This gentleman, whatever his nominal business in the world might be, was first and above all a cavaliere servente, and the cavaliere servente was the invention, it is said, of Genoese husbands who had not the leisure to attend their wives to the theater, the promenade, the card-table, the _conversazione_, and so installed their nearest idle friends permanently in the office. The arrangement was found so 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 us not too virtuously condemn him, since, preposterous as he was, his existence was an amelioration of disorders at which we shall find it better not even to look askance.