MASSIMILLA DONI BY HONORE DE BALZAC Translated by Clara Bell and James Waring 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 successfully--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 inaccurate 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. MASSIMILLA DONI As all who are learned in such matters know, the Venetian 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