Massimilla Doni | Page 2

spared our handsome Emilio the ignominy of
accepting, as many nobles did, the indemnity of a franc a day, due to
every impoverished patrician under the stipulations of the cession to
Austria.
At the beginning of winter, this young gentleman was still lingering in
a country house situated at the base of the Tyrolese Alps, and
purchased in the previous spring by the Duchess Cataneo. The house,
erected by Palladio for the Piepolo family, is a square building of the
finest style of architecture. There is a stately staircase with a marble
portico on each side; the vestibules are crowded with frescoes, and
made light by sky-blue ceilings across which graceful figures float
amid ornament rich in design, but so well proportioned that the
building carries it, as a woman carries her head-dress, with an ease that

charms the eye; in short, the grace and dignity that characterize the
Procuratie in the piazetta at Venice. Stone walls, admirably decorated,
keep the rooms at a pleasantly cool temperature. Verandas outside,
painted in fresco, screen off the glare. The flooring throughout is the
old Venetian inlay of marbles, cut into unfading flowers.
The furniture, like that of all Italian palaces, was rich with handsome
silks, judiciously employed, and valuable pictures favorably hung;
some by the Genoese priest, known as il Capucino, several by
Leonardo da Vinci, Carlo Dolci, Tintoretto, and Titian.
The shelving gardens were full of the marvels where money has been
turned into rocky grottoes and patterns of shells,--the very madness of
craftsmanship,--terraces laid out by the fairies, arbors of sterner aspect,
where the cypress on its tall trunk, the triangular pines, and the
melancholy olive mingled pleasingly with orange trees, bays, and
myrtles, and clear pools in which blue or russet fishes swam. Whatever
may be said in favor of the natural or English garden, these trees,
pruned into parasols, and yews fantastically clipped; this luxury of art
so skilfully combined with that of nature in Court dress; those cascades
over marble steps where the water spreads so shyly, a filmy scarf swept
aside by the wind and immediately renewed; those bronzed metal
figures speechlessly inhabiting the silent grove; that lordly palace, an
object in the landscape from every side, raising its light outline at the
foot of the Alps,--all the living thoughts which animate the stone, the
bronze, and the trees, or express themselves in garden plots,--this lavish
prodigality was in perfect keeping with the loves of a duchess and a
handsome youth, for they are a poem far removed from the coarse ends
of brutal nature.
Any one with a soul for fantasy would have looked to see, on one of
those noble flights of steps, standing by a vase with medallions in
bas-relief, a negro boy swathed about the loins with scarlet stuff, and
holding in one hand a parasol over the Duchess' head, and in the other
the train of her long skirt, while she listened to Emilio Memmi. And
how far grander the Venetian would have looked in such a dress as the
Senators wore whom Titian painted.
But alas! in this fairy palace, not unlike that of the Peschieri at Genoa,
the Duchess Cataneo obeyed the edicts of Victorine and the Paris
fashions. She had on a muslin dress and broad straw hat, pretty shot

silk shoes, thread lace stockings that a breath of air would have blown
away; and over her shoulders a black lace shawl. But the thing which
no one could ever understand in Paris, where women are sheathed in
their dresses as a dragon-fly is cased in its annular armor, was the
perfect freedom with which this lovely daughter of Tuscany wore her
French attire; she had Italianized it. A Frenchwoman treats her shirt
with the greatest seriousness; an Italian never thinks about it; she does
not attempt self-protection by some prim glance, for she knows that she
is safe in that of a devoted love, a passion as sacred and serious in her
eyes as in those of others.
At eleven in the forenoon, after a walk, and by the side of a table still
strewn with the remains of an elegant breakfast, the Duchess, lounging
in an easy-chair, left her lover the master of these muslin draperies,
without a frown each time he moved. Emilio, seated at her side, held
one of her hands between his, gazing at her with utter absorption. Ask
not whether they loved; they loved only too well. They were not
reading out of the same book, like Paolo and Francesca; far from it,
Emilio dared not say: "Let us read." The gleam of those eyes, those
glistening gray irises streaked with threads of gold that started from the
centre like rifts of light, giving her gaze a soft, star-like radiance,
thrilled him with nervous