Introduction

In works of literature, periodicals, travel diaries, pamphlets and sermons of the second half of the eighteenth century, one finds allusions, most of them full of wrathful indignation, to a custom, apparently imported from Italy, which took root in Spain around 1750. This custom had to do with noblemen tacitly allowing their wives to become friends with a member of the opposite sex, a relationship which was graciously accepted within their social and familial circles alike. The male friend who frequented the lady's house, and who was as familiar a sight in it as the husband, apparently did not overstep the limits of platonic love. Perhaps this was so because ambiguity was one of the rules of this game. He limited himself to bestowing upon the lady a series of attentions, gallantries and courtesies so rigid and obligatory that they lost their initial tinge of passion and became fixed in a code as tedious and stiff as marriage was in those times, even if its tenets appeared more attractive.

To satirize this situation, a writer of the time has a lady speak in the following manner, to inform her friend-to-be of the obligations he will have to fulfill in order to become her escort:

First of all, your lordship ought not to speak to any other woman but myself, even when I am not present. Your lordship is to come in the morning to take a cup of chocolate with me and perhaps to do my corset hooks up for me. Likewise in the afternoon, besides escorting me on a walk . . . your lordship ought to ask and receive my gracious leave before accepting another invitation to any gathering or visit. Your lordship must supply me with the most exquisite flowers of the season, as I take great pleasure in fragrances. And as I ought to be informed on the fashions of Madrid in order to dress accordingly, your lordship should employ an agent of good taste to ferret out what is stylish, without ever neglecting to send me immediately any modish fan or bonnet that may have arrived from abroad, so that I may pose as the most fashionable lady, for once these fashions spread, they are despised as common.^[1]

Besides the exaggeration in this text, we find a very interesting aspect of the relationship, one which I wish to examine. It seems obvious that these demands entrench the position of the woman as an idol. As such, they are the consequence of a long, gallant tradition going back to the thirteenth century and latent since then in the Spanish soul.

In contrast, with the insignificant and meager pan women actually played in society, they were the objects of a deceptive adoration infrequent in other countries. A French traveler visiting Spain in the year 1800 commented on the surprising phenomenon:

They do not revere women less than they do priests. One can say they actually make idols of them, to whom they burn incense. No matter what complaint men have against them, it is not proper to express it. Those who consider themselves refined kneel in front of the ladies to speak to them; they kiss their hand and do not get up until they are repeatedly asked to. Their respect for pregnant women is such that when the latter fancy a jewel, they feel obliged to buy it, and the women unfortunately are very much given to such whims.^[2]

It was the reverence to woman as a deity-like being before whom one piled up merits that characterized most of these liaisons in eighteenth-century Spain. The words merit, submission, sacrifice , and recompense are frequent in writings on this theme. In a playlet by Ramón de la Cruz,^[*] for instance, a character, Lorenza, is very proud of what a certain gentleman had to go through to be admitted among her guests. She shows a girlfriend a billet-doux of his, in which he shows his submission to her as follows:

Madam, my bowing to your excellence, the little attention you have paid my walking up and down your street, and the annoyance at seeing the happy ones who achieve the good fortune of frequenting your house and gatherings encourage me to beg of you to be admitted in the circle of your admirers, for which honor I prostrate myself at your feet and offer you my soul, my life, my person and everything God has granted me liberally, without aspiring, in exchange for this sacrifice, to any recompense that one should not demand of great ladies like you, nor should be asked by men like myself.^[3]

The very etymology of the word cortejo , with which one designated the friend or the beau of the married lady, points significantly

to the aspect of submission in such liaisons. The transposition to the language of love of such expressions as "to court" (cortejar, hacer la corte ), which initially applied to ceremonies with which noblemen honored kings, is a well-known phenomenon, one which certainly is not restricted to Castilian. It is common to other languages as well, as a residue of certain periods characterized by a man's devotion to a noble woman. The man, by humbly adopting a subservient attitude in relation to the lady whose favors he was seeking—however small they might have been—saw himself as a vassal before his king. In Italy and in France, the expression corteggiare and faire la cour underwent a process parallel to that of the terms cortejar or hacer la corte . The origins of such amorous connotations might be traced to the manifestations of chivalrous love in the various occidental countries. For our purpose, it will suffice to say that though cortejar or hacer la corte were expressions used in the eighteenth century, the derivative, cortejo , with its gallant connotations, is exclusive and characteristic of the eighteenth century.

