‘Well, sir,’ she said to me, ‘you are displeased, I see it in your face’—I tried to speak, but she does not hear me, raises her voice and goes on—‘Yes, sir, the Signorina N. is to be married, and she is going to marry her guardian.’ I tried to raise my voice too. ‘Hush, hush,’ she cries, ‘listen to me; this marriage is my doing: after having reflected upon it, I helped it on, and on your account I wished to hasten it.’ ‘On my account?’ I said. ‘Hush,’ she replied, ‘you shall understand the conduct of a prudent woman who has a liking for you. Are you,’ she went on, ‘in a position to take a wife? No, for a hundred reasons. Was the Signorina to wait your convenience? No, she had not the power to do so; it was necessary to marry her; she might have married a young man and you would have lost her forever. She marries an old man, a man in his decline and who cannot live long; and though I am not acquainted with the joys and disappointments of marriage, yet I know that a young wife must shorten the life of an old husband, and so you will possess a beautiful widow who will have been a wife only in name. Be quite easy on this point, therefore; she will have improved her own affairs, she will be much richer than she is now, and in the meantime you will make your journey. And do not be in any anxiety about her; no, my dear friend, do not fear; she will live in the world with her old fellow and I shall watch over her conduct. Yes, yes! She is yours, I will be surety to you for that, and I give you my word of honour——’
And here comes in the Signorina N. and approaches the grating. The nun says to me with an air of mystery, ‘Congratulate the young lady on her marriage!’ I could bear it no longer; I make my bow and go away without saying more. I never saw either the governess or her pupil again, and thank God it was not long before I forgot them both.
After reading such stories and looking into the archives of the ‘Superintendents of Convents,’ it is easy to understand that Pope Gregory XIII.
Rom. vi. 360.
should have exclaimed bitterly, ‘I am Pope everywhere except in Venice’; and more than one of his successors in the eighteenth century had cause to repeat his words. The Church protested in vain against the abuse of the veil by Venetian ladies, for the State protected them on the specious pretext of superintending their morals, and the remonstrances of the popes and of the patriarchs of Venice were not even heard within the walls of those sham cloisters. With such a system of education and such examples the bankruptcy of morality was merely a question of time. The number of marriages diminished amongst the aristocracy, and when a young man made up his mind to matrimony he consulted nothing but his financial interests.
The expenses of a fashionable marriage were considerable. There were always several festive ceremonies in the bride’s house. The first was the
Mutinelli, Ult. 86; Goldoni, vol. i. chap. xxvi.
signature of the contract; the second, which followed soon afterwards, was a gathering of all the relations and friends of the two families with a sort of standing collation, and it was on this occasion that the future bridegroom gave his betrothed the first present, which was generally a big diamond set in other stones, and was called the ‘ricordino,’ the ‘little remembrance.’
A few days before the wedding the two families and their friends met again, and if the man’s mother was still alive it was she who gave the bride a pearl necklace; otherwise the duty fell to one of his near female relations. This pearl necklace was thought absolutely indispensable for the honour of the family, and the bride was bound to put it on at once and to wear it till the end of the first year of her marriage. Where it would have caused financial difficulty it was simply hired for the time, and was returned to the jeweller at the end of the year.
After her marriage every well-born woman took a ‘cicisbeo’ or ‘cavalier servente.’ These cavaliers were in most cases, especially at the beginning