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What could go wrong in a world where noble ladies lived in palaces hung with tapestry and damask, with powdered lacqueys to wait on them, a turbaned blackamoor to tend their parrots and monkeys, a coronet-coach at the door to carry them to mass or the ridotto, and a handsome cicisbeo to display on the promenade?
The amusing thing is the persistence in the claim when the type has passed away. The British spouse has bloomed into the semi-detached wife, with a husband always conveniently in the distance, and a cicisbeo as conveniently in the corner. The British mother has died into the faded matrimonial schemer, contemptuous of younger sons.
The husband and the cicisbeo live together as sworn brothers; and the wife and the mistress embrace each other with marks of the warmest affection. I do not choose to enter into particulars. I cannot open the scandalous chronicle of Nice, without hazard of contamination.
The very best families with few exceptions are satisfied with shutting up their daughters in a convent for several years till the time comes for them to marry some man whom they never see till the eve or the day of their marriage. As a consequence we have the 'cicisbeo', and in Italy as in France the idea that our nobles are the sons of their nominal fathers is a purely conventional one.
The moment that her husband was persuaded that she loved the Cicisbeo and hated the Patito, she arranged that she and the Patito should be found in a situation whose compromising character she had calculated in advance, and her husband and the execrated celibate were thus induced to believe that her love and her aversion were equally insincere.
This office of Cicisbeo is however an intolerably expensive one; especially to our countrymen. The Signora is so inventive in her faculties, there are so many trinkets which she dies to possess, and her wants, real and artificial, are so numerous, that the purse is never quiet in the pocket. And every Englishman is supposed to be furnished with the purse of Fortunatus.
Rose-Pompon, a widow for the moment, whose bacchanalian cicisbeo was Ninny Moulin, the orthodox scapegrace, who, on occasion, after drinking his fill, could transform himself into Jacques Dumoulin, the religious writer, and pass gayly from dishevelled dances to ultramontane polemics, from Storm-blown Tulips to Catholic pamphlets.
After marriage there is a mutual accommodation system suggesting the cicisbeo or mariage a trois school; hence we read that wives, like the much-maligned Xantippe, were borrowed and lent, and that not fulfilling the promise of a loan is punishable by heavy damages.
The rank and file of Italian ladies could give him only another Marchesa di Prié, a little better or a little worse, another woman who would degrade him in the sensual and inane routine of a cicisbéo. The exceptional ladies were even worse.
Thus equipped, and guarded by my cicisbeo, I one day found myself, on entering the Tuileries, in the midst of an immense mob of regular trained rioters, who, seeing me go towards the palace, directed their attention entirely to me. They took me for some one belonging to the Queen's milliner, Madame Bertin, who, they said, was fattening upon the public misery, through the Queen's extravagance.
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