Margaret Fuller (45 page)

On one of Margaret’s last nights in London, Mazzini—a man of “beauteous and pure music” when they talked alone—arrived at the Springs’ rented rooms for conversation, only to be joined unexpectedly by the Carlyles. Although Mazzini was “a dear friend of Mrs. C.,” his presence “gave the conversation a turn to ‘progress’ and ideal subjects,” which inspired in the cranky Thomas Carlyle a stream of “invectives on all our ‘rose-water imbecilities.’” After making a futile effort to “remonstrate,” Mazzini withdrew, turning visibly “sad.” Jane Carlyle whispered into Margaret’s ear what she already knew: “These are but opinions to Carlyle; but to Mazzini, who has given his all, and helped bring his friends to the scaffold, in pursuit of such subjects, it is a matter of life and death.”

18

“Rome has grown up in my soul”

I
N PARIS—“THE CITY OF PLEASURES,”
MARGARET WAS QUICK
to say—the women devoted their first days to “
getting dressed,
”
choosing not to send out their calling cards right away and instead keeping to the new Hôtel Rougement on the Boulevard Poissonnière, in their rooms furnished with “thick, flowered” carpets, marbled walls, canopied bedsteads, and the “inevitable large mirror,” to be fitted for new clothes.
The Springs decreed this was no time to economize, as they had in London by moving after two days from a fine hotel overlooking the fountains in Trafalgar Square to rented rooms “in a little narrow street.”
Margaret had instantly noticed “the devotion of a French woman to her
mise
”—her attire—and the money she used to buy her French wardrobe, a portion of her
Tribune
advance, was well spent.
The dresses would last for the next three years.

Margaret had begun to mention in letters home the possibility of staying on in Europe for at least another season, if she could find the means. The Howitts had invited her to publish in their journal, and other “openings were made for me to write” on topics she wished to comment on in England.
But while Margaret sequestered herself in the Hôtel Rougement for dress fittings and tutoring sessions to improve her spoken French, she was also looking backward, writing the dispatches she owed to the
Tribune
covering the weeks in London when she had been too busy to write, both harried and pleased by receiving so much company that the “only way of escape is
to hide.
”

It was not simply in conversation that Margaret felt more in her element in Europe, but in her writing as well, now that she could reach past the boundaries of even America’s Great Metropolis for subject matter. One of Margaret’s last columns for the
New-York Tribune
before leaving, titled “Mistress of Herself, Though China Fall,” had addressed the American housewife’s “besetting danger . . . of littleness,” the tendency of women to cry over broken china or “spots on the table cloth,” fearing that “other women will laugh at them” for their sloppy housekeeping. Instead, Margaret advised her female readers to “see how much you need a great object in all your little actions.” Cooking and cleaning should be “a means to an end,” that of creating a “home” filled with “good spirits,” not a “work-house.”
But Margaret’s horizons had always stretched beyond the home. In England she had observed women in truly oppressive working conditions and confronted hard facts, such as the “habit of feeding children on opium” among mothers in Manchester to pacify hungry babies through long workdays.
She had left America in search of both great objects
and
great actions—in writing, in life.

Once stylishly dressed and with several
Tribune
letters filed, Margaret began attending the opera and theatrical performances, museum exhibitions, and debates in the Chamber of Deputies; her French was now good enough for her to take in the arguments of the verbal “sharp-shooters” who held the floor.
She was presented at Louis Philippe’s court but preferred her audience with the “true kings”
of France: the socialists Félicité-Robert Lamennais and Pierre Jean de Béranger, the first a renegade priest whose internationally known
Words of a Believer
and
Book of the People
espoused a return to the democratic principles of the early Christian church, the second a poet whose verse satirized both church and monarchy and who had spent time in prison for it. Mazzini’s good word had brought about the meeting and also served as entrée to the editors of
La Revue Indépendante,
who swiftly accepted Margaret’s essay on American literature from
Papers on Literature and Art
for publication and asked her to become the journal’s American correspondent when she returned to the United States.

