Margaret Fuller (55 page)

And “Roman blood has flowed also,” Margaret wrote.
She had spent the night of April 30 in the hospital on Tiber Island, where she had witnessed “the terrible agonies of those dying or who needed amputation . . . their mental pains, and longing for the[ir] loved ones.” Many were university students who “threw themselves into the front of the engagement” with no previous experience of battle.
Margaret moved from one cot to the next in the large receiving hall, assisting in the flickering lamplight under the painted gaze of a flaxen-haired angel that filled an enormous canvas on one wall of the room, a beneficent feminine presence that may have merged with Margaret’s in the unsteady vision of injured and dying men. Mercifully, Giovanni was not among them. Across the river, the city was illuminated with celebratory bonfires and torchlight parades, and Margaret herself felt the thrill of righteous victory. As she walked the quiet streets at dawn on the first of May, she felt these had been “grand and impassioned hours.”

She met Giovanni in the Vatican gardens, and he showed her where the cannon had been concealed amid the flowering shrubs: “we climbed the wall to look out on the rich fields; the
contadini
were coming up with little white flags of peace; figures with black flags were still searching for dead bodies in the gully, and amid the tall canes.” On the wall beside her, Margaret noticed “a long red streak where a man’s life-blood had run down,” a vivid reminder of the risk Giovanni faced. Climbing farther up into a tower “where charts and models had been kept,” she found a few officers sleeping on straw. Margaret had wanted to “look through the windows, each of which presented a view of distinct beauty, a calm Roman landscape, calmest in the world.” Gazing out on Italy’s storied
campagna,
she wondered, “How
can
men feel” the enmity of war when beholding such vistas of pastoral harmony?

Leaving Giovanni’s encampment, Margaret found the city had come to life again. In a later account for the
Tribune,
she reported finding the cardinals’ ornate carriages burning in the streets, wooden confessionals dragged out of the churches, and men making “mock confessions” in the piazzas: “I have sinned, father . . . Well, my son, how much will you pay to the church for absolution?”
On Mazzini’s orders, the mayhem soon stopped, although not before six priests had been massacred.
The “brotherly scope of Socialism” must be proven by maintaining order and showing respect for Rome’s sacred spaces, Mazzini insisted, even if its highest religious leader, Pio Nono, was no longer welcome.
Dio e popolo.

At the gates to the Vatican gardens, Margaret had met the new American chargé d’affaires, Lewis Cass Jr., and found him more sympathetic to the republic than she’d expected. Cass knew Margaret at once: a small woman with auburn hair, dressed in one of her now faded Parisian gowns, she was easily recognized as the sole American journalist remaining in Rome, the one whose
Tribune
letters had stirred widespread support for the republican side. By the end of June, as her accounts of the siege reached American shores, Margaret would be singled out for blame as “the female plenipotentiary who furnishes the
Tribune
with diplomatic correspondence” in an angry letter from New York’s Bishop Hughes to the
New York Courier and Inquirer,
decrying the “reign of terror” instigated by the “revolutionists in Rome.”
Concerned for her safety, Cass urged Margaret to move from her perch on the Piazza Barberini, dangerously near to one of the city’s gates, and into the more sheltered Casa Diez, a hotel near the Spanish Steps, now all but vacant of its usual English and American tourists and not far from Cass’s own lodgings at the Hotel de Russie.
Cass would see to it that an American flag was raised, offering a modicum of protection in the event that the French broke through the city walls. Margaret readily agreed. From the Casa Diez on the Via Gregoriana, she could reach Tiber Island more quickly, and a newly improvised convalescent hospital on the grounds of the pope’s own Quirinal Palace was only blocks away.

Now came a longer wait, as lonely and suspenseful, as full of worry and fear, as the past summer’s wait for Nino’s birth. Would France honor the truce Mazzini had brokered? “The French seem to be amusing us with a pretence of treaties, while waiting for the Austrians to come up,” Margaret wrote to her brother Richard.
She closed her May 27 letter to the
Tribune
with these words: “I am alone in the ghostly silence of a great house, not long since full of gay faces and echoing with gay voices, now deserted by every one but me.”