In the beginning, the word cortejo did not refer to the man courting (or paying court to) the lady, but rather to the homage he paid her. Then the word came to refer to the gentleman who had committed himself to be the lady's escort, not only in her eyes, but in the eyes of the world. This custom, common by the second half of the eighteenth century, had spread to such an extent by the end of the century, that in a play in which the god Mars is mentioned, we read "you know he was, of the Cytherean goddess, escort."^[4]

Although literary and popular language preserve the gallant connotation of cortejar , the term cortejo has kept only its original meaning of retinue , or train of attendants . Even Corominas's Critical Dictionary of Etymologies fails to mention the meaning of escort . Therefore, it is not strange that the word, repeatedly uttered by eighteenth-century Spaniards to the point of creating a rift between the ones who did not want to hear about it and the ones who popularized it by their example, does not evoke, nowadays, anything but a "martial cavalcade."

Although the term cortejo was prevalent and generally used by those who left us testimony of this fashion, it was interchanged with two synonyms that also referred to the married lady's male friend: chichisveo and estrecho .^[5] The word chichisveo disappeared gradually, and by the end of the century it was considered antiquated.

The fact that it was replaced entirely by cortejo caused some authors to compare and differentiate the two terms. For instance, in a text of 1789, the Devil uttered the following words:

My dear subjects, you know very well the fine progress made by the bygone chichisveo to undermine mortals. Now I have thought out an even more clever device. . . . It will consist of every man choosing a lady to whom he humbly sacrifices his affection, with such devotion as to bind himself to her will and be ever at her side, at home, in the promenade, in bed, at gatherings and finally, everywhere.^[6]

But I do not believe that the chichisveo and the cortejo differed, or at least I have not found proof of it. If anything it is more an issue of quantity than quality. In the first years of the eighteenth century when the word chichisveo became popular, the fashions and novelties gradually introduced by the Bourbon dynasty were more severely criticized by the majority than they were later on when the term cortejo became prevalent during the reign of Charles III (1759–1788) and Charles IV (1788–1808). Although the phenomenon had from its onset retained its elitist character, many of those who objected to it considered it far more deeply rooted and widespread than they would have wished.

The Devil has taken advantage of the times in which we live [wrote one of them in 1729] to seed in the world the malignant weed called chichisveo and to transplant it to our country. One can easily see by its rapid growth that it is a harmful weed.^[7]

The country held responsible for that "malignant weed" was Italy; its ways and fashions had been introduced during the reign of Philip V (1700–1746), who had been successively married to two Italian princesses. The very name chichisveo reveals its origin. It was in Italy where a custom flourished at the beginning of the eighteenth century, with traits analogous to the ones described above, and where it served as a source of inspiration to the theater of Goldoni.^[8][*] The word, before being applied to the custom of a married lady having a male friend, meant "in a whisper" (or "under one's breath"), which became cicisbeare .^[9] Chichisveo, then, meant a certain conversation from which the lady drew solace and enjoyed the attention of a person of the opposite sex. The peculiar feature

of this conversation was its secretive and whispered tone, an inevitable carryover of the long-practiced confessionary habits.^[10] At least this is what one gathers from the information offered about this custom by an Italian contemporary:

The conversation of the cicisbei , then, consists in the choice that a young or mature man makes of a married lady, and sometimes a widow, to while away the time in frequent and familiar chats with her, under the title of honorable escort and respectful devotion. . . . The most pleasing conversation between them is carried on, not rarely, in a solitary room . . . and the most attractive topics are the ones they whisper to each other's ear with a studied affection that pretends to be platonic.^[11]

It is interesting to underline a point implied in the etymology of the word chichisveo . The core of the phenomenon lay in the conversation, that is to say, in the novelty of a married woman conversing with a man who was not her husband. From conversation, it was easy to continue on to a certain intimacy; it had always been felt that even confessors—who were men after all—could threaten the chastity of those women, who were far too secluded, and whose only escape was to talk.

