Cicisbeism is still kept up in Italy, though somewhat on the decline. I have nothing to say in favour of that anomaly in vice and virtue. The English women are particularly shocked at it, who are allowed to hate their husbands, provided they do not like any body else. It is a kind of marriage within a marriage; it begins with infidelity to end in constancy; it is not a state of licensed dissipation, but is a real chain of the affections, superadded to the first formal one, and that often lasts for life. A gay captain in the Pope’s Guard is selected by a lady as her cavalier servente in the prime of life, and is seen digging in the garden of the family in a grey jacket and white hairs thirty years after. This does not look like a love of change. The husband is of course always a fixture; not so the cavalier servente, who is liable to be removed for a new favourite. In noble families the lover must be noble; and he must be approved by the husband. A young officer, who the other day volunteered this service to a beautiful Marchioness without either of these titles, and was a sort of interloper on the intended gallant, was sent to Volterra. Whatever is the height to which this system has been carried, or the level to which it has sunk, it does not appear to have extinguished jealousy in all its excess as a part of the national character, as the following story will shew: it is related by M. Beyle, in his charming little work, entitled De l’Amour, as a companion to the famous one in Dante; and I shall give the whole passage in his words, as placing the Italian character (in former as well as latter times) in a striking point of view.
‘I allude,’ he says, ‘to those touching lines of Dante;—
‘Deh! quando tu sarai tornato al mondo,
Ricordati di me, che son la Pia;
Sienna mi fê: disfecemi Maremma:
Salsi colui, che inannellata pria,
Disposando, m’avea con la sua gemma.’—Purgatorio, c. 5.
‘The woman who speaks with so much reserve, had in secret undergone the fate of Desdemona, and had it in her power, by a single word, to have revealed her husband’s crime to the friends whom she had left upon earth.
‘Nello della Pietra obtained in marriage the hand of Madonna Pia, sole heiress of the Ptolomei, the richest and most noble family of Sienna. Her beauty, which was the admiration of all Tuscany, gave rise to a jealousy in the breast of her husband, that, envenomed by false reports and by suspicions continually reviving, led to a frightful catastrophe. It is not easy to determine at this day if his wife was altogether innocent; but Dante has represented her as such. Her husband carried her with him into the marshes of Volterra, celebrated then, as now, for the pestiferous effects of the air. Never would he tell his unhappy wife the reason of her banishment into so dangerous a place. His pride did not deign to pronounce either complaint or accusation. He lived with her alone, in a deserted tower, of which I have been to see the ruins on the sea-shore; here he never broke his disdainful silence, never replied to the questions of his youthful bride, never listened to her entreaties. He waited unmoved by her for the air to produce its fatal effects. The vapours of this unwholesome swamp were not long in tarnishing features the most beautiful, they say, that in that age had appeared upon earth. In a few months she died. Some chroniclers of these remote times report, that Nello employed the dagger to hasten her end: she died in the marshes in some horrible manner; but the mode of her death remained a mystery, even to her contemporaries. Nello della Pietra survived to pass the rest of his days in a silence which was never broken.
‘Nothing can be conceived more noble or more delicate than the manner in which the ill-fated Pia addresses herself to Dante. She desires to be recalled to the memory of the friends whom she had quitted so young: at the same time, in telling her name and alluding to her husband, she does not allow herself the smallest complaint against a cruelty unexampled, but thenceforth irreparable; and merely intimates that he knows the history of her death. This constancy in vengeance and in suffering is to be met with, I believe, only among the people of the South. In Piedmont, I found myself the involuntary witness of a fact almost similar; but I was at the time ignorant of the details. I was ordered with five-and-twenty dragoons into the woods that border the Sesia, to prevent the contraband traffic. On my arrival in the evening at this wild and solitary place, I distinguished among the trees the ruins of an old castle: I went to it: to my great surprise, it was inhabited. I there found a Nobleman of the country, of a very unpromising aspect; a man six feet in height, and forty years of age: he allowed me a couple of apartments with a very ill grace. Here I entertained myself by getting up some pieces of music with my quarter-master: after the expiration of some days, we discovered that our host kept guard over a woman whom we called Camilla in jest: we were far from suspecting the dreadful truth. She died at the end of six weeks. I had the melancholy curiosity to see her in her coffin; I bribed a monk who had charge of it, and towards midnight, under pretext of sprinkling the holy water, he conducted me into the chapel. I there saw one of those fine faces, which are beautiful even in the bosom of death: she had a large aquiline nose, of which I never shall forget the noble and expressive outline. I quitted this mournful spot; but five years after, a detachment of my regiment accompanying the Emperor to his coronation as King of Italy, I had the whole story recounted to me. I learned that the jealous husband, the Count of ——, had one morning found, hanging to his wife’s bedside, an English watch belonging to a young man in the little town where they lived. The same day he took her to the ruined castle, in the midst of the forests of the Sesia. Like Nello della Pietra, he uttered not a single word. If she made him any request, he presented to her sternly and in silence the English watch, which he had always about him. In this manner he passed nearly three years with her. She at length fell a victim to despair, in the flower of her age. Her husband attempted to dispatch the owner of the watch with a stiletto, failed, fled to Genoa, embarked there, and no tidings have been heard of him since. His property was confiscated.’—De l’Amour, vol i. p. 131.