“Can you guess the meaning of such a phenomenon?” the Frenchman asked of Capraja, wishing to make him talk, as the Duchess had spoken of him as a profound thinker.

“What phenomenon?” said Capraja.

“Genovese—­who is admirable in the absence of la Tinti, and when he sings with her is a braying ass.”

“He obeys an occult law of which one of your chemists might perhaps give you the mathematical formula, and which the next century will no doubt express in a statement full of x, a, and b, mixed up with little algebraic signs, bars, and quirks that give me the colic; for the finest conceptions of mathematics do not add much to the sum total of our enjoyment.

“When an artist is so unfortunate as to be full of the passion he wishes to express, he cannot depict it because he is the thing itself instead of its image.  Art is the work of the brain, not of the heart.  When you are possessed by a subject you are a slave, not a master; you are like a king besieged by his people.  Too keen a feeling, at the moment when you want to represent that feeling, causes an insurrection of the senses against the governing faculty.”

“Might we not convince ourselves of this by some further experiment?” said the doctor.

“Cataneo, you might bring your tenor and the prima donna together again,” said Capraja to his friend.

“Well, gentlemen,” said the Duke, “come to sup with me.  We ought to reconcile the tenor and la Clarina; otherwise the season will be ruined in Venice.”

The invitation was accepted.

“Gondoliers!” called Cataneo.

“One minute,” said Vendramin.  “Memmi is waiting for me at Florian’s; I cannot leave him to himself.  We must make him tipsy to-night, or he will kill himself to-morrow.”

“Corpo santo!” exclaimed the Duke.  “I must keep that young fellow alive, for the happiness and future prospects of my race.  I will invite him, too.”

They all went back to Florian’s, where the assembled crowd were holding an eager and stormy discussion to which the tenor’s arrival put an end.  In one corner, near a window looking out on the colonnade, gloomy, with a fixed gaze and rigid attitude, Emilio was a dismal image of despair.

“That crazy fellow,” said the physician, in French, to Vendramin, “does not know what he wants.  Here is a man who can make of a Massimilla Doni a being apart from the rest of creation, possessing her in heaven, amid ideal splendor such as no power on earth can make real.  He can behold his mistress for ever sublime and pure, can always hear within him what we have just heard on the seashore; can always live in the light of a pair of eyes which create for him the warm and golden glow that surrounds the Virgin in Titian’s Assumption,—­after Raphael had invented it or had it revealed to him for the Transfiguration,—­and this man only longs to smirch the poem.

“By my advice he must needs combine his sensual joys and his heavenly adoration in one woman.  In short, like all the rest of us, he will have a mistress.  He had a divinity, and the wretched creature insists on her being a female!  I assure you, monsieur, he is resigning heaven.  I will not answer for it that he may not ultimately die of despair.