The confessionals were, in fact, very suitable places in which a whispered conversation on intimate subjects could become sinful, or at least open the way to certain liberties. In a text of the beginning of the eighteenth century, a moralist availed himself of this argument. If those "sacred buttresses" had to be fortified "with walls against sight and precautions against imprudences" in order to restrain desire, he wondered, how can sin fail to penetrate intimate conversations between a man and a woman?^[12]

The idea of impurity attached to a conversation with a person of the opposite sex was so ingrained in Spain that it originated the pithy saying " between a chaste woman and a saintly man, build a wall of lime and stone." Throughout Golden Age literature, we encounter similar statements.

Women should never [writes a moralist of the sixteenth century] obey too slavishly their spiritual advisors. . . . Very often this spiritual friendship turns into another sort of alloy.^[13]

The forbidding of all closeness to a man was a refrain long sung to Spanish women. A Spanish woman's dream was to be known as chaste, a dream that she was inescapably compelled to nourish.

A good reputation just did not go with friendship or obedience to a man, except to one's father in the first stage of one's life, then later on, to the man who became lord and husband by laws of convenience or chance. The wonder caused by the scandalous fashion of the close relationship between a man and a woman who were not husband and wife is what doubtlessly caused the other word denoting a male friend to be coined: the word "intimate" (estrecho ).

The term estrecho was probably chosen as more apt to describe the man enjoying those privileges, precisely because they were those of intimacy. A man who was not the husband, nor the father, nor the confessor was allowed to converse privately with a woman, to be her confidant. Moreover, she was allowed to smile at him through the ribbing of her fan, to send him billet-doux, to receive him in the house, to squeeze his hand when he held it out to help her alight from the carriage, and finally, to become entangled in a reciprocal confidence sealed by that most unusual familiarity. It is not difficult, then, to imagine why the beneficiary of a relationship that had vanquished the taboos of friendship between man and woman was called intimate .

This name must have waned quickly, as I found it only in a few writings. It has, nevertheless, left its traces in a game I learned from my mother in childhood, which she herself used to play as a child. It was called "pick out your 'intimate'" (echar los estrechos ). The last day of the year my girlfriends and I put folded pieces of paper in a bag, each with our respective name on it. In another bag we stuffed the names of as many young lads as we knew or wished to know. Then we proceeded to pair off the folded paper scraps. It was a rather insipid affair, which ended by our reading aloud the name of the boy assigned to each of us by chance, as estrecho or friend, for the coming year. In spite of the importance we attached to the game and the expectations with which we did the sorting out, it did not bear any consequence except that we girls nudged each other on the street when we saw one or another of the boys passing by whose names we had used in our wishful play. Now, after so many years, I believe that this game was probably the residue of a similar one played in the eighteenth-century drawing rooms, most likely enlivened by jocose comments, but I have not found references to support my conjecture.

How to explain the presence of such customs, however restricted to a minority, in a country that upheld matrimonial honor so

strictly? To answer such questions (the cause of anxiety to so many contemporaries opposing the new ways), one should remember something they often forgot in their indignation: these ways were not as new as they thought.