Margaret’s translator for the article, Pauline Roland, an intimate of
La Revue Indépendante
’s founders, the socialist philosopher Pierre Leroux and Margaret’s heroine George Sand, had been mistress of a household that would have been scarcely imaginable to the American wives Margaret conjured up in her
Tribune
article as weeping into their broken teacups. For twelve years Pauline had lived in a “free union” with the father of two of her three children, declaring her firm opposition to marriage; more recently she had moved with the children to Pierre Leroux’s experimental commune at Broussac, near George Sand’s country house, and taken the job of teacher in the community’s school. By way of Pauline’s example, Margaret came to understand that Charles Fourier, the French originator of the international communal movement—called Associationism by its American popularizer, Albert Brisbane—had advocated social reforms far more revolutionary than the model
phalanstères
he’d outlined in his writings, which had inspired the formation of egalitarian working communities such as Broussac and Brook Farm. Horace Greeley was now helping to found the North American Phalanx in New Jersey, which the Springs planned to join on their return to the United States.

Taking up the cause of women—“
le feminisme
” in his terminology—Fourier had argued not just for a fair distribution of labor between men and women in his ideal communities (Margaret, in
Woman in the Nineteenth Century,
had cited Fourier’s estimate that a third of men were likely to prefer traditionally male labor, and a third of men would prefer women’s work).
He also advocated the full emancipation of women through the abolition of marriage, which he viewed as a form of enslavement or legalized prostitution. French Fourierist
phalanstères
like Leroux’s at Broussac, Margaret learned, supported free love, or “passional attraction,” among communards, with the children born of such unions, whether temporary or enduring, to be raised collectively in infant
crèches,
liberating all parents to pursue their chosen occupations.

The Springs must have wondered how, with so much visiting, Margaret would ever fulfill her obligations as governess, yet Eddie’s health was precarious and he was not always able to study. One of his illnesses held the Springs in Paris longer than they’d intended, to Margaret’s relief. George Sand had been away for weeks at her country house, unable to respond to the letter Margaret directed to her home in the place d’Orléans. And though Margaret had attended the opera and seven performances by the celebrated dramatic artist Rachel, she had not yet had an opportunity to hear Sand’s Polish lover, Frédéric Chopin, play the piano. At last, on Valentine’s Day, 1847, rather than suffer another lonely call to the Lynch salon on Washington Square, Margaret spent an afternoon in Chopin’s Paris atelier as the invited guest of the composer and one of his English piano students, listening to the man with whom Sand “lives on the footing of combined means, independent friendship!” as he expressed the “subtile secrets of the creative spirit” at the keyboard.

Margaret also met George Sand, who had returned to the city for the purpose of correcting galley proofs. Before the meeting, Margaret was impressed by what she heard of “Madame Sand,” as she was called in Paris (Baroness Dudevant was her discarded married name)—“she takes rank in society like a man, for the weight of her thoughts.”
Yet when the novelist descended from her study to greet “
La dame Americaine
”—Margaret had simply dropped by in hopes of finding Sand at home—she was wearing not her famous black trousers and cape but a dark violet dress draped with a black mantle at the shoulders, her long dark hair brushed into curls, and her “lady-like dignity, presenting an almost ludicrous contrast to the vulgar caricature idea of George Sand.”
Margaret believed she would never forget the moment when Sand, her dark eyes shining with “truly human heart and nature,” fixed those eyes upon her, asked “
C’est vous?
” and extended her hand. Sand explained afterward that Margaret appeared to have been summoned magically to her door: she had just been reading Margaret’s letter, which she pronounced “
charmante,
” and begun to compose an invitation in return.

Despite Margaret’s continuing struggle with spoken French, “a great trial to me, who am eloquent and free in my own tongue, to be forced to feel my thoughts struggling in vain for utterance,” the two writers managed to communicate “as if we had always known one another.” They did not take up the “personal or private matters” that may have been uppermost in Margaret’s mind as she interviewed the social renegade, but the topics must have seemed urgent enough to Sand, who put aside her proof sheets to entertain Margaret for the rest of the day, explaining her decision in a phrase Margaret also committed to memory: “it is better to throw things aside, and seize the moment.”

