Margaret Fuller (52 page)

Trying to be brave, she wrote to Charles King Newcomb, the protégé of her Rhode Island years, describing her landlady as “a lively Italian woman who makes me broth of turnips and gets my clothes washed in the stream.” Her residence in the mountains was a “beautiful solitude,” she told him, invoking the Transcendentalist virtues. Each day that she was well enough, Margaret walked or rode by donkey beyond the town limits, through wheat fields edged with red poppies and yellow cornflowers to ancient monasteries, entering churches to take shelter from the sun, where she found sacred paintings, “not by great masters, but sweetly domestic”: “the Virgin offering the nipple to the child Jesus, his little hand is on her breast, but he only plays and turns away”; and “Santa Anna teaching the Virgin, a sweet girl of ten years old, with long curling auburn hair[,] to read, the Virgin leans on her mother’s lap; her hair curls on the book.”
How long had it been since an auburn-haired Sarah Margaret Fuller sat with her mother, writing a letter to her absent father, and then, when asked to “hold the baby,” exchanged pen for swaddled infant? She had been a daughter, a virgin with book in her lap; now she would be the mother.

As Margaret walked the roads of L’Aquila, she wrote to Charles Newcomb, “The country people say ‘Povera, sola, soletta, poor one, alone, all alone! the saints keep her,’ as I pass. They think me some stricken deer to stay so apart from the herd.” She did not tell Charles Newcomb that the “povera, sola” walking, riding a donkey, was a lone woman swollen with child, six months pregnant. Another painting showed “the Marriage of the Virgin,” in which “a beautiful young man, one of three suitors . . . looks sadly on while she gives her hand to Joseph.”
Had Margaret been inspired to write to Charles Newcomb, one of several handsome younger American men she had once fancied, as she was about to give her hand to Giovanni? Would Margaret marry? Giovanni addressed his letters to her at L’Aquila “Mrs. M. Ossoli.” Was this a scheme to protect his lover, alone and pregnant in an Italian hill town, or had the couple already married in secret?

“I don’t like this place at all,” she wrote Giovanni, “non mi piace niente.” “Si solamente era possibile venire più vicino a ti”—“If only it were possible to come closer to you.” The only reason to stay was for “the good air and its safety”—“per buon aria e sicurezza.”
Here “I never see any English or Americans,” she wrote to Waldo Emerson, still not disclosing her location; she now thought “wholly in Italian.” Once it was too late to join him on his return to America, she confessed that “my courage has fairly given way, and the fatigue of life is beyond my strength.” Worse: “I do not prize myself, or expect others to prize me.”
In her “mountain solitude,” Margaret debated anew the choices she had already made and could not now unmake.

Then L’Aquila too was no longer safe. Close to Rome, yet within the boundaries of Ferdinand II’s Sicilian kingdom, the windy mountain village was fast becoming a billeting post for Neapolitan soldiers who, by the end of July, had begun arresting republican sympathizers. Margaret quickly moved down the mountainside to Rieti, within the Papal States, a riverside “hive of very ancient dwellings”
in a verdant plain crosshatched with vineyards, just one day’s ride from Rome. Giovanni could visit so reliably now that she had coffee waiting for the two of them to share when he arrived on Sunday mornings after a journey made under cover of darkness. Margaret was beginning to discover, as she would later write, that “we are of mutual solace and aid about the dish and spoon part”—the trivial pleasures of domestic life.

No sooner had Margaret settled in second-floor rooms overlooking the rapids of the Velino River, with rent and board cheaper than any she had found in Italy (quantities of “figs, grapes, peaches” and “the best salad enough for two persons for one cent a day,”
she wrote to her brother Richard, surely puzzling him about her living arrangements), than Giovanni found himself pressured to join a regiment that would leave Rome for Bologna to defend against the Austrians led by Count Radetzky, who had regained first Milan and then Ferrara by late July. Giovanni wanted to go, and after a time, Margaret agreed to the plan: “if it is necessary for your honor, leave and I will try to be strong.”
When she wrote to Richard in mid-August, “All goes wrong,” she meant not only in the Italian city-states—where “the Demon with his cohort of traitors, prepares to rule anew,” where “my dearest friends,” the radicals of Milan, “are losing all”—but also in her hideaway in the “mountains of Southern Italy,” the indeterminate address she used in writing to Richard.
Margaret wrote to Giovanni that she would prefer to spare him the “ordeal” of the birth if she was “sure to do well,” but she feared the possibility, if he went to Bologna, that she might “die alone without touching a dear hand.”

