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.
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