When Margaret called again a few days later, Sand’s daughter and several friends, male and female, were on hand. She stayed long enough to see that Sand’s “position” among the company was “of an intellectual woman and good friend,—the same as my own in the circle of my acquaintance.” Although Margaret didn’t draw the connection to her own conversational style, she noted too that Sand’s “way of talking” was “just like her writing—lively, picturesque, with an undertone of deep feeling, and the same skill of striking the nail on the head every now and then with a blow.”

Margaret quickly accustomed herself to Sand’s habit of smoking a small cigarette while talking—now a “common practice among ladies abroad,” which, Margaret believed, had “originated” with Sand. Writing against convention had long seemed a legitimate means of protest to Margaret, but in Paris both small and large
acts
of defiance began to seem acceptable as well. “She needs no defence,” Margaret recorded after the two encounters with George Sand, “but only to be understood, for she has bravely acted out her nature, and always with good intentions.” If Sand had found a man “who could interest and command her throughout her range,” she might have loved that one man “permanently,” Margaret speculated, “but there was hardly a possibility of that, for such a person.” Margaret decided that Sand’s having “changed the objects of her affection,” not just once but “several times,” was inevitable for a woman of her “range” and disposition: there may have been “something of the Bacchante in her,” a “love of night and storm,” a susceptibility to “free raptures” like those that had overcome “the followers of Cybele, the great goddess, the great mother.” Unable any longer to disapprove of George Sand’s “passional” prodigality now that she’d been welcomed by the novelist as an old friend and had confirmed their likeness in certain key respects, Margaret turned to mythology to find precedent, and perhaps a measure of propriety, in her heroine’s transgressions—committed as a means of “acting out her nature.”

Adam Mickiewicz, the great Polish poet and patriot, was another new acquaintance living a large life in Paris. Mickiewicz had been a professor of Slavic studies at the Collège de France until, shortly before Margaret arrived in Paris, he’d begun to attack the established church in his lectures and lost his job. Those same lectures had also introduced Emersonian Transcendentalism to the Paris intelligentsia, as Margaret found when she read them herself—and she sent Mickiewicz a copy of Waldo’s newly published book of poems, guessing correctly that the gift would draw him swiftly to the Hôtel Rougement. If Waldo Emerson brought the two together, it was by stark contrast to her emotionally restrained American friend that Margaret knew she had found, in the handsome, exuberant forty-eight-year-old political exile Mickiewicz, “the man I had long wished to see, with the intellect and passions in due proportion for a full and healthy human being, with a soul constantly inspiring,” as she wrote to Waldo a month after their first meeting, knowing he would take her meaning.

During her final ten days in Paris, Margaret spent most evenings in the company of Adam Mickiewicz, once attending a meeting of his “Circle of God,” the group of ecstatic Christian radicals he was grooming for the fight for Polish independence from Prussia. George Sand probably had not read
Woman in the Nineteenth Century,
but Mickiewicz, who was fluent in English, had, finding himself in full agreement with Margaret’s prediction that, as the Circle of God radicals put it, “the present is the era of the liberation of women.”
He announced as much at the meeting, impressing upon the assembled students and exiled Polish intellectuals his belief that Margaret would carry the cause to fruition. By one account, the intensely focused attention Margaret received from Mickiewicz that night caused her to faint.

Mickiewicz’s enthusiasm for the cause of women’s rights placed him closer to the Fourierists than to his Italian revolutionary counterpart Mazzini—and closer to Margaret as well. Whether Margaret was aware of Mickiewicz’s troubled marriage is impossible to know. His wife had become mentally unstable during their years of exile, and recently the poet had transferred his affections, for a time at least, to the family’s governess, with whom he had conceived a child. Perhaps Margaret knew and didn’t care, or cared most of all about what Mickiewicz had suffered. As with so many of her previous attractions to powerful men, it was the “deep-founded mental connection” she experienced with Mickiewicz that anchored her in “this real and important relation.” But the connection to this “full and healthy human being” was “real”—felt in her body, as the report of Margaret’s fainting revealed.