Honoré de Balzac 
The Vendetta 

“The Vendetta” is a novel by the French writer Honoré de Balzac. It is the eighth of the Scènes de la vie privée (Scenes of Private Life) in La Comédie humaine. “The Vendetta” is a short work relating the tragic fate of Ginevra Piombo, the daughter of proud Corsican immigrants, who has the misfortune of falling in love with another Corsican Luigi Porta. When it becomes known that Luigi is the sole survivor of a massacre in which the rest of his family were the victims of a bloody vendetta with Ginevra’s family, Ginevra’s father Bartolomeo is determined to complete the act of vengeance by having him killed. But Ginevra refuses to yield to her father’s demands and she and Luigi are married…