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. ADDENDUM The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy. Cane, Marco-Facino Facino Cane Tinti, Clarina Albert Savarus Varese, Emilio Memmi, Prince of Gambara Varese, Princess of Gambara Vendramini, Marco Facino Cane Victorine Lost Illusions Letters of Two Brides Gaudissart II End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Massimilla Doni, by Honore de Balzac