It was when she thought about Nino that Margaret lost her courage, “became a coward”: “It seemed very wicked to have brought the little tender thing into the midst of cares and perplexities we had not feared in the least for ourselves.” At night she “imagined every thing.”
Perhaps Nino would be killed by troops massing outside the city, as she had heard the Croatian soldiers fighting for Austria in Lombardy had massacred babies; they might set fire to Chiara’s house and Margaret would not be there to save him. Giovanni could be killed in the fighting; Margaret herself might not survive the French assault. What would become of Nino then? Since Nino’s birth, “my heart is bound to earth as never before.”
But she could not leave, she “could not see my little boy.”

Garibaldi’s desperadoes had repelled the Neapolitan army at Frascati, but Louis Napoleon had sent his own reinforcements to Italy rather than wait for Austria to join the offensive, tripling his army and supplying powerful siege artillery and a corps of engineers to dig trenches. In the early morning hours of June 2, violating the truce due to expire in two days, the advance guard of a force of thirty thousand French soldiers reached the outskirts of Rome, seized the strategic hillside villas Pamfili and Orsini, and began to fire at long range on the city.

“What shall I write of Rome in these sad but glorious days?” Margaret began a June 10 letter to the
Tribune.
“Plain facts are the best; for my feelings I could not find fit words.”
She had written out the plain facts in a letter to Emelyn Story immediately following that first “terrible” battle, a “real” one that Margaret witnessed from the top-floor loggia of the Casa Diez. Beginning at four in the morning, the fighting lasted “to the last gleam of light”—sixteen hours. “The musket-fire was almost unintermitted,” punctuated by the “roll of the cannon” from Castel St. Angelo, the fortress near the Vatican gardens where she knew Giovanni and his men must have joined the fray. With a spyglass Margaret could see “the smoke of every discharge, the flash of the bayonets.”
She could see the men. “The Italians fought like lions,” she would write later to Waldo Emerson.

Under clear skies and a full moon, the “cannonade” continued night and day until the morning of June 6. Margaret made her way to the hospital each day, arriving once just as a rocket, fired over the city walls, exploded in the Fate Bene Fratelli’s venerable interior courtyard. The “poor sufferers” in their cots called out in fear: “they did not want to die like mice in a trap.”
But with an army half the size of the French legion, and most of its soldiers untrained, the citizens of the Roman Republic could hardly hope for any other fate.

Mazzini—and Margaret—had known the situation was hopeless, save for the unlikely “help” of heaven. If Louis Napoleon hadn’t supplied his own reinforcements, the Austrians would have been next to lay siege to Rome, joined by King Ferdinand’s Sicilian army at full force. Hope, if there was any, lay in holding out as long as possible, presenting to the eyes of the world a brave defense, and proving the French assault morally indefensible. Margaret’s dispatches to the
Tribune
and her projected book became key elements in a strategy that would outlast the immediate conflict. If the effort “fails this time,” they both believed, it will succeed in the coming “age.”
But the cost to the city and its people would be enormous.

“Rome is being destroyed,” Margaret wrote to Waldo Emerson in mid-June as the French advanced their trenches ever nearer to the city walls: “her glorious oaks; her villas, haunts of sacred beauty, that seemed the possession of the world forever,” all these “must perish, lest a foe should level his musket from their shelter.” Margaret pitied Mazzini as the leader of the republic’s desperate stand: “to me it would be so dreadful to cause all this bloodshed, to dig the graves of such martyrs . . .
I
could not, could not!”

Yet Margaret did, in her own way, help dig the graves by attending the injured and dying in the hospitals each day, learning firsthand “how terrible gunshot-wounds and wound-fever are,” watching a brave university student kiss his arm goodbye after it had been cut off to save his life and reporting the moment to her readers.
At such times Margaret began to “forget the great ideas” that propelled Mazzini, Garibaldi, and the Roman assembly, and instead to “sympathize with the poor mothers” who had nursed these “precious forms, only to see them all lopped and gashed.” But the “beautiful young men” themselves would not forget the ideas that had sealed their fates. One crippled youth looked forward to wearing his uniform, tattered by gunshot, on festival days celebrating the founding of the republic. Another cheered Margaret by clasping her hand “as he saw me crying over the spasms I could not relieve, and faintly cried, ‘Viva l’Italia.’” She watched another soldier “kissing the pieces of bone that were so painfully extracted from his arm, hanging them around his neck.” He would wear them “as the true relics of to-day,” mementos proving he had “done and borne something for his country and the hopes of humanity.”
In her work as a volunteer nurse, Margaret was also accomplishing a great deal in “the way of observation,” as she wrote Waldo Emerson, playing her part in Mazzini’s campaign of moral suasion.
All these anecdotes would be shaped for publication in the
Tribune,
conveying with their pathos the power and righteousness of the Roman Republic’s “great ideas.”

