Massimilla Doni is dedicated to Jacques Strunz, at one time a music critic in Paris. This dedication, charmingly indited, as are all of Balzac’s, acknowledges the author’s indebtedness to the critic. Massimilla Doni is more violent and less credible than Gambara. The chief character is a musical degenerate, a morbid nobleman whose solitary pleasure in life is to hear two tones in perfect concord. This musical Marquis de Sade is described as follows: “This man, who is 118 years old on the registers of vice and forty-seven according to the records of the church, has but one last means of enjoyment on earth that is capable of arousing in him a sense of life. Yes, all the chords are broken, everything is a ruin or a tattered rag; the mind, the intelligence, the heart, the nerves, all that produces an impulse in man, that gives him a glimpse of heaven through desire or the fire of pleasure, depends not so much upon music as upon one of the innumerable effects, a perfect harmony between two voices, or between one voice and the first string of his violin.” Certainly this evil-minded person would not care for Wagner. He is attached to a beautiful Venetian singer, Clara Tinti. It is she who tells of this horrid Duke Cataneo:— The old monkey sits on my knee and takes his violin; he plays well enough, he produces sounds with it; I try to imitate them, and when the longed-for moment arrives, and it is impossible to distinguish the note of the violin from the note that issues from my windpipe, then the old fellow is in ecstasy; his dead eyes emit their last flames, he is deliriously happy, and rolls on the floor like a drunken man. That is why he pays Genovese so handsomely. Genovese is the only tenor whose voice sometimes coincides exactly with mine. Either we do really approach that point once or twice in an evening, or the duke imagines it; and for this imaginary pleasure he has engaged Genovese; Genovese belongs to him. No operatic manager can engage the singer to sing without me, or me without him. The duke educated me to gratify this whim, and I owe to him my talent, my beauty, my fortune. He will die in some spasm caused by a perfect accord. The sense of hearing is the only one that has survived in the shipwreck of his faculties—that is the thread by which he clings to life.