If one of the main premises of the cortejo was to consider woman as an object worthy of adoration, eighteenth-century Italy was not bringing anything new to Spain. It is true that the chichisveo, updated and dressed up in eighteenth-century fashion, entered Spain by way of Italy, but it is also true that Italy, as well as France during the sixteenth century, had drawn from the spirit of chivalry found in Spanish customs and literature.^[14] A glance, however cursory, at Spanish Golden Age theater will reveal the stereotype of the proud and haughty lady demanding proofs of a burdensome vassalage. Laura, the protagonist of one of these plays, reacts indignantly at the daring of a gentleman who, having no record of his chivalrous pursuits to boast, laments her harshness:

Do I cost you sorrowful years?
Do I owe your desire, any passionate letters and vigil?
Have you burnt any candle at both ends for me?
Have you jousted in my honor in Ferrara, Octavio?
Tell me, what tears have I seen you shedding?
What estate have you lost for me?
What merchant has given you in credit the gowns you offered me?
What rings, what crystals, what paintings, corals, bracelets or necklaces,
the jeweler?
Have you served me on your knees?
What lackeys have you liveried in my colors?
Whom did you duel with in my honor?
In which tournament, in my presence, did you get the palm of victory,
that you are to complain of me?^[15]

Spanish women, deserving or not, were traditionally accustomed to "making themselves precious." This tendency to request guarantees, to heighten the value of whatever favor the suitor was granted, is the logical consequence of the insistence with which the girls themselves were lectured on the always vital modesty and reserve. In Philip IV's (1621–1665) court, it was customary for the queen's ladies-in-waiting, even if they were married, to accept homage from the courtiers. The latter had to ask beforehand the ladies' leave to pay them homage, and if permission was granted, the gentlemen acquired the right to call themselves "enraptured" (embebecidoes ),

that is, so absorbed by their respective ladies' presence as to be excused from bowing to the queen in public ceremonies. These same gentlemen used to disguise themselves as lackeys on the journey from Madrid to Aranjuez,^[*] to follow the ladies of their hearts, and to thus express to them their constant devotion. It was not rare for some of them to choose as the object of their gallantry a young nun of high birth.^[16] The fact that they chose such inaccessible women seems to indicate that it was enough for a gentleman to let his lady know that she was the cause of his pining, and that he expected nothing in return.

And what seems most peculiar is to allow a man, though he may be married, to declare himself the lover of one of the queen's ladies, and to present her with expensive gifts and do all sorts of madness for her, without anybody being scandalized by it all. One can see these gallants in the palace courtyard and the ladies at the windows, whiling away their days in perpetual long-distance chats . . . these flirtations are public, and a gentleman requires much ingenuity to start them and to have a lady go along with it because they are discreet and not very talkative as women are wont to be.^[17]

These courtships, then, gave prestige to the lady who accepted them. Moreover, the linking of the concept of love with renunciation of it had become a privilege of distinguished folk. Lope de Vega^[**] underlined it explicitly in one of his plays:

Here Don Enrique plays court to Lady Ana de Moncada, and the Count of Ribagorza, to Lady Sol de Peralta; Don Lorenzo de Aragón, to the fair Lady Juana de Toledo and Don Ramiro, though wedded, to Lady Cassandra, and many more likewise with the decorum noblemen observe in these matters.^[18]

From the above testimonials, it is obvious that these relationships, conducted outside of wedlock among the nobility in seventeenth-century Spain, were of the most rigorous chastity, or at least a great show was made of it. The fact that the king himself, Philip IV, was adept at this custom may explain why it would have been in bad taste to doubt its propriety. As for the peculiarities of eighteenth-

century gallantry—which indeed could give rise to doubts about its innocence—neither did there exist any muzzle to keep the evil tongues from wagging. In the seventeenth century the example of the king, flatteringly followed, was a mighty dike against the satires and attacks the cortejo suffered a century later.

