Margaret Fuller (46 page)

Rebecca Spring, who had not followed Margaret to George Sand’s house, refusing to enter the home of a woman who had broken her marriage vows, worried that Margaret was falling in love with Mickiewicz, or falling in with his Circle of God zealots. If Rebecca had read the letter Mickiewicz sent Margaret summing up his predictions at the evening meeting, she might have worried even more. Margaret, however, prized the letter above any she had received, as one of “the very few addresses to me to which I could respond.”
She felt
recognized.
And no wonder: Mickiewicz’s words both echoed her highest aspirations and sounded her deepest self-doubt. Margaret was “the only one among women genuinely initiated into the antique world,” Mickiewicz wrote, honoring Margaret’s classical education, and “the only one to whom it has been given to touch that which is decisive in today’s world and to comprehend in advance the world to come.” He continued: “You have acquired the right to know and maintain the rights and obligations, the hopes and exigencies of virginity.” Yet “the first step in your deliverance . . . is to know if it is permitted to you to remain virgin.”
Margaret had told the assembled members of the Circle of God that she had made a “vow never to marry.”
Did that vow require her to “remain virgin”?

To Rebecca Spring’s blunt question—did she love Mickiewicz?—Margaret would answer, “He affected me like music or the richest landscape, my heart beat with joy that he at once felt beauty in me also.”
To Mickiewicz, Margaret was not simply, as Horace Greeley once observed, “an embodied intellect.”
She was body
and
mind. In Paris, Margaret lamented, “How much time had I wasted on others which I might have given” to Mickiewicz!
But it was time to leave. Distraught, she packed her bags. In Rome Margaret would tell Rebecca Spring that “the attraction” she felt for Mickiewicz was “so strong that all the way from Paris”—through Arles to Marseille, stopping to view the working conditions of French silk weavers, by boat to Genoa, suffering “frightful” seasickness on the Mediterranean, and finally through a hurried tour of Pisa, Naples, Capri, and Pompeii to the Springs’ rented rooms on the Corso—“I felt as if I had left my life behind.” Margaret was powerfully tempted to return to Paris and leave the rest of Italy “unseen.”

But she did not. Soon Margaret was leading Eddie Spring on walks in the Villa Borghese gardens, although she remained preoccupied. Once, while she sat nearby, deep in thought, the boy tumbled into the fountain and she had to fish him out. In Paris Margaret’s French tutor had told her that with her naturally expressive voice and gestures, “I speak and act like an Italian.” Margaret held out hope that in Italy “I shall find myself more at home.”
As for missing Mickiewicz, “I do not know but I might love still better tomorrow.”

On April 1, Holy Thursday, six days after arriving in Rome and ten days before she wrote out her rueful plaint to Rebecca Spring, Margaret had met the man she would love still better—or differently—than Adam Mickiewicz. She’d ridden with the Springs by carriage to St. Peter’s Basilica for evening services marking the Last Supper. As always, pilgrims from all over Europe—colorfully dressed in peasant costume, elegantly clad in silks—descended on Rome’s most sacred church to celebrate the rituals of Easter week. The massive, echoing sanctuary was mobbed after a late mass as Margaret found her way into a side chapel for vespers. The daily escalation of pageantry, beginning on Palm Sunday, filled the air with expectation this year more than any in recent memory. Three days later, on April 4, Easter Sunday, the broad piazza in front of the cathedral would fill with a “prostrate multitude”
kneeling to receive the first Easter blessing of the new pope, Pius IX, as he was borne high above their heads in his ornate pontifical chair into the cathedral. “Pio Nono,” Margaret had already learned to call the man who since his election the previous June had swiftly, almost miraculously it seemed, brought liberalizing reforms to Rome, including amnesty for political refugees of the Papal States.

The mood in the city was heartening, and Margaret would soon be caught up in it herself, invited to attend an elegant open-air dinner in celebration of Rome’s “natal day”
two weeks later at the Baths of Titus, where writers just returned from exile stood among the ancient ruins to give speeches lauding Pio Nono as destined to become “a new and nobler founder for another State.” Music wafted on the breeze as the guests, seated under an effigy of “the Roman wolf with her royal nursling,” looked out toward the Colosseum and the arches of the Forum. “It was a new thing here, this popular dinner,” Margaret wrote in her account for the
Tribune,
“and the Romans greeted it in an intoxication of hope and pleasure.” Several days before, Margaret and the Springs had witnessed a torch-bearing procession—“a river of fire” streaming down the Corso from the Piazza del Popolo, past their apartment to the pope’s Quirinal Palace—formed spontaneously in tribute to Pio Nono after he’d issued a circular granting the states under his control, Rome among them, the right to elect representative councils. Pio Nono’s circular provided only a “limited” improvement, in Margaret’s view, compared with a fully representative democracy like the United States, but it was “a great measure for Rome.” Margaret had followed the parade, which advanced “slowly with a perpetual surge-like sound of voices” and torchlight flickering on “animated Italian faces” all the way to the Quirinal, where red and white “Bengal” flares were tossed into the night sky, lighting up the colossal statues of Castor and Pollux with their steeds. She watched as the pope stepped out on his balcony to shouts of “Viva!” from the crowd, which dispersed in an instant, torches extinguished, after receiving Pio Nono’s open-armed blessing. Margaret had “never seen anything finer.” Yet she worried that even Pio Nono was “not great enough”
—how could he compare to Mazzini, who had risked his life and stirred an international movement?—or that the new pope lacked the temporal power to bring about “the liberty of Rome” that its people, with their “perpetual hurra, vivas, rockets,” had now come to expect.
Then what would happen?

At evening vespers on Maundy Thursday, Margaret had become separated from the Springs in a more subdued crowd of the worshipful, her thoughts still dwelling on the music—on the astonishing, transporting experience for a New Englander of a religious service that included no sermon.
There had been simply a blending of male voices, “elaborate, expressive, and sacred,” as her countryman George Hillard, traveling in Rome the following year, would describe vespers at St. Peter’s, “weaving solemn airs” for nearly an hour “into a complicated tissue of harmony, such as tasked both the voice and the mind to unwind.”
At first Margaret hadn’t noticed she was lost, and may have willed herself to become one of the multitude to test her self-sufficiency in the world’s capital.

True to her French tutor’s prediction, the Italian language Margaret had mastered as a reader came more easily to her tongue, and in any case, as she’d written to James Nathan two years earlier at a time when she expected never to see the inside of St. Peter’s, “Rome has grown up in my soul in default of the bodily presence.” Margaret arrived in Rome as much a native as was possible for someone who had never lived there. “We know every nook of St Peters, every statue, every villa, by heart almost,” she’d admonished James Nathan from her desk at the
Tribune
when he contemplated writing about the city; “Rome is an all hacknied theme and by the most accomplished pens.”
For Margaret, who at age twenty-three had read Goethe’s
Italian Journey
(the book that inspired “an earnest desire to live as he did”)
and countless other reminiscences of travel since, whose knowledge of the antique world was that of a “genuine initiate,” as Mickiewicz easily saw, mere travelogue could never satisfy. Rather than “describe outward objects there in detail,” she advised James Nathan, he should find what was “characteristic”: analyze, interpret, and deliver “your own thoughts.” Another sign that Margaret had estimated James Nathan too highly was her expectation that he could readily offer up the knowing, incisive commentary that came instinctively to her. Even after receiving her explicit instructions, he had failed.

But in the crowd of departing worshipers that Thursday night, with her Parisian clothes and American independence, Margaret did not blend in. When she couldn’t find the Springs at their appointed meeting place and drew out her lorgnette to see better, she attracted the attention of a tall, slender, twenty-six-year-old Roman, Giovanni Angelo Ossoli. The young man inquired in Italian—he knew no English or French—was she lost, did she need guidance to her hotel, her rooms? Perhaps she enjoyed answering him in Italian.

Margaret never recorded the meeting herself, other than to say it was “singular, fateful.”
Or maybe she did, but the “little book”
in which she inscribed her account was lost. According to the American publisher George Palmer Putnam, who had taken the same paddle steamer from Livorno to Naples with her several weeks earlier and claimed to have chanced upon the two at St. Peter’s as she searched “bewildered” for the Springs, Margaret dropped Ossoli’s arm as soon as Putnam recognized her and set off on the long walk back across the Tiber River to the Corso alone. But something must have struck him about the pair—the uncharacteristically flustered and fashionably dressed American literary celebrity with the attentive young Roman at her side—despite his assertion that Margaret “certainly did not give her address” to the Italian youth. In a letter to Evert Duyckinck written soon afterward, Putnam speculated suggestively that “within the precincts of the sanctuary” the
Tribune
’s star reporter had “received very singular suggestions from the young men of Rome which may afford instructive notes to a future edition of Woman in the Nineteenth Century.”

Margaret’s own testimony a few years later, reported by her friend and closest confidante in Rome, Emelyn Story, a Bostonian married to the expatriate sculptor William Wetmore Story, did not involve a surprise appearance by George Putnam. Rather, Margaret had kept hold of Ossoli’s arm through a fruitless search of the cathedral’s side chapels for the Springs, a vain foray into the streets surrounding the piazza looking for a carriage to hire, and then a stroll back to the Corso, where the kind young man left her, fully apprised of her address.

Yet the facts of that night remain irretrievable. Margaret wished to obscure them, always preferred to “say nothing” about the details of her early involvement with Giovanni Angelo Ossoli.
Her version of events may have been contrived to mislead. Indeed, George Putnam was certain he’d spotted Margaret and the young Italian on a Wednesday evening, at the singing of the plaintive miserere. Could the two have parted quickly after a chance first encounter, arranging to meet again at Thursday vespers, giving Margaret a night to consider whether she truly wished to be escorted home by the young man with a touch of melancholy about the eyes—if only she could detach herself from her chaperones, the Springs? His evident “simplicity” and “unspoiled nature”
may already have signaled to Margaret that Ossoli was “ignorant of great ideas, ignorant of books,”
a man whom most of her friends would consider “nothing.”
Yet perhaps she saw in him instantly, as well, his “excellent practical sense,” his “native refinement” and “sweet temper,” qualities she would remark on again and again to those same uncomprehending friends several years later. She might have sensed too in those early moments in the cathedral that Ossoli was, like her if from a less learned perspective, “a judicious observer” of the passing scene: he
had
noticed Margaret’s distress and offered help.
If all this had not been apparent in his manner, why else would she have taken the stranger’s arm?

What happened next took place rapidly, for by April 10 Margaret was projecting a new and “better” love to Rebecca Spring and hinting that she might leave her traveling companions to make an independent tour of northern Italy in July and August, rather than follow the Springs into Switzerland and Germany and back to America. “I wish to be free and absolutely true to my nature,” she informed Rebecca, who only grew further alarmed.
Was Margaret planning an impulsive return to Mickiewicz? No, she was considering a return to Rome, rather than Paris, at the end of the summer.

A letter from Mickiewicz supported her choice—he was not yet free to see her under circumstances when “all of me could be with you.” She “needed” more of Italy, the poet advised.
Margaret thought so too, even though, when the young man who was paying such ardent suit stunningly “offered me his hand through life,” she turned down his proposal of marriage. “I loved him,” but the prospect of a permanent “connexion” to the twenty-six-year-old unlettered Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, no matter how sweet-tempered, “seemed so every way unfit.”

Could this momentous exchange—“singular, fateful”—have taken place as early as April 4, Easter Sunday at St. Peter’s, a date the two would later celebrate as an anniversary? Was it their first meeting, or the second, if Putnam is to be believed, or a third, at St. Peter’s on Easter Sunday, that caused Margaret to associate the cathedral and its expansive piazza with “the splendidest part of my life”? “No spot on earth is worthier the sun light,” she exulted; “on none does it fall so fondly.”

But Margaret could still write honestly to her brother Richard in mid-April of her stay so far in Rome, “I have not yet formed any friendship of the mind, such as I had in London and Paris” with Mazzini and Mickiewicz.
Giovanni Ossoli, she had discerned correctly, was “a person of no intellectual culture”—he may never have read a book all the way through.
“Nature has been his book,” Margaret would one day write to defend him, and “of that some lines he has spelled thoroughly.”
But he had never been to school, received only cursory tutoring in liturgical Latin from a parish priest. Despite his air of “refinement,” Giovanni Ossoli was also very much “an obscure young man.”
The fourth and by far the youngest son in a family of faded nobility, a half-orphan who still mourned the mother who died when he was six, he shared with an older married sister the care of their elderly father, with whom he lived in an apartment near the Capitol, a short walk from the Springs’ rooms on the Corso.