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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Massimilla Doni by Honore de Balzac: The Duchess feared that she was seeing her Emilio for the last time.
As to the Prince: in the presence of the Duchess, the sovereign
divinity who lifted him to the skies, he had forgotten where he was,
he no longer heard the voice of the woman who had initiated him into
the mysteries of earthly pleasure, for deep dejection made his ears
tingle with a chorus of plaintive voices, half-drowned in a rushing
noise as of pouring rain.
Vendramin saw himself in an ancient Venetian costume, looking on at
the ceremony of the /Bucentaur/. The Frenchman, who plainly discerned
that some strange and painful mystery stood between the Prince and the
Duchess, was racking his brain with shrewd conjecture to discover what
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