Massimilla Doni | Page 5

--the land which
a Memmius had marched over as conqueror in the time of the Romans!
To see his ancestors in effigy on their tombs of precious marbles in one
of the most splendid churches in Venice, and in a chapel graced with
pictures by Titian and Tintoretto, by Palma, Bellini, Paul
Veronese--and to be prohibited from selling a marble Memmi to the
English for bread for the living Prince Varese! Genovese, the famous
tenor, could get in one season, by his warbling, the capital of an income
on which this son of the Memmi could live--this descendant of Roman
senators as venerable as Caesar and Sylla. Genovese may smoke an
Eastern hookah, and the Prince of Varese cannot even have enough
cigars!"
He tossed the end he was smoking into the sea. The Prince of Varese
found cigars at the Duchess Cataneo's; how gladly would he have laid
the treasures of the world at her feet! She studied all his caprices, and
was happy to gratify them. He made his only meal at her house--his
supper; for all his money was spent in clothes and his place in the
Fenice. He had also to pay a hundred francs a year as wages to his
father's old gondolier; and he, to serve him for that sum, had to live
exclusively on rice. Also he kept enough to take a cup of black coffee
every morning at Florian's to keep himself up till the evening in a state
of nervous excitement, and this habit, carried to excess, he hoped
would in due time kill him, as Vendramin relied on opium.
"And I am a prince!"
As he spoke the words, Emilio Memmi tossed Marco Vendramin's

letter into the lagoon without even reading it to the end, and it floated
away like a paper boat launched by a child.
"But Emilio," he went on to himself, "is but three and twenty. He is a
better man than Lord Wellington with the gout, than the paralyzed
Regent, than the epileptic royal family of Austria, than the King of
France----"
But as he thought of the King of France Emilio's brow was knit, his
ivory skin burned yellower, tears gathered in his black eyes and hung to
his long lashes; he raised a hand worthy to be painted by Titian to push
back his thick brown hair, and gazed again at Massimilla's gondola.
"And this insolent mockery of fate is carried even into my love affair,"
said he to himself. "My heart and imagination are full of precious gifts;
Massimilla will have none of them; she is a Florentine, and she will
throw me over. I have to sit by her side like ice, while her voice and her
looks fire me with heavenly sensations! As I watch her gondola a few
hundred feet away from my own I feel as if a hot iron were set on my
heart. An invisible fluid courses through my frame and scorches my
nerves, a cloud dims my sight, the air seems to me to glow as it did at
Rivalta when the sunlight came through a red silk blind, and I, without
her knowing it, could admire her lost in dreams, with her subtle smile
like that of Leonardo's Mona Lisa. Well, either my Highness will end
my days by a pistol-shot, or the heir of the Cane will follow old
Carmagnola's advice; we will be sailors, pirates; and it will be amusing
to see how long we can live without being hanged."
The Prince lighted another cigar, and watched the curls of smoke as the
wind wafted them away, as though he saw in their arabesques an echo
of this last thought.
In the distance he could now perceive the mauresque pinnacles that
crowned his palazzo, and he was sadder than ever. The Duchess'
gondola had vanished in the Canareggio.
These fantastic pictures of a romantic and perilous existence, as the
outcome of his love, went out with his cigar, and his lady's gondola no
longer traced his path. Then he saw the present in its real light: a palace
without a soul, a soul that had no effect on the body, a principality
without money, an empty body and a full heart--a thousand
heartbreaking contradictions. The hapless youth mourned for Venice as
she had been,--as did Vendramini, even more bitterly, for it was a great

and common sorrow, a similar destiny, that had engendered such a
warm friendship between these two young men, the wreckage of two
illustrious families.
Emilio could not help dreaming of a time when the palazzo Memmi
poured out light from every window, and rang with music carried far
away over the Adriatic tide; when hundreds of gondolas might be seen
tied up to its mooring-posts, while graceful masked figures and the