One can find even earlier precedents of the cortejo. The French fashion of the chevaliers servants , also called alcovistes ,^[*] was thought to be an invention of Louis XIII's court (1610–1643). It was actually a simple deformation of a Spanish custom of the times of Philip II (1556–1598). Adopted in Italy, it was disseminated in France by Maria de Medici. This was the custom of the bracero (the arm-man), known in Italy as the bracciere , and in France, having taken a different tinge, as the alcoviste . The Spanish arm-man was a servant without whose help a lady of high nobility could not get along. His function was almost exclusively limited to offering the lady his arm and to accompanying her when her husband was absent. The nobler the family to which this arm-man belonged, the more highly honored by his service were husband and wife.^[19]

Few in the eighteenth century linked those old customs with the cortejo, which was seen by some as a fashion brought from abroad to tarnish Spain's purest traditions, or, in the opinion of others, to demolish antiquated prejudices. However, there were some who remembered the amorous style of yore, with its aura of attractiveness and prestige, with which the cortejo could be associated. In a text from the end of the century which defended the presumed innocence of the cortejo, whose task is to be an arm-man, a dialogue between a lady and her confessor is heard. She defended the new ways, stressing their similarity to the traditional ones:

According to this, your Reverence considers it improper to give a lady one's arm. Thus, from now on we shall have to do without the help of a servant who, in the absence of the gentleman of the house, acts as the lady's escort . . . to offer one's arm to a lady is not a new custom, on the contrary, a very courteous gesture as old, in my opinion, as the very nobility.^[20]

Those who rejected the cortejo, as well as those who took pride in accepting it, considered it something that came from outside, whence also came materialism, ambition for luxury, forbidden

books and the waves of criticism. The "traditionalists" raised their protest before the "modern," regarding them as contaminated by the new ways. Sometimes they accused them, not without reason, of slavishly accepting everything foreign. Nevertheless, for divergent reasons, both the former and the latter refused to look for the roots of that gallant fashion. They saw it as detached from tradition, and as part of the numerous fashions which had been entering the country since the beginning of the century, slowly undermining long established beliefs. The majority saw the cortejo as a challenge to the traditional image of the Spanish woman, and to the belief that such an image was untouchable. In the view of the modern, the cortejo opened the way toward disputing the presumed eternal values that the traditional image implied, values attributed to conventions already abandoned in other European countries, those which Spain had to overcome to keep up with the times. Latent in the national tradition, that revolutionary innovation reappeared as a foreign borrowing sanctioned by the prestige it had gained in more advanced countries, like all novelties in that century of enlightenment and reason. Few Spaniards were able to see that they were being given back, somewhat adorned, something that was genuinely theirs and that they had propagated abroad.

(Later the same thing occurred with some aspects of Romanticism, another example of that "belated imitation" so characteristically Spanish: that is, to ignore what was piled up in the attic, so to speak, was the same thing that was hailed as new when coming from abroad. Novelties thus bedazzled Spaniards and awakened in them the desire to copy the fashions when they returned much later, clothed somewhat differently and surrounded by an exotic aura which was already fading abroad.)

Neither the origin of the chichisveo nor the changes it underwent when it was later called cortejo are well defined in the contemporary texts pertinent to this subject. Likewise, one very seldom finds an exact reference to the birthplace of this custom, although Italy and France, generally considered the culprits in introducing immoral thoughts and ways into Spain, were most often accused.

The actual origin of the chichisveo is unclear, to say the least; it is curious to find that among Spain, Italy and France, there ran a stream of reciprocal accusations. If they were interpreted literally, they would lead one to a maze of divergent versions as far as responsibility for the phenomenon is concerned. For instance, Antonio

Muratori,^[*] in his Annals of 1700, referred to the Italian chichisveo as the most pernicious inheritance left by the recent French domination of Northern Italy.^[21] In contrast with this version, Father Mayans, in the second part of the century, spoke of "the plague brought to Spain by those who fought in Italy . . . in the past wars."^[22] He was referring to the troops of Louis XIV, sent to aid his nephew, Philip of Anjou, recently ascended to the Spanish throne. The military aid strengthened and increased Spain's possessions in Italy while Philip was fighting in Spain to secure his throne against the Austrian pretender. Because the French and the Spaniards invaded Italy at the same time, other authors confused the issue even further by spreading the word in some widely read books that the chichisveo passed from Italy to Spain.