But Margaret’s private anguish, unexpressed in these weeks under siege to any beyond Giovanni and Lewis Cass, to whom she had at last confided her secret, was no use as propaganda, even as it was the true source of her sympathy with “the poor mothers” of the wounded soldiers. Margaret spent hot afternoons waiting in line at the post office, hoping for news of Nino. He “is perfectly well,” Margaret finally reported to Giovanni on one of Rome’s terrible June days. She told Giovanni she had given Nino’s baptismal papers and other important documents to Lewis Cass for safekeeping, specifying that Emelyn Story should care for Nino if they both should die. Margaret had begun to think that Nino would be better off in America, but “if you live and I die,” she wrote to Giovanni, he could take the papers back “as from your wife” and “do as you wish.” She urged, “Be always very devoted to Nino. If you ever love another woman, always think first of him—io prego prego, amore—I beg you, beg you, love.”

She wrote to Waldo in similar desperation, confiding her fear that she might never return to America. Even if she survived the war, “I am caught in such a net of ties here.” Again she almost revealed her secret: “if ever you know of my life here, I think you will only wonder at the constancy with which I have sustained myself.” But she would not. “Meanwhile, love me all you can; let me feel, that, amid the fearful agitations of the world, there are pure hands, with healthful, even pulse, stretched out toward me, if I claim their grasp.”

Had she forgotten his coldness? Or had Margaret understood all along that there was love for her within Waldo’s reserve, the love that had moved him to insist she come home with him? Could she have guessed, as Waldo had written in his private journal years before, his reluctant awareness that he had “underrated” his friend, a woman whose “sentiments are more blended with her life” than were his own, “so the expression of them has greater steadiness & greater clearness”? Could she have known that it was her own image that, Waldo wrote, “rose before me at times into heroical & godlike regions, and I could remember no superior women”? Indeed, to Waldo, who had once unkindly disrupted her Conversations on classical myth, Margaret was best compared to “Ceres, Minerva, Proserpine, and the august ideal forms of the Foreworld.”
He had not told her this, but perhaps somehow she knew.

Margaret’s courage may have failed her “in apprehension,” when she thought of Nino, but she could always act when required. She wrote two lengthy dispatches to the
Tribune,
on June 10 and 21, 1849, denouncing the French, “who pretend to be the advanced guard of civilization” yet “are bombarding Rome” in an “especially barbarous manner”: aiming for the Capitoline Hill and Rome’s “precious monuments,” lobbing explosives at the hospitals marked with black flags. But “wounds and assaults,” Margaret reported, only strengthened the resolve of Rome’s “defenders,” who by then included many more than the armed soldiers under Garibaldi’s command.
She wrote of the brave Trasteverines, women living near contested ground at the Palazzo Spada, who seized bombs as soon as they fell and extinguished their fuses, who gathered cannonballs and passed them to the republican army. But provisions in the city under siege were dwindling, and in the June heat many fell ill with Roman fever.

On June 20, the Casa Diez began to fill with residents fleeing the opposite bank of the Tiber, and in the early morning of the twenty-second, the city’s outermost walls were breached. It was “the fatal hour,” Margaret wrote. From then on, “the slaughter of the Romans became every day more fearful”
as the French fired from the high ground of the Janiculum, where Margaret had once wandered with Giovanni, learning “the unreserve of mingled being.” Now those gardens were “watered with the blood of the brave.”
Garibaldi himself led one last reckless charge up the hillside, only to find his daring band overpowered. Although “the balls and bombs began to fall round me also,” Margaret could no longer “feel much for myself.”
The hospital scenes had become too grievous to describe.