As September approached, Margaret found it difficult to write; perhaps, with so many reversals, her chronicle would no longer “seem worth making such a fuss about,” she worried. She had written to her friend Emelyn Story in mid-June, “If anything should occur to change my plans for the summer,” she would certainly visit her and the Cranches in Sorrento.
But there had been no “accident,” as Margaret had once both feared and hoped, tormenting herself: “was I not cruel to bring another into this terrible world”?
She could only wait, looking often at the daguerreotype Giovanni had given her—his dark hair, searching eyes, so young, so thin. She worried about him too.

Just as it seemed he would leave for Bologna, the Austrian forces withdrew, and Giovanni was free to join Margaret in Rieti, to wait with her for labor to begin. She brewed morning coffee on Sunday, August 27. He stayed until September 6, the day after the birth of Angelo Eugene Philip Ossoli.

The baby “still cries a lot,” Margaret wrote a day later, addressing Giovanni for the first time as “Carissimo Consorte,” the “dearest husband” to whom she could give kisses and hugs “in this dear baby I have in my arms”—“dandoti un abbraccio, ed un bagio in questo caro Pupo.”
Then soon Giovanni was again “mio caro,” “mio amore” in the letters Margaret wrote every day, then every other day, until the end of September when he could make his next visit.
She told him that her milk would not come in, that she’d had a fever; like her sister, Ellen, she could not nurse her child; “he refuses my breast.”
Then all was well; she had hired a wet nurse, Chiara Fiordiponte. Now she could write “I am delighted to see you in the baby who I have always close to me.”
He is “very beautiful, everybody says so”;
he “has your mouth, hands, feet: I think his eyes will be turquoise. He is very naughty; understands well, is very obstinate to have his will.”
And “he is still so pretty; his gestures as delicate as a ballerina’s.”

They had named their son Angelo for his father, giving him Giovanni’s middle name; for Eugene, the oldest of Margaret’s brothers; and for Giovanni’s father, Filippe, who had died in February, leaving Giovanni, who cared for him through his final illness, to war with his “odious brothers”
over such inheritance as might be allowed a youngest child. The ancient law of primogeniture was one of the reasons Giovanni was so committed to the republican cause—the code favoring eldest sons in all things would be abolished. The wrangle over his modest share of his father’s estate was Giovanni’s motive too for hiding the child; to anger his brothers, all in the employ of the pope, with a connection—married or not—outside the church would ruin his chances of receiving even his meager allotment.

Giovanni was also determined to have the child baptized, which required Margaret and the baby to stay forty days in Rieti before the ritual could take place; Giovanni wished to establish the baby’s paternity, to ensure his son’s inheritance, one day, of Giovanni’s tiny fortune—and, Margaret believed, of the title marchese. They must find a man to stand as godfather. Margaret proposed Mickiewicz: “He knows about the existence of the baby[,] he is a devout Catholic, he is a distinguished man who could be a help to him in his future life, and I want him to have some friend in case something happens to us.”
But Mickiewicz was on the march. Giovanni confided in his nephew Pietro, in line to become the true marchese Ossoli, who obliged with signature, seal, and family crest on the necessary documents and promised to keep Giovanni’s secret from the “odious brothers” as long as needed.

When Giovanni left Rieti after his early-October visit, Nino, as they called the child, short for the affectionate Angelino, “seemed to look for you,” Margaret wrote. “He woke up before sunrise, looked, refused his milk; cried very much and seemed to look for something that he could not find.”
Margaret missed Giovanni too. Would she miss Nino as much—more? She knew she must return to Rome, to resume writing
Tribune
columns, gathering material for her book; it was the only way to support herself and, now, beautiful, naughty, obstinate, delicate Nino—with his “exstatic smiles.”

She spent, she would say afterward, “entire” nights “contriving every possible means by which, through resolution and energy on my part, I could avoid that one sacrifice”—leaving Nino. “It was impossible.”
Could she rent rooms for Chiara and Nino, separate from hers, in Rome? But Chiara would have to leave her husband and bring her own baby to the city as well. The plan was both too expensive and too risky, Giovanni argued, and Margaret knew it. Rebecca Spring had left her three-year-old daughter for more than a year with no qualms; Nino was only an infant, so young he might miss his mother less than an older child would, Margaret may have believed.

