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Title: Massimilla Doni

Author: Honore de Balzac

Translator: Clara Bell and James Waring

Release Date: March 2, 2010 [EBook #1811]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny

MASSIMILLA DONI

By Honore De Balzac

Translated by Clara Bell and James Waring

DEDICATION

To Jacques Strunz.

MY DEAR STRUNZ:--I should be ungrateful if I did not set your name
at the head of one of the two tales I could never have written but
for your patient kindness and care. Accept this as my grateful
acknowledgment of the readiness with which you tried--perhaps not
very successfully--to initiate me into the mysteries of musical
knowledge. You have at least taught me what difficulties and what
labor genius must bury in those poems which procure us
transcendental pleasures. You have also afforded me the
satisfaction of laughing more than once at the expense of a
self-styled connoisseur.

Some have taxed me with ignorance, not knowing that I have taken
counsel of one of our best musical critics, and had the benefit of
your conscientious help. I have, perhaps, been an inaccurate
amanuensis. If this were the case, I should be the traitorous
translator without knowing it, and I yet hope to sign myself
always one of your friends.

DE BALZAC.

MASSIMILLA DONI

As all who are learned in such matters know, the Venetian aristocracy is
the first in Europe. Its _Libro d'Oro_ dates from before the Crusades,
from a time when Venice, a survivor of Imperial and Christian Rome which
had flung itself into the waters to escape the Barbarians, was already
powerful and illustrious, and the head of the political and commercial
world.

With a few rare exceptions this brilliant nobility has fallen into utter
ruin. Among the gondoliers who serve the English--to whom history here
reads the lesson of their future fate--there are descendants of