文档介绍：Massimilla Doni
Massimilla Doni
by Honore de Balzac
Translated by Clara Bell and James Waring
1
Massimilla Doni
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 essfully--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 urate 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.
2
Massimilla Doni
As all who are learned in such matters know, the ian 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 long dead
Doges whose names are older than those of sovereigns. On some bridge,
as you glide past it, if you are ever in Venice, you may admire some lovely
girl in rags, a poor child belonging, perhaps, to one of the most famous
patrician families. When a nation of kings has fallen so l