As the day of the baptism approached, the day when she could leave if she chose, as she must, Margaret wrote a confused letter to Giovanni, directing him to find her a room in Rome, but not for long. Nino “becomes more interesting every day,” yet Margaret needed “to spend some time with you,” to “go once again into the world from which I have been apart now for 5 months.” But “I don’t want to settle in Rome so as not to be able to leave if I am too unhappy away from the baby.”

She would go. Still, Nino “has grown much fatter . . . he starts to play and dance . . . He bends his head toward me when I ask for a kiss.” And Giovanni? “I love you much more than during the first days because I have proof of how good and pure your heart is.”
She could not now have them both—and Rome.

To a canny reader, Margaret’s
Tribune
columns told the whole story, from her loss of appetite, reported in late January, to the “swelling” hopes of a republic in March, to the cessation of her dispatches for six months of “seclusion” in summer and fall. And when she resumed her column in early December of 1848, at the end of a year of “revolutions, tumults, panics, hopes,” Margaret wrote of her return to the city by carriage after a weekend of torrential rains: “The rivers had burst their bounds, and beneath the moon the fields round Rome lay one sheet of silver.” As she waited at the city gate for her bags to be inspected, Margaret strayed onto the grounds of a ruined villa, the gardens of the first-century Roman historian Sallust—“the scene of great revels, great splendors in the old time.” Was a historian ever equal to the task of revelation? “Strange things have happened now,” Margaret wrote, “the most attractive part of which—the secret heart—lies buried or has fled . . . Of that part historians have rarely given a hint.” Yet here was Margaret’s hint, her cry: although “I was very ready to return . . . I left what was most precious”—that, “I could not take with me.”

“Were you here, I would confide in you fully,” Margaret wrote to her mother from Rome in mid-November, “and have more than once, in the silence of the night, recited to you those most strange and romantic chapters in the story of my sad life.”
She had not been prepared for “this kind of pain,” she wrote later to Cary Sturgis Tappan, “the position of a mother separated from her only child.” This also was “too frightfully unnatural.”

But neither was she prepared for the “strange and romantic chapters” that unfolded in Rome on her return, and quickly she became absorbed in recounting them for her
Tribune
readers, in playing her “
part
therein.” By the time she returned to the city, nearly all of Europe’s revolutions had failed or lost their momentum; the “springtime of nations” had passed. In France, the fragile coalition of socialists, workers, and shopkeepers that had formed so swiftly to depose King Louis Philippe in February had splintered during the terrible “June Days” of bloody street fighting in Paris. The ensuing election of the Imperialist party’s Prince Louis Napoleon as president brought about only a sham Second Republic, which would turn Empire in little more than a year. Similar dissension among the leaders of uprisings in Germany, Hungary, and Vienna opened the way for the return of autocratic rule. But although Pio Nono had refused to support the radicals in Milan, Ferrara, and Naples in outright war with their sovereigns, the Papal States under his rule, a wide band at the center of the Italian peninsula that included Rome and the ancient university town of Bologna, remained the one portion of Italy, perhaps of the entire Continent, where a popular impetus toward the “radical reform” that Margaret favored remained strong.

Rome was “empty of foreigners” now, Margaret wrote to her
Tribune
readers in early December 1848: “most of the English have fled in affright—the Germans and French are wanted at home—the Czar has recalled many of his younger subjects; he does not like the schooling they get here.”
Giovanni had easily found Margaret a room in a central location, on the top floor of a high corner building overlooking the Piazza Barberini. From her windows she had views of the pope’s palace at the Quirinal and, across the piazza with Bernini’s immense travertine Triton Fountain as its centerpiece (the brawny kneeling sea god held an enormous conch to his lips and blew jets of water high into the air), of the Palazzo Barberini, the imposing residence of one of Rome’s principal families, and beyond that, the dome of St. Peter’s. The palazzo, also of Bernini’s execution, dominated the square with its several stories of arched, leaded glass windows, speaking the message to the outside world of its baroque interior ceiling fresco,
Allegory of Divine Providence and Barberini Power.
At the foot of Margaret’s own modest stucco building at 60 Piazza Barberini, on the opposite corner of the square from the palazzo, was nestled Bernini’s more delicate Fountain of the Bees, another tribute to the Barberini family and a watering spot for passing wagon horses.