“But Emilio,” he went on to himself, “is but three and twenty.  He is a better man than Lord Wellington with the gout, than the paralyzed Regent, than the epileptic royal family of Austria, than the King of France——­”

But as he thought of the King of France Emilio’s brow was knit, his ivory skin burned yellower, tears gathered in his black eyes and hung to his long lashes; he raised a hand worthy to be painted by Titian to push back his thick brown hair, and gazed again at Massimilla’s gondola.

“And this insolent mockery of fate is carried even into my love affair,” said he to himself.  “My heart and imagination are full of precious gifts; Massimilla will have none of them; she is a Florentine, and she will throw me over.  I have to sit by her side like ice, while her voice and her looks fire me with heavenly sensations!  As I watch her gondola a few hundred feet away from my own I feel as if a hot iron were set on my heart.  An invisible fluid courses through my frame and scorches my nerves, a cloud dims my sight, the air seems to me to glow as it did at Rivalta when the sunlight came through a red silk blind, and I, without her knowing it, could admire her lost in dreams, with her subtle smile like that of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa.  Well, either my Highness will end my days by a pistol-shot, or the heir of the Cane will follow old Carmagnola’s advice; we will be sailors, pirates; and it will be amusing to see how long we can live without being hanged.”

The Prince lighted another cigar, and watched the curls of smoke as the wind wafted them away, as though he saw in their arabesques an echo of this last thought.

In the distance he could now perceive the mauresque pinnacles that crowned his palazzo, and he was sadder than ever.  The Duchess’ gondola had vanished in the Canareggio.

These fantastic pictures of a romantic and perilous existence, as the outcome of his love, went out with his cigar, and his lady’s gondola no longer traced his path.  Then he saw the present in its real light:  a palace without a soul, a soul that had no effect on the body, a principality without money, an empty body and a full heart—­a thousand heartbreaking contradictions.  The hapless youth mourned for Venice as she had been,—­as did Vendramini, even more bitterly, for it was a great and common sorrow, a similar destiny, that had engendered such a warm friendship between these two young men, the wreckage of two illustrious families.

Emilio could not help dreaming of a time when the palazzo Memmi poured out light from every window, and rang with music carried far away over the Adriatic tide; when hundreds of gondolas might be seen tied up to its mooring-posts, while graceful masked figures and the magnates of the Republic crowded up the steps kissed by the waters; when its halls and gallery were full of a throng of intriguers or their dupes; when the great banqueting-hall, filled with merry feasters, and the upper balconies furnished with musicians, seemed to harbor all Venice coming and going on the great staircase that rang with laughter.