Margaret Fuller (51 page)

In late March of 1848, she traveled, probably with Giovanni, to the coast at Ostia. “A million birds sang,” Margaret wrote on April 1 in a dispatch for the
Tribune,
“the surf rushed in on a fair shore . . . the sea breezes burnt my face, but revived my heart; I felt the calm of thought, the sublime hopes of the Future, Nature, Man.”
It was the first column she had completed since late January. “Now this long dark dream—to me the most idle and most suffering season of my life—seems past,” she wrote. “Nature seems in sympathy with the great events that are transpiring; with the emotions which are swelling the hearts of men.”
Returning to Rome, she learned the astonishing “official” news that, with the capitulation of the Hapsburg viceroy at Verona on March 22, all of Italy had become “free, independent, and One.” She hoped this would “prove no April foolery, no premature news.”

But of course it was. As quickly as revolution had forced concessions and abdications throughout Europe, reaction set in. Margaret had seen the Austrian coat of arms “dragged through the streets of Rome” and burned in the Piazza del Popolo to cries of “
Miracolo, Providenza!
”
She had read accounts of the hero’s welcome Mickiewicz received in Florence when he arrived with his regiment—“O, Dante of Poland!”—and she had given her
Tribune
readers his full address to the cheering crowds.
She learned of Mazzini’s triumphal return to Milan in April; until this month the target of a death warrant, this “most beauteous man,” in Margaret’s estimation, was now greeted as his country’s true leader.
But with Mickiewicz no longer in Rome, her spirits flagged. At Easter on April 22, in contrast to last year’s blissful discoveries at St. Peter’s, the “gorgeous shows” were “fatiguing beyond any thing I ever experienced,” the “
benedicti
leave me unblest.”
And on April 29, the holy man who had celebrated his first Easter mass as pope only a year earlier turned traitor to the cause of Italian unification, withdrawing his support from the war against Austrian rule, taking the course opposite to the one Mazzini had urged in his open letter of six months before. Pressured by Catholic monarchies on the run in France, Austria, and Spain to retreat from civil leadership, Pio Nono now instructed the people of Italy to “abide in close attachment to their respective sovereigns.”
Angry mobs filled the Corso in front of Margaret’s apartment on the morning of the pope’s announcement, and the Civic Guard took control of the gates to the city. Demonstrations lasted well into May. “Italy was so happy,” Margaret grieved along with the citizens of Rome, in “loving” this “one man high placed” who seemed willing to serve the people rather than distant, corrupt, and exploitive monarchs. “But it is all over.”
In mid-May, the ousted Ferdinand II, king of the Two Sicilies, regained Naples in a coup, and an Austrian counteroffensive led by the brilliant military strategist Count Joseph Radetzky began to systematically undo the work of the “radicals” in the north.

By now Margaret had made plans to spend the remaining months of her pregnancy in L’Aquila, a remote “bird’s-nest village of the Middle Ages”
in the Abruzzi Mountains, seventy miles northeast of Rome, where she would deliver the baby in secret. Although most foreign tourists avoided Rome in the summer for fear of contracting Roman fever—malaria—Margaret’s body already revealed enough of her condition that she had hidden from a courier sent by Costanza Arconati Visconti to deliver a letter, and the American novelist Caroline Kirkland was expected to arrive soon and seek out Margaret. She could not settle in any of the closer spa towns—Ostia, Frascati, Tivoli—frequented by American tourists or wealthy Italians. And she would have to live alone. Giovanni must remain in the city so as not to arouse the suspicions of his family and to serve with his regiment; after the pope’s defection, the Civic Guard had increasingly operated under its own leadership, readying to fight under the banner of a republic, if it was raised.

Margaret would not tell the name of the town—only “I am going into the country,” or “into the mountains,” as she wrote to her brother Richard, Waldo, and Costanza Arconati Visconti.
At the urging of Mickiewicz, she allowed a young American artist with an atelier in Rome, Thomas Hicks, to paint her portrait before they both left the city at the end of May—Margaret for her “mountain solitude,”
Hicks to meet Waldo Emerson in London, bearing gifts of engravings for Margaret’s friends and family and “a piece of the porphyry pavement of the Pantheon” for Waldo, which Margaret had acquired “by bribe” from workers mending the tiles.
Hicks was the “only artist” Margaret had met in Europe as “deeply penetrated by the idea of social reform” as she, perhaps the result of his own poverty. Hicks’s “struggles and privations” equaled Margaret’s; he’d been similarly overlooked by rich relatives and was getting by on rare commissions.
He was probably the man Margaret had in mind when she wrote to her former pupil Jane Tuckerman, “The artists’ life is not what you fancy; poor, sordid, unsocially social, saving baiocchis [pennies] and planning orders.”
Hicks knew her secret too. In the portrait, Hicks seated Margaret fancifully on a red velvet bench in a Venetian portico, pale but full-bodied, swelling with her unborn child. A portrait bust of Eros on a pillar hovers in the background, just as the lyrical Erato had over her bed. The young socialist, enamored of Italian sacred art, had painted Margaret as an expectant, careworn Madonna, with Love as her god.

There were already rumors, perhaps sparked by the voluble Mickiewicz, which Margaret did her best to quash. When she sent their mutual friend Costanza Arconati Visconti a letter like the one to Jane Tuckerman, or to the elderly Mary Rotch, a friend since her days of teaching in Rhode Island—“You must always love me whatever I do”
—the Italian marchioness responded, to Margaret’s alarm, with forthright questions: “What mystery lies in the last lines? Yes, I am faithful and capable of sympathy . . . but just what are you talking about?” Someone had told her “that you have had a lover in Rome, a member of the Civic Guard. I have not wanted to believe it, but your mysterious words arouse my doubts.”

Margaret made the best case she could without divulging the truth, outlining her plans to “sit in my obscure corner, and watch the progress of events.” She claimed it was “the position that pleases me best, and, I believe, the most favorable one.” Margaret was “beginning to set down some of my impressions” of recent events, and “everything confirms me in my radicalism.” She hoped that “going into the mountains” to find “pure, strengthening air, and tranquillity for so many days” would “allow me to do something”: to write her book.
Margaret could only hope Costanza would accept her story.

She had to answer Waldo as well. Margaret’s letters describing her “debility and pain”
had prompted his invitation to “come live with me at Concord!” where he would “coax” her “into Mrs Brown’s little house opposite to my gate.”
Waldo himself was answering to a despondent and increasingly invalid Lidian, who complained from Concord that he never wrote about his feelings for her. Waldo pleaded as an excuse “a poverty of nature”: “the trick of solitariness never never can leave me.” Besides, “am I not, O best Lidian, a most foolish affectionate goodman & papa, with a weak side toward apples & sugar and all domesticities, when I am once in Concord? Answer me that.”
But he had little difficulty expressing urgent concern for Margaret. At the end of April he’d written again to Margaret in Rome, “You are imprudent to stay there any longer. Can you not safely take the first steamer to Marseilles, come to Paris, & go home with me”?
Waldo accepted her excuse that she was occupied with Mickiewicz, but on the last night of his stay in Paris—where, a week after his arrival, “there was a revolution defeated, which came within an ace of succeeding”
—he implored her a third time to “come to London immediately & sail home with me!” Margaret had learned quite enough of “the dwellers of the land of
si,
” he thought, and must return to America to “be well & strong.”

“I have much to do and learn in Europe yet,” Margaret answered Waldo in a letter more emphatic than the one she’d written to Costanza. “I am deeply interested in this public drama, and wish to see it
played out.
Methinks I have
my part
therein, either as actor or historian.” Margaret could only “marvel” at Waldo’s “readiness to close the book of European society” just now. Among her old friends, there were “few indeed” she wished to see, and although “the simplest and most retired life would now please me,” she “would not like to be confined to it” in Concord, “in case I grew weary, and now and then craved variety, for exhilaration.” She must have mystified Waldo by then explaining her plan to move to the country outside Rome—“I want some scenes of natural beauty.” And, still more enigmatic: “imperfect as love is, I want human beings to love, as I suffocate without.” How could Waldo not wonder what she meant? Hadn’t Margaret said she was alone? Wouldn’t leaving Rome make her lonelier still? Margaret ended by chastising Waldo for missing the opening days of the Paris assembly in late April, the first experiment in direct universal suffrage in France. “There were elements worth scanning,” she scolded.
Having recovered enough to plan out her own defensive maneuvers, Margaret may have had Mazzini’s critical words on Waldo Emerson in mind: “Contemplation! no . . . Life is a march and a battle.”

But as Thomas Hicks completed her portrait, Margaret wrote a letter for him to convey to her family in America if she did not survive the summer. Margaret asked that he “say to those I leave behind that I was willing to die” and that “I have wished to be natural and true.” But “the world was not in harmony with me—nothing came right for me.” She was not without hope for a better life, but Margaret placed her faith in “the spirit that governs the Universe” to “reserve for me a sphere” in that supersensuous ether of the afterworld “where I can develope more freely, and be happier.” She had little expectation that her “forces” would sustain her long enough to find that “better path” on earth.

“Fortune favors the brave,” Margaret had written jauntily just three days before setting down her last wishes for Thomas Hicks. This time she was addressing a new American friend she’d met in Rome, Elizabeth De Windt Cranch, wife of the artist Christopher Pearse Cranch, sometime member of the Transcendentalist circle in Boston; the Cranches were wealthy New Englanders making the grand tour. Elizabeth was frail, pregnant with her second child, and she’d just left Rome with her husband and one-year-old son for Sorrento, where oranges were said to be as big as New England pumpkins, in search of a more healthful location for the birth at a safe distance from Rome’s factional strife. Margaret could not tell her new friend that she would be leaving Rome soon for the same reason. Instead she expressed hope that Elizabeth might have a daughter, “a girl that comes to help on the 19th century,” she wrote, playing on the title of her own book—the one whose message Mickiewicz had exhorted her to live by. Margaret rejoiced that Elizabeth would have “two female friends,” American traveling companions, “near when you are ill”—when labor began.

Margaret tried to be brave during the early weeks of summer in L’Aquila, but stiff winds blew up from the valleys below, and a hot sun blazed for forty days straight, even as snow lingered in the highest mountain passes. Not only did Margaret have no female friends near to help her, but also Giovanni could not think of making the three-day journey to visit her for at least a month. The ancient stone hill town with its surrounding pastureland and terraced vineyards lay just beyond the boundaries of the Papal States, and mail arrived unpredictably; weeks passed without the delivery of newspapers or Giovanni’s bulletins of information gathered from cafés and comrades in the Civic Guard. Margaret wrote to Costanza Arconati Visconti that in her “lonely mountain home” she had begun “writing the narrative of my European experience,” devoting a “great part” of each day to her book. Perhaps she would finish in three months’ time: “It grows upon me.”

In truth, as her child grew inside her, perhaps kicking and turning, Margaret was hardly sleeping, and she suffered from recurring headaches that twice required bloodlettings for relief. Before leaving Rome she had received a letter from Mickiewicz urging her not to be “frightened at a very natural, very common ailment”—her pregnancy. “You exaggerate it in an extravagant manner,” he admonished her. If Margaret did not “have the courage to be happy about it,” she must at least “accept the cross with courage.”
But Margaret’s situation, even her “ailment,” was not at all natural or common for a woman of thirty-eight. “All life that has been or could be natural to me, is invariably denied,” she would later write to Cary Sturgis Tappan.
First she had feared she might never experience love, never bear a child. Now she must endure the anxious wait for labor, with its many risks, in secret, far from friends and family who knew nothing of her plight, and a three-day journey from the baby’s father, with whom she was falling more deeply in love.

She felt “lonely, imprisoned, too unhappy,” Margaret wrote to Giovanni: “mi sento tutta sola, imprigionata, troppo infelice
.
”
Her jaw and teeth ached, but could she trust a midwife’s assurance that this too was natural, common? “According to these women, one must think that this condition is really a martyrdom,” Margaret wrote to her young lover, a boy almost, who had never tended a baby, whose mother had died when he was six, leaving him, her youngest child, unfamiliar with the “ailment” of a woman’s pregnancy.
Margaret cried after receiving letters from her family begging her to come home, knowing that she could provide only vague descriptions of her whereabouts, pretend to enjoy “hid[ing] thus in Italy,” like the “great Goethe.”
She experienced “fits of deep longing to see persons and objects in America” and once again felt “
I
have no ‘home,’ no peaceful room to which I can return and repose in the love of my kindred from the friction of care and the world.”
Her money worries were greater than ever, as promised bank drafts from both her brother Richard and Horace Greeley failed to arrive.