This was especially true of the families of men of letters,
where the liberal education of the young girls, and their habit of
associating as equals with men of serious and cultivated minds, gave
them a self-possession disconcerting to the young blood accustomed to
conquer with a glance. These girls as a rule, were married early to men
of their own standing, and though the cicisbeo was not unknown after
marriage he was not an authorised member of the household. Fulvia,
indeed, belonged to the class most inaccessible to men of Odo's rank:
the only class in Italy in which the wife's fidelity was as much
esteemed as the innocence of the girl. Such principles had long been
ridiculed by persons of quality and satirised by poets and playwrights.
From Aristophanes to Beaumarchais the cheated husband and the outwitted
guardian had been the figures on which the dramatist relied for his
comic effects. Even the miser tricked out of his savings was a shade
less ridiculous, less grotesquely deserving of his fate, than the
husband defrauded of his wife's affection. The plausible adulteress and
the adroit seducer had a recognised claim on the sympathy of the public.
But the inevitable reaction was at hand; and the new teachers to whom
Odo's contemporaries were beginning to listen had thrown a strangely
poetic light over the dull figures of the domestic virtues. Faithfulness
to the family sanctities, reverence for the marriage tie, courage to
sacrifice the loftiest passion to the most plodding duty: these were
qualities to touch the fancy of a generation sated with derision.
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