A Father's Curse and Other Stories Author:Honoré de Balzac General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1898 Original Publisher: J. M. Dent Subjects: France Fiction / Classics Fiction / Literary History / Europe / France Literary Criticism / European / French Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or... more » missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: MASSIMILLA DONI To Jacques Strum My Dear Strunx : -- / 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 labour 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. As all who are learned in such matters know, the Venetian aristocracy is the first in Europe. Its Libra a" 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 Barbarians, was already powerful and illustrious, and the head of the political and commercial world. 151 With a few rare exceptions this brilliant nobility has fallen into utter ruin. Among the gondoliers who serve the English -...« less