Part 20

“I? I possess the whole world!” cried Capraja, with a sovereign gesture of his hand.

“And I have devoured it!” replied the Duke.

They observed that the physician and Vendramin were gone, and that they were alone.

Next morning, after a night of perfect happiness, the Prince’s sleep was disturbed by a dream. He felt on his heart the trickle of pearls, dropped there by an angel; he woke, and found himself bathed in the tears of Massimilla Doni. He was lying in her arms, and she gazed at him as he slept.

That evening, at the Fenice,--though la Tinti had not allowed him to rise till two in the afternoon, which is said to be very bad for a tenor voice,--Genovese sang divinely in his part in Semiramide. He was recalled with la Tinti, fresh crowns were given, the pit was wild with delight; the tenor no longer attempted to charm the prima donna by angelic methods.

Vendramin was the only person whom the doctor could not cure. Love for a country that has ceased to be is a love beyond curing. The young Venetian, by dint of living in his thirteenth century republic, and in the arms of that pernicious courtesan called opium, when he found himself in the work-a-day world to which reaction brought him, succumbed, pitied and regretted by his friends.

No, how shall the end of this adventure be told--for it is too disastrously domestic. A word will be enough for the worshipers of the ideal.

The Duchess was expecting an infant.

The Peris, the naiads, the fairies, the sylphs of ancient legend, the Muses of Greece, the Marble Virgins of the Certosa at Pavia, the Day and Night of Michael Angelo, the little Angels which Bellini was the first to put at the foot of his Church pictures, and which Raphael painted so divinely in his Virgin with the Donor, and the Madonna who shivers at Dresden, the lovely Maidens by Orcagna in the Church of San-Michele, at Florence, the celestial choir round the tomb in Saint-Sebaldus, at Nuremberg, the Virgins of the Duomo, at Milan, the whole population of a hundred Gothic Cathedrals, all the race of beings who burst their mould to visit you, great imaginative artists--all these angelic and disembodied maidens gathered round Massimilla’s bed, and wept!

PARIS, May 25th, 1839.

ADDENDUM

The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.

Cane, Marco-Facino Facino Cane

Tinti, Clarina Albert Savarus

Varese, Emilio Memmi, Prince of Gambara

Varese, Princess of Gambara

Vendramini, Marco Facino Cane

Victorine Lost Illusions Letters of Two Brides Gaudissart II