Actually the chichisveo, regardless of its origin, was already rooted in Italy, especially in Genoa and Venice, with the name and the features Spain was going to inherit; in fact, a cultured minority in Spain was already aware of it. Mariano Nipho,^[**] for instance, had read Goldoni, whose realism he attacked on the ground that a play should not limit itself to depicting the vices of one's contemporaries with verisimilitude and humor. He sympathized with Venetian gentlemen irked by the brazen casting of the chichisveo in The Gentleman and the Lady^[23] The abbé Cenicero unhesitatingly declared, as early as 1737, that the chichisveo was born in Italy, and he was shocked because nobody attacked or reproved it, while it was being opposed in the very country of its origin.^[24]

Attaching the blame for the cortejo to Italy had almost been forgotten by the second half of the eighteenth century, especially during the years of the French revolution, when the tendency was to roundly impute France for all immortality, infiltrated mainly through "devilish books liable to instigate son against father and to pervert the purest maiden and the most judicious married woman."^[25]

Although France and Italy were as a rule considered responsible for the upheaval in the amatory code, xenophobia led some traditionalists to combine distant geographic places as originators of the evil. One of them commented:

As you know, England, Holland and the Northern countries are the ones that dictate the laws in fashion and manners. In these regions there reigns heresy. . . . And is it not rash, to take up in our country as good and decent, what, in fact, a loose conscience has fostered in such countries?^[26]

Having underlined the point that hardly anyone believed the cortejo to be a custom linked to an old gallant Spanish tradition, it would be worthwhile to take a brief glance at its closest intermediary, the chichisveo, before entering into the broader topic. What made the life of married women and widows so pleasant, first in Genoa, then in Venice, and finally all over Italy, seems to have stemmed from the fact that Genoese men had to travel constantly because of their businesses. The husbands welcomed with a sigh of relief the institution of the chichisveo, that is, of an attentive escort to a bored wife. It was this acceptance on the husband's part that spread and perfected the custom among the Genoese to the point that often the choice of the chichisveo was a family matter. The name of the gentleman designated to fulfill this charge was agreed upon by husband and wife, and was included in the marriage papers.

Giuseppe Baretti suspected that half of these relationships might have been chaste, and the other half not. Nevertheless, the proper thing to do was to consider the doubtful ones platonic, and to behave as if indeed they were. Jealous husbands cut a ridiculous figure.^[27]

Other authors tell us that it was a fashion followed zestfully by some worldly abbés, who adopted the same frivolous attitudes as the secular escorts, by frequenting theaters and feasts with complete nonchalance.^[28] The duties of the chichisveo were enslaving and baroque. He had to show up at his lady's house every day at nine on the dot, to serve her chocolate or coffee in bed, making sure to open the windows and to wake her gently. If the lady, for instance, asked him to fetch her a pin, to demurely close her nightgown around the neck, he had to look for it around the room, and feign he did not see the one she had at her hand's reach. The chichisveo did not have to leave the room if the chambermaid was not present; on the contrary, he was to help the lady to get up. He was to assist her at her dresser, standing behind her like a servant, to be ready to hand her all of her cosmetics and to give her an opinion on the effect they produced on her face. After the dressing up, he would

take her to her litter and accompany her to church on foot, keeping step with the bearers. He would rush to the door to offer the lady holy water from his fingers. In the afternoon, he would accompany her to the theater and sit by her.

In the same text that described in great detail the guidelines for the Spanish cortejo there follows a cynical but revealing comment uttered by a husband complying with the fashion:

We Genoese husbands are too busy, while our wives are not busy enough, to be satisfied to get along unaccompanied. They need a gallant, a dog, or a monkey.^[29]

The Genoese gentleman who solved the problem in such a contemptuous way had nonetheless put his finger on the right spot. It was a matter of idleness. The ladies all over Europe were bored. They were not any more bored than they had been in other eras, but—and this is a feature of the eighteenth century—they started to become aware of it. They began to feel restless and to rebel; they had to fill their idle hours somehow.