The Manzoni Family (22 page)

‘This was how we heard of her
blessed passing,
as she called it, but so deadly for us. I need say nothing of us, for you can imagine and feel for the state we were in. My sister-in-law had come from her country estate, where she had left my brother. She took us to her house that night, and in the morning we set off with her. Before leaving, we went back to my house to see our beloved once again. An angelic smile had taken the place of those lines of pain that such a cruel illness had imprinted on the face, now young and beautiful again. Oh! Euphrosine, I kissed her hands, but dared not touch her, My poor Giulia, who was ill in bed, got up to come with us; after a few miles she had to turn back; her husband, who also returned, rendered every possible office to that holy body; no one touched her except her women and Massimo who placed her in her last resting-place. People came to see her; they prayed for her; at last two days later she was taken to the church, and in the evening to our country estate. A grave had been prepared in the cemetery. The peasants came to meet her with lighted candles. They kept vigil all day and in the morning they wanted the local priest and several others to say the funeral service again there. Oh! can you forgive me all these details? my poor head is so confused. I don't know how you can follow all this scrawl, but it is all so alive in my memory that my pen goes on and on, without my knowing what I'm writing. We stayed with my brother for about a fortnight; now we are at home to feel each day the loss of her who was
our necessity.

‘Dear Euphrosine, I want to tell you that I share with all my heart in the loss of your good mother. Such a holy and precious death should console us, our faith tells us; but our hearts are flesh and always there to torment us. Do not worry about us; we have had no material worries at all. . . . Goodbye, my dearest friend; I feel I still have some bond upon this earth if you love me. '

This was Enrichetta's will, which she dictated a week before she died:

I, Enrichetta Blondel, wife of Alessandro Manzoni living in Milan, dispose of my belongings in the following way:

Regarding my dowry, I wish it to be divided into equal parts between all my children, both male and female; regarding my possessions outside my dowry, I leave half to my three sons Pietro, Enrico and Filippo, and the other half to be divided equally between all my children, both male and female; I wish my husband to hold everything in usufruct during his natural life.

I wish my above-mentioned three male heirs, and likewise my husband and usufructuary, to pay once only by way of legacy to my five daughters Giulietta married d'Azeglio, Cristina, Sofia, Vittorina, Matilde one thousand five hundred Milanese lire each.

This legacy to Giulietta, wife of the Marchese d'Azeglio, shall be paid once the will is proven, the other daughters may not demand it during the life of their Father unless in the case of their respective marriages.

The witnesses to the will were don Giulio Ratti, Provost of San Fedele, Tommaso Grossi and an accountant called Casti glioni.

‘Our friends have had the greatest misfortune that could happen to them', Constanza Arconati wrote to Fauriel. He had not written to the Manzonis for a long time. He had not even sent a line when Giulietta got married. Costanza Arconati begged him to write. ‘My dear Fauriel, will you not write them a word? Your silence, justified or not, I do not know, at the time of Giulietta's marriage, upset them so much that I can imagine what they must feel now. I beg you, do write. '

Fauriel did not write. Manzoni wrote to him in February 1834, recommending to him Niccolò Tommaseo, who was going to Paris. For his part, Manzoni had not written to Fauriel for a long time. ‘A sacred duty forces me to break a silence which will not have surprised you. . . [the “sacred duty” was to introduce Tommaseo, who was so eager to meet him]: you know that at times there are words bitter to pronounce, even impossible to find, for the simple reason that they are in vain. . . Goodbye, dear, evermore dear friend; what remains of this poor family embraces you; one day I shall be able to communicate with you more fully. '

Fauriel received Niccolò Tommaseo most cordially. They became quite good friends. He did not answer Manzoni's letter, and never wrote to him any more. Neither did Manzoni write to him again.

In the summer of 1834 Mary Clarke was in Italy. She saw the Manzonis in Milan and and gave them news of Fauriel. She knew he was preparing for a journey to the South of France, but did not know when he was leaving.

Mary Clarke to Fauriel:

‘I am still filled with emotion after leaving the Manzonis so that I can think of nothing else. . . O Heavens! if you could come and spend a fortnight here during your trip, how much good you would do Manzoni; he loves you with all the love of which his noble heart is capable. How pleased I would be if I could persuade you to give him this pleasure! How he spoke of you! his friendship is not in the least diminished, nor the fascination he feels for you. Think how easy it would be when you are in the south of France; think how short life is; think of the happiness of having a friend like him; remember that for so many years you have thought of nothing but work and that this dries up the heart, and that it is not time wasted to spend time with one like him. . .' Here the letter broke off, and besides, Mary Clarke did not know where to send it, because she did not know if Fauriel was still in Paris or if he had already left.

That summer, at Brusuglio, Giulietta took to her bed, never to rise again. As usual, Cousin Giacomo wrote to Uncle Giulio Beccaria:

‘The Manzonis did not leave Brusú yesterday because of Giulietta d'Azeglio, who has succumbed to a fever for which she had to be bled.' ‘When I was going to see the Manzonis, I saw the cook Giuseppe on the way and, when I asked after Giulia, he told me that he was going to fetch her confessor, as she had wished to perform her devotions this morning. . . So, not to disturb her religious practices, I saw fit to delay my visit to Brusú. . . From what I heard, however, it seems things are not going at all well. '

Giulietta died on the 20th September at Brusuglio. On her death certificate was written ‘tuberculosis of the abdomen'.

All the Manzonis went to Gessate, to Uncle Giulio Beccaria's villa. Cousin Giacomo wrote to Uncle Giulio:

‘When I got to town yesterday evening, I went immediately to casa Manzoni, but heard they had all gone to you. I hope that, in spite of the distress of mind, they are all reasonably well. I beg you to express my condolences to them, and to d'Azeglio. I shall arrange in the coming weeks to come to Gessate to embrace them all. '

The author of these laconic notes was the Cousin Giacomo with whom Giulietta had been in love.

Giulietta was buried at Brusuglio. Manzoni wrote the epitaph for her tomb:

‘To Giulia d'Azeglio, née Manzoni who died in the peace of the Lord / on the 20th day of September 1834; / her husband and her desolate relatives / commend her to His mercy / and to the prayers of the faithful. '

Manzoni wrote to the Grand Duke of Tuscany in October 1834:

‘It has pleased the Lord to take from the world my eldest daughter, in the flower of youth, at the beginning of a very happy marriage and ardent motherhood. Mindful as I shall be as long as I live of the pity Your Highness deigned to show me for the cruel blow which struck me at the end of last year, it would seem to me almost ungrateful to remain silent about this other cruel blow, so soon after. '

Mary Clarke to Fauriel, from Lille (about a month and a half had passed since her last letter, and passing through Basle, she had heard that Fauriel was at Marseilles):

‘I would have written without waiting for your letter, if I had known where to send, because I dearly wished to speak to you about the Manzonis while my heart was so full of them, and while my impression was more happy than sad; now what I have to say can only give you pain. They have lost Giulietta, and during my stay she was so much better that they hoped to save her. It is all the more horrible in that, as far as I am persuaded from enquiries I made, it was her own folly that began to destroy her stomach, and a year or two ago she could have been saved if she had consulted the doctor who did me so much good; she did not die of any illness, but of a serious wasting and general, slow inflammation. The fact is that she had destroyed her digestion over a period of years, eating almost nothing, and then was not sufficiently well cared for, and all the fatigues of her confinement and nursing aggravated her weakness. . . If you could have the courage to write to Manzoni, I assure you it would do him good: just a few lines; this grief will be much less than the first, only it will reopen the wound; how I pity the poor grandmother! Signora Arconati wanted to suggest you go to Milan with her. . . She wanted you to join her at Gaesbeck. She would take you in her carriage, you would be very comfortable; I have nothing to say about this plan, because if you wanted to go, it would be quicker to go from where you are now; as for me, I should be happily resigned to see you later if Manzoni were to reap the benefit. The impression he made on me was like nothing I've ever known, at times I couldn't look at him without tears coming to my eyes and I was obliged to go out of the room several times, his face seemed to me as Christ must have looked to his disciples, I wanted to kneel down before him. He has hardly aged at all, only his hair is all grey, he was almost cheerful the two days I was there, but it's not insensitivity as Signora Arconati thinks, but his nature is so tender and so gentle that he cannot bear grief too long and seeks to elude it from time to time; grief is so ugly that it proves antipathetic to extreme beauty, but there are traces of tenderness and suffering in his face that bear witness to what he has been through; he shows supreme grace.

‘I would have liked to curl up before him like a cat in the sun; the three days spent at Milan have been a great event in my life; I was drowned in melancholy yet the pleasure of seeing Manzoni was so great that the melancholy was dear to me. He still has the same candour, takes an interest in everything, seemed much amused by all I told him of Paris, judges people there and knows them as if it was scarcely six months since he was there; he does me so much good, he restored my faith in disinterested intelligence, so that I want to return to Milan in a year or two to retemper my mind and faith. . . . The two boys look good lads, quite nice-looking but without any fascination. Pietro has a certain grace and presents himself well, although they say he's a great idler. Matilde, the youngest, who is four, is a little jewel of grace, coquetry and vivacity, I've never seen such a charming little creature. Signora Giulia is still as affable and affectionate, looks a little older, but apart from this I thought she hadn't changed at all. “And our Fauriel!” she said to me with the same tenderness as ever. Oh! you don't see their like anywhere, and I set them in my heart again as in a reliquary; the more people I've seen, the more I love these, there's nobody to compare with them. Signora Giulia talked to me a great deal of Enrichetta, she told me she feels her loss more keenly every day, that she could never leave Alessandro, that he was like a child, that she was very old and trembled at the idea of leaving him alone when she died. Enrico has grown quite handsome, he doesn't look like his father, he says nothing and looks rather a wild spirit, I rather liked him. I didn't like Azeglio over much, I don't know why. I've nothing to say against him, he has great moustaches that look pretentious, but I didn't see any ostentation in him. However, every individual is like a work of art. There are very passable paintings which have nothing noticeably wrong with them yet nothing pleasing either, and in that family where so many can capture your heart with one glance, anyone who lacks