Massimilla Doni is a Venetian tale that blends the analysis of music with a meditation on ideal love and carnal desire. The action unfolds in Venice, city of art and sensuality, and is organized around an opera performance — Rossini's Mosè — of which Balzac offers a long, learned exegesis, making musical analysis the very heart of the narrative. The plot stages the noble Duchess Massimilla Doni and the young Prince Emilio, who love each other with a love so high, so spiritualized, that it becomes paralyzing: their ideal passion paradoxically prevents them from consummating it, mutual adoration turning into an obstacle to physical desire. In counterpoint, the narrative brings into play the figures of the singers, the tenor Genovese and the cantatrice La Tinti, and explores the complex relations between elevation of the soul and the appetites of the body. Balzac unfolds a subtle reflection on the duality of love, divided between the ideal and the sensual, and on the difficulty of reconciling spiritual ecstasy with carnal fulfillment. Rossini's music serves as the support for a veritable aesthetic philosophy, in which opera becomes the language of the emotions and the mirror of the characters' torments. The tale, one of the most erudite and singular of the Philosophical Studies, testifies to Balzac's passion for Italian music and to his will to make of it an object of intellectual speculation. Through the refined, decadent setting of Venice, Massimilla Doni interrogates the nature of perfect love and its relation to desire, and illustrates the idea that a too-pure ideal can sterilize life. It is a dense work, in which the analysis of art illuminates that of the feelings.