convenient that the cavaliere servente presently spread throughout
Italy; no lady of fashion was thought properly appointed without one;
and the office was now no longer reserved to bachelors; it was not at
all good form for husband and wife to love each other, and the husband
became the cavalier of some other lady, and the whole fine world was
thus united, by a usage of which it is very hard to know just how far
it was wicked and how far it was only foolish; perhaps it is safest to
say that at the best it was apt to be somewhat of the one and always
a great deal of the other. In the good society of that day, marriage
meant a settlement in life for the girl who had escaped her sister's
fate of a sometimes forced religious vocation. But it did not matter
so much about the husband if the marriage contract stipulated that
she should have her cavaliere servente, and, as sometimes happened,
specified him by name. With her husband there was a union of fortunes,
with the expectation of heirs; the companionship, the confidence, the
faith, was with the cavalier; there could be no domesticity, no family
life with either. The cavaliere servente went with his lady to church,
where he dipped his finger in the holy-water and offered it her to
moisten her own finger at; and he held her prayer-book for her when
she rose from her knees and bowed to the high altar. In fact, his
place seems to have been as fully acknowledged and honored, if not by
the Church, then by all the other competent authorities, as that of
the husband. Like other things, his relation to his lady was subject
to complication and abuse; no doubt, ladies of fickle minds changed
their cavaliers rather often; and in those days following the
disorder of the French invasions, the relation suffered deplorable
exaggerations and perversions. But when Giuseppe Parini so minutely
and graphically depicted the day of a noble Lombard youth, the
cavaliere servente was in his most prosperous and illustrious state;
and some who have studied Italian social conditions in the past bid