Margaret Fuller (57 page)

How far was Margaret from that unwed girl? Was there ever a risk that Nino might be taken from her as a foundling? Margaret was an American citizen, and a prominent one. But Nino was born within the borders of the Papal States, and the country’s strict laws on children of unwed mothers, surely known to Giovanni, may have been one reason Margaret and Giovanni almost certainly married in secret outside Rome sometime during Margaret’s pregnancy. They knew, as well, that travel with Nino between the Italian states or abroad would require papers that showed all three to be a family. Perhaps the couple found an opportunity to marry in the early spring of 1848, as Margaret’s depression and morning sickness abated and she visited the seaside town of Ostia, when revolutions were sweeping Europe and for a brief few days it had seemed as if all of Italy had become “free, independent, one.”
Possibly Giovanni arranged a private ceremony in Rieti, where Nino’s baptismal record certified his birth “from the married Giovanni Angelo of Marquis Ossoli from Rome and Margarita Fuller heterodox from America.”
The term “heterodox” referred to her religion: not Catholic.

Margaret’s love for Giovanni had intensified in the year of living at risk in Rome, the year they had been parents of “Angelo Eugenio Filippo,” as Nino’s name was entered in the baptismal records of the ancient cathedral at Rieti. But her views on marriage remained as “heterodox” as they had been when she debated the institution with Waldo Emerson in Concord years before—not just not-Catholic, but counter to any tradition. In the letters she sent from Rieti to her mother and a few close friends, letters that “half killed me to write” as she finally disclosed facts she had concealed for nearly two years, Margaret didn’t use the word “marriage,” and she never gave details of a ceremony, perhaps wishing to avoid drawing attention to Nino’s premarital conception.
To her mother she explained circuitously that “your eldest child might long ago have been addressed by another name than yours, and has a little son a year old.” She apologized for the “pang” Margarett Crane would certainly suffer in learning this “piece of intelligence” so long after the fact. But she told her mother that if it had not become “necessary, on account of the child, for us to live publicly and permanently together,” she would have preferred to keep the secret longer—perhaps, her words suggested, not to have married at all.

Writing to William Channing, Margaret simply launched in: “I am a mother now.” As for the “tie” with her child’s father, whom she did not name at first, their love existed independent of the “corrupt social contract” she had entered into for their son’s sake, because “children involve too deeply.” Margaret was frank. She and Giovanni—“my gentle friend, ignorant of great ideas, ignorant of books,” but “never failing” in “pure sentiment”—were not ideally matched: “If earthly union be meant for the beginning of one permanent and full we ought not to be united.” Margaret was older, nearly forty, and she no longer expected to find a lifelong soul mate; nor did she wish to bind the younger Giovanni to her if he should meet another woman he loved better. These principles did not diminish their love; they intensified it. But living by them “in the midst of a false world,” one that prized legal and ecclesiastical bonds over relations freely chosen, like hers with Giovanni, came “easier to those” without children.

“Yet I shall never regret the step which has given me the experience of a mother,” Margaret wrote to William; “my heart was too suffocated without a child of my own.” She had discovered “I am not strong as we thought”—not strong enough to continue living as a solitary sibyl who prophesied a better day for women and waited stoically for its advent.
Not strong enough to live openly with her lover and child in a foreign land without marriage license or birth certificate. Little wonder that when Margaret’s startling news reached Sarah Clarke, she thought her old friend seemed “more afraid of being thought to have submitted to the ceremony of marriage than to have omitted it.”

Margaret had long argued that marriage should be “only an experience,” not a defining vocation for women. What mattered was
experience.
“I have lived in a much more full and true way than was possible in our country,” she wrote to William Channing of her more than two years in Italy; “each day has been so rich in joys and pains, actions and sufferings, to say nothing of themes of observation”—material for her book.
Despite the restrictive laws on women and children in the Papal States, Margaret had experienced more freedom of opportunity, both professionally and personally, in Rome than in New England or New York. And now she had a family, a child whose “little heart clings to mine”
and a husband whose companionship, Margaret wrote to her sister, Ellen, is “an inestimable blessing.” Giovanni had remained loyal when she was “more sick, desponding and unreasonable in many ways than I ever was before,” and he had cheered and sustained her with “the sacred love, the love passing that of women.”
“In him,” Margaret wrote to her mother, “I have found a home.”

And yet they had no home. Giovanni and Margaret Ossoli, as they were now to be known, the marchese and marchesa d’Ossoli, as Margaret occasionally ventured to introduce her husband and herself, had “moored”
themselves temporarily in Florence, in a small apartment at one corner of a broad piazza looking toward the ornate marble façade of the Church of Santa Maria Novella, and settled into a daily routine of walks in the
cascine
on the banks of the Arno, visits to museums, and quiet hours devoted to writing while the baby napped. Often they brought Nino out with them, but when they didn’t, “What a difference it makes to come home to a child,” Margaret exclaimed to Emelyn Story; “how it fills up the gaps of life.”
From his bed Nino could reach up to draw the heavy curtains and let in the sunlight when he woke in the morning or after his nap, and he bobbed and swayed by the window to the rhythms of the Austrian drum corps training in the piazza below. He played contentedly on the floor while Margaret and Giovanni dressed for the day and enjoyed “kicking, throwing the water about” in his bath. At fifteen months, Nino was beginning to speak in his parents’ two languages. Kissing and then patting Margaret’s cheeks, he would say “poor,” perhaps mimicking his mother’s solicitous gestures when he’d been ill; standing up and stretching to his full height, he called out “
bravo.
”

Nino was growing fat and was “not handsome,” according to an American friend, George Curtis, an aspiring literary journalist who paid the family a visit that fall en route to Egypt and Syria.
But could Margaret, once a plump and homely child, mind that about him? She had feared so recently that her son might waste away. But now “I feel so refreshed by his young life,” Margaret wrote to Cary Sturgis Tappan of the boy she considered “very gay impetuous, ardent”—a word she had often used to describe herself—and a “sweet tempered child.” Nino’s cheerful nature, she believed, had been enhanced “by taking the milk of these robust women.” And “Ossoli,” as Margaret referred to her husband in letters, “diffuses such a peace and sweetness over every day.”
George Curtis observed this as well. To him, Giovanni seemed “a dark-haired, quiet, modest man” with “no appearance of smartness”; Curtis guessed that Margaret’s husband would have trouble learning English. But he “clings to Margaret with quite a touching confidence & affection.” As for Margaret, the “Marchesa Ossoli herself”: she “seems as always.” Curtis noted “a vein of intense enthusiasm threading with fire her talk about Rome, which was fine & wonderful at the same time.” Like so many before him on both sides of the Atlantic, George Curtis had been stimulated by Margaret’s conversational powers into a plethora of metaphor; her “heart is now too much rooted in Rome,” Curtis supposed, “ever to bear a long, never a life-long separation.”

To Margaret, Florence was “so cheerful and busy after ruined Rome” that she hoped she and Giovanni might manage to “forget the disasters of the day for awhile.”
But the vivid images of dead and dying Romans in the hospital and on the battlefield, of blasted city walls, ravaged villas, and gardens “watered in blood,” would never leave their imagination, nor would the memory fade of those “glorious days that expand the heart, uplift the whole nature,” that they had lived through before the siege.
The Austrian presence in Florence was a continual reminder of the failed republic, posing an almost unbearable contradiction to Margaret’s firm belief, as she wrote in a November dispatch to the
Tribune,
that “the world can no longer stand without” the “vast changes in modes of government, education and daily life” that
must
be brought about by “what is called Socialism.”
There was no other “comfort, no solution for the problems of the times.”
In Florence, Margaret took solace in viewing the figure of Dante painted on an interior wall of the Duomo, clad in red cloak and standing with book in hand just outside the gates of the city from which he had been banished, gesturing toward the lurid and divine landscapes of his epic poem. For him, both “Heaven and Hell are in the near view.”
It was the same for Margaret and Giovanni; the couple could not stay long in such painful proximity to terrifying memories, “blighted” hopes.

Giovanni had suffered even greater disappointments than Margaret—“it has ploughed great furrows into his life.”
He had lost home, employment, and now, it seemed, his small inheritance at the whim of an “angry” older brother who’d been forced to hide out in a cellar while republican soldiers occupied his house during the siege.
Margaret accepted a job tutoring the daughter of the American businessman turned sculptor Joseph Mozier, with whom she had stayed on her solo tour of northern Italy three years before, and she expected, with Giovanni’s savings and the remainder of her
Tribune
payments, to “eke out bread and salt and coffee till April.”
But perhaps that was long enough: “I should not be sorry to leave Italy till she has strength to rise again.”
Margaret and Giovanni, who frequently wore
his dark brown, red-trimmed Civic Guard jacket at home as if to keep the cause alive, both looked forward to a successful second uprising—“a new revolution”
—in perhaps two or three years’ time: the vengeful despotism of “the restored authorities” had been so extreme, “it cannot be otherwise.”
Only then would they “find really a home in Italy.”
The plan of settling for several years in America, where Margaret could publish her book more profitably if on hand to make the arrangements, began to solidify in both their minds.

Christmas in Florence was different from the last in Rieti, when Margaret and the infant Nino had huddled together in the cold mountain town, listening to church bells, missing Giovanni. This winter’s cold was far worse: in Rome two feet of snow had fallen, and in Florence snow covered the piazzas, water froze overnight in the washbasins.
On Christmas morning several packages arrived, perhaps gifts from the wealthy Mozier, all of them containing large toys—a bird, a horse, and a cat—that sent Nino into a “kind of fearful rapture,” with “legs and arms, extended, fingers and toes quivering, mouth made up to a little round O, eyes dilated.” Witnessing Nino’s “pure delight” in the gifts made Margaret regret “any money I ever spent on myself or in little presents for grown people, hardened sinners.” But Nino’s favorite toy was one that Margaret had drawn in a lottery at a party in the home of another expatriate sculptor, Horatio Greenough, where a few American families with children had gathered to celebrate the holiday. This one was a tiger with a small child asleep on its neck. Nino whispered over the pair, “seeming to contrive stories,” as the guardian tiger stood frozen in a watchful stance, “stretching up to look at the child.”

Was
Margaret “as always”? She tried hard to persuade her friends that this was so, that she had not been simply “running about” in “blind alleys”
as she followed her “revolutionary spirit” into an actual revolution and an unlikely marriage. She was acting out her nature. “The heart of Margaret you know,” she had written to Costanza Arconati Visconti, expressing hope that the surprising news of husband and child would not cause her friend to “feel estranged”—“it is always the same.”
Margaret wished her family and friends to understand “I have acted not inconsistently with myself,”
that “whatever I have done has been in a good spirit and not contrary to
my
ideas of right.”

She needn’t have worried about Costanza, who had heard the rumor of Margaret’s romance with a soldier in the Civic Guard more than a year before; the marriage and perhaps Giovanni’s tinge of nobility answered her concerns, and she wrote swiftly to assure Margaret of her continued affection. Costanza and her ten-year-old son had taken up residence in a villa outside Florence this year; proximity and shared motherhood drew the two women into an even closer friendship. But Margaret’s report to Costanza that she had been received with “no questions” by the English-speaking residents of the city on her arrival “with the unexpected accessories of husband and child” gave only one side of the story.

Margaret had detected an “increased warmth of interest” from “the little American society of Florence,” which she might have read as prurient.
The poets Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, whom Margaret had long hoped to meet, had settled in Florence three years before, mingling socially with the cluster of American expatriate artists settled there, and Elizabeth Browning’s account of Margaret’s sudden appearance in the city—“retiring from the Roman field with a husband & child above a year old!”—gave a more accurate version of the Americans’ stunned reaction to the revelation of an “underplot.” No one had “even suspected a word,” Elizabeth Browning wrote to her friend Mary Russell Mitford in England, and Margaret’s “American friends stood in mute astonishment before this apparition of them here.”

The Brownings, whose elopement to Italy had provoked an international “warmth of interest,” welcomed Margaret and her family to their spacious rooms at Casa Guidi near the Pitti Palace, happy to have their own year-old son acquire a playmate and eager to test Margaret’s powers of conversation. But many of the Americans were inclined to judge more harshly, their response varying with the opinions they already held of Margaret. Frederick Gale, the older brother of one of Margaret’s Greene Street School pupils, while passing through Florence on a European tour encountered Margaret and Giovanni at two different parties hosted by Joseph Mozier. Gale was no partisan of his sister’s former instructor. He wrote home to relay the “strange story” of Margaret Fuller’s transformation “by marriage, into no less a personage than the
Marchioness of Ossoli
”: if “the scornful, manhating Margaret of 40 has got a husband, really no old maid need despair, while there is life in her body!” In his journal Gale noted after the first party, “There are wrinkles and lines in her face, old enough for 60!” while “her husband is handsome and hardly looks 30.” Margaret appeared “sad and depressed,” Gale observed, “an old woman before her time.” She must have won him over at the second party, however. They danced two “cotillions,” during which Margaret was “merry and agreeable” after the guests had dined on “cold turkey, duck, maryonaise [
sic
], champagne and whisky punch.” The “transcendental ex-editress of the Dial devoted herself with unmistakeable ardor to them all.” It was Giovanni, who “says nothing,” whom Gale found fault with this time.