La Tinti had made her debut the year before, and had enchanted the three most fastidious capitals of Italy.

“I am perfectly certain that her great nobleman is not my husband,” said the Duchess.

The horses were ordered, and the Duchess set out at once for Venice, to be present at the opening of the winter season.

So one fine evening in November, the new Prince of Varese was crossing the lagoon from Mestre to Venice, between the lines of stakes painted with Austrian colors, which mark out the channel for gondolas as conceded by the custom-house.  As he watched Massimilla’s gondola, navigated by men in livery, and cutting through the water a few yards in front, poor Emilio, with only an old gondolier who had been his father’s servant in the days when Venice was still a living city, could not repress the bitter reflections suggested to him by the assumption of his title.

“What a mockery of fortune!  A prince—­with fifteen hundred francs a year!  Master of one of the finest palaces in the world, and unable to sell the statues, stairs, paintings, sculpture, which an Austrian decree had made inalienable!  To live on a foundation of piles of campeachy wood worth nearly a million of francs, and have no furniture!  To own sumptuous galleries, and live in an attic above the topmost arabesque cornice constructed of marble brought from the Morea —­the land which a Memmius had marched over as conqueror in the time of the Romans!  To see his ancestors in effigy on their tombs of precious marbles in one of the most splendid churches in Venice, and in a chapel graced with pictures by Titian and Tintoretto, by Palma, Bellini, Paul Veronese—­and to be prohibited from selling a marble Memmi to the English for bread for the living Prince Varese!  Genovese, the famous tenor, could get in one season, by his warbling, the capital of an income on which this son of the Memmi could live—­this descendant of Roman senators as venerable as Caesar and Sylla.  Genovese may smoke an Eastern hookah, and the Prince of Varese cannot even have enough cigars!”

He tossed the end he was smoking into the sea.  The Prince of Varese found cigars at the Duchess Cataneo’s; how gladly would he have laid the treasures of the world at her feet!  She studied all his caprices, and was happy to gratify them.  He made his only meal at her house—­his supper; for all his money was spent in clothes and his place in the Fenice.  He had also to pay a hundred francs a year as wages to his father’s old gondolier; and he, to serve him for that sum, had to live exclusively on rice.  Also he kept enough to take a cup of black coffee every morning at Florian’s to keep himself up till the evening in a state of nervous excitement, and this habit, carried to excess, he hoped would in due time kill him, as Vendramin relied on opium.

“And I am a prince!”

As he spoke the words, Emilio Memmi tossed Marco Vendramin’s letter into the lagoon without even reading it to the end, and it floated away like a paper boat launched by a child.