Margaret Fuller (47 page)

“Giovanni,”
as Margaret introduced her “gentle friend”
to the Springs, who suspected no romantic involvement with so young a foreigner, could walk with Margaret the several blocks to the Church of Santa Maria Maddalena near the Piazza Colonna to show her the ornate Ossoli chapel, with its columns and panels of richly colored marbles, its seventeenth-century painting of the Virgin Mary and St. Nicholas, savior of the hungry and the destitute. Although Giovanni was descended from the same prosperous baker who had earned the title of marchese two centuries before—hence the family’s choice of St. Nicholas, known for his miraculous multiplication of wheat—this was not truly
Giovanni’s
sacred altar. This Margaret would never learn, or never reveal that she knew, if she did: Giovanni was not heir to the title marchese Ossoli. That title belonged to his oldest brother, and would pass to the first son of that brother—a nephew. Giovanni’s correct title was Giovanni Angelo
dei Marchesi d’Ossoli,
of the marquises d’Ossoli, a mere member of the family. Still, he was honest about his prospects. The majestic Palazzo Ossoli in the Piazza Quercia had been sold a century earlier, and the Roman law of primogeniture meant he would gain little of what remained of the family fortune at his father’s death. Giovanni had not made up his mind whether to enter papal service, as his older brothers had. His future in Rome was as uncertain as Margaret’s.

Yet he affected her powerfully. When Margaret turned down his proposal—“never dream[ing] I should take it”
—and, both eager and sorrowing, left Rome for Venice with the Springs, soon to part from them as well, Giovanni Ossoli told her he would wait. She would change her mind and come back to him.

Margaret wrote openly to Mickiewicz for advice, but to no one else. “Do not be too hasty about leaving places,” he counseled by return mail. “Prolong your good moments. Do not leave lightly those who would like to remain near you. This is in reference to the little Italian you met in the Church.”
Even Mickiewicz shared the prejudice Margaret anticipated in other friends, terming Ossoli “the little Italian.” But Poland’s great national poet had taken up with his children’s governess. Was he encouraging an extramarital involvement with Ossoli that he saw—that Margaret might see—as similar: a powerful literary personage loving and loved by a younger besotted “nothing”? Mickiewicz urged Margaret to come back to Paris, but first “try to bring away from Italy what you will be able to take of it in joy and in health.”
Could Mickiewicz have hoped to welcome a more “thoroughly” experienced Margaret at their next meeting, when he might be free to offer “all of me” in return?

She wrote to family and friends in America, asking Horace Greeley for further advances on columns, requesting loans from her brother Richard, her mother, even Waldo Emerson, so that she could stay on in Europe without the support of the Springs. “A single year is so entirely inadequate to see all which I wish to see,” she wrote to Mary Rotch of Rhode Island, a wealthy friend to Waldo Emerson and the late Reverend Channing, and “I find myself better here.”
She explained to them all, however, that she had little time to write letters, that they must follow her progress now through her
Tribune
columns. The dispatches recorded a vital outward life: “I take interest in the state of the people,” she wrote to William Channing. “I see the future dawning.” She predicted it would be “in important aspects Fourier’s future”—egalitarian, socialist.

To William she confided a little more: “Art is not important to me now.” She would no longer write to him “of the famous people I see, of magnificent shows and places. All these things are only to me an illuminated margin on the text of my inward life”—an inward life she would not describe, but that now took precedence. She needed “a kind of springtime to renovate my faculties,” she wrote to Mary Rotch.
She would find it in Rome, in the fall.

So far as can be known, Margaret did not communicate with Giovanni Ossoli during the summer of 1847 as she traveled from Venice, where she spent an evening at Florian’s on the Piazza San Marco after parting tearfully with the Springs, to Florence (too “busy and intellectual,” Margaret complained, “more in its spirit like Boston, than like an Italian city”),
and finally to Milan, where she fell in with “a circle of the aspiring youth,”
disciples of Mazzini. In letters to Marcus Spring and anyone she hoped might aid her materially, Margaret emphasized the difficulties of solo travel. She had become ill in Brescia after making a journey “very profitable to the mind” through Vicenza, Verona, Mantua, and Lago di Garda. Though she had lived alone “in our own country,” it had been a frightening experience to fall sick “here where there is no one on whom I can call for aid in any case.”
Once recovered, she had “nearly killed myself finishing a letter for the Tribune” in hopes of meriting another advance from Greeley.
Traveling briefly into Switzerland, she was overcharged by her guide, then pestered by a well-meaning traveler who assumed she wanted company when all she wished for was a “quiet room . . . in a place where I was unknown, and where there was nothing, except the mountains to distract my attention.”

But writing to her mother, who promised to send one hundred dollars once she’d received the sum from brother Eugene in repayment of a loan, Margaret stressed the “advantage I derive from being alone”: “if I feel the need of it, I can stop,” and she had in fact made a detour to visit the Armenian monastery on an island near Venice frequented by Byron.
In Tuscany she paused to watch women braiding one another’s hair; in Assisi she mingled with a crowd of curious schoolgirls, inquired about their studies (reading, writing, and sewing), and chatted in Italian with a woman who called down to her from an upstairs window. “Who can ever be alone for a moment in Italy?” she asked her
Tribune
readers.
To Richard, who finally extracted the hundred dollars from Eugene, Margaret wrote that since leaving the Springs, “I passed happier and more thoughtful hours than at all before in Europe.”

The truth may have been somewhere in the middle—euphoric moments when she felt happy to be “alone with glorious Italy,”
mixed with anxious ones and even times when, after being away for so long, Margaret felt “a yearning for the loved familiar faces” and bravely vowed not to “yield to it.”
To one of those longed-for familiars, Cary Sturgis, Margaret confessed what she would never tell the Springs—she had begun to feel “a wicked irritation against them for being the persons who took me away from France.” After floating as the sole passenger on a gondola that first week in Venice on her own, “I seemed to find myself again.”
At last, “I begin to be in Italy”; she wished to “drink deep of this cup.”

Without the Springs in tow, Margaret could mingle freely with the community of expatriates and returning exiles whose fervor for the cause of independence she instinctively shared and her travels had affirmed: “In this Europe how much suffocated life!”
Particularly in Italy, Margaret believed, “the signs have improved so much since I came.” She felt “most fortunate to be here at this time,” she wrote to Richard.
In Milan she cultivated a friendship with the marchioness Costanza Arconati Visconti, whom she had met first at the open-air dinner in Rome, and again in Florence for a celebration of Grand Duke Leopold’s relaxation of press censorship in Austrian-controlled Tuscany. But in Milan Margaret saw Arconati Visconti in her private residence, newly established after a twenty-five-year exile in Belgium and France, as well as at the marchioness’s villa on Lake Como, where Margaret spent two weeks in August. Here she could scrutinize this “specimen of the really highbred lady,” to Margaret a new breed entirely. Most striking was the way her hostess managed, “without any physical beauty,” to employ “the grace and harmony of her manners [to] produce all the impression of beauty.” An “intimate with many of the first men” of Italy—Mazzini, and the great poet Alessandro Manzoni, to whom Margaret gained an introduction in Milan—Costanza Arconati Visconti possessed a mind that was “strong clear, precise and much cultivated by intercourse both with books and men.”

Although the vacation at Bellagio on Lake Como brought Margaret “into contact with . . . high society, duchesses, marquises and the like,” as she wrote to Cary Sturgis, and the talk was often “of spheres so unlike mine,” Margaret was reminded of nothing so much as the dreams she and Cary had once entertained of an ideal riverside community in Newburyport: “these people have charming villas and gardens on the lake, adorned with fine works of art; they go to see one another in boats; you can be all the time in a boat if you like.”
Margaret would later decide that there were few “women in Europe to compare with those of America”; she managed to establish “real intimacy” with only three, Arconati Visconti among them.
But at Bellagio, during that summer in which “I seemed to find myself again,” Margaret felt welcomed into an elite company of like-minded women. Arconati Visconti’s friendship circle in exile had included Margaret’s heroine Bettine von Arnim, and she introduced Margaret now to the “fair and brilliant”
Polish countess Radzivill, another “one of the emancipated,” Margaret judged. The countess “
envies me,
” Margaret marveled, for being “so free, so serene, so attractive, so self-possessed!”
In her travels Margaret had unknowingly acquired the same poise she admired in the marchioness Arconati Visconti: the ability to project “without any physical beauty . . . all the impression of beauty.” Certainly Giovanni Ossoli thought so—along with the “pretty girls of Bellagio,” daughters of the Italian gentry, who “with their coral necklaces, all brought flowers to ‘the American Countess’ and ‘hoped she would be as happy as she deserved.’” Their “cautious wish” seemed, for the moment, within her grasp.

If Margaret lost touch with Ossoli—she could not have written to his family residence in Rome without arousing suspicion of an attachment—she traveled with three powerful male epistolary companions: Mickiewicz, Mazzini, and Waldo Emerson. Waldo’s periodic letters to “our queen of discourse,” as he addressed Margaret in sympathy with her struggles in the French language, brought news of a world that must have seemed impossibly distant. Over the winter, Henry Thoreau had read an “account of his housekeeping at Walden” to a receptive audience at the Concord Lyceum, the lecture billed as “Subject—History of Himself.” But despite Waldo’s approval of the manuscript’s “witty wisdom,” the young memoirist was having trouble finding a publisher. A reception at Elizabeth Peabody’s Boston bookroom following Waldo’s own winter lecture, “Eloquence,” had brought out the old Conversations crowd: Anna Ward, Sarah Clarke, Cary Sturgis and her two sisters, Ellen and Anna Hooper, along with William Henry Channing and Theodore Parker. Waldo joked that the gathering seemed “an Egyptian party; on this side of Styx too!” Without Margaret, the affair took on a “melancholy absurdity,” and soon the guests “glided out like so many ghosts.” Cary had teased Waldo that even his lecture “was old!!”

How could her one-time mentor in the “newness”—a man just forty-three years old—feel so ancient, mummified? Now Margaret had other heroes to compare him to, men who had given up home and country for a cause—to put an end to these “everlasting struggles” to bring freedom to “those who will come after us,” as Mazzini had written to her before she left Paris.

Waldo wrote Margaret that he’d been invited to deliver a series of lectures in England; he viewed the prospect with alarm, as “one to whom almost every social influence [is] excessive & hurtful.” He would rather they “send me into the mountains for protection,” he admitted.
Waldo had toured Europe the year after his first wife’s death and returned to New England convinced that there was little to be learned from “these millennial cities”—London, Paris, Rome—with “their immense accumulations of human works,” so dizzying to the beholder that “nothing but necessity & geometry” remained in retrospect.
Yet once he learned that Margaret planned to stay on in Italy, he applauded her decision, understanding her quite different need to “run out of the coop of our bigoted societies . . . and find some members of your own expansive fellowship.”
Waldo longed to know, “O Sappho, Sappho, friend of mine”—identifying Margaret with the Greek love-poet at one time exiled in Italy—“the best of your Roman experiences,” wishing he could somehow inhabit her mind, guessing that even the “faithfullest paragraph of your journal” would not reveal them.

Waldo did not tell Margaret that he had devoted many spare hours during the past year to refining a “rugged”
translation he’d made years before of Dante’s
Vita Nuova
(
New Life
), the medieval Italian poet’s series of lyrics exploring his transfiguring love for the unreachable Beatrice—an account “almost unique in the literature of sentiment,” in Waldo’s opinion. Margaret had once held the text, among the earliest renderings of the chaste passions of courtly love, sacred herself. Nor did Waldo reveal to Margaret that he privately considered her own journal record that she’d once shown him of just “two of her days,” perhaps covering the long-ago negotiations over the “covenant” of five, so much the equal in pitch and ardency of Dante’s work that he’d labeled the passage “Nuovissima Vita”—
newest
life.
No wonder Waldo longed to read whatever as-yet-unwritten record of the heart Margaret might keep in Rome; possibly he looked forward to further manifestations of her “deep-founded mental connection” with “the Polander,”
as he referred to Mickiewicz, the “full and healthy human being” with “intellect and passions in due proportion” whom Margaret had pointedly described in her letter from Paris.

Yet Margaret knew anyway that Waldo was still absorbed imaginatively, sentimentally, with his own Beatrice—Cary Sturgis—by way of a poem in his recent collection, “Give All to Love”:

Obey thy heart;

Friends, kindred, days,

Estate, good-fame,

Plans, credit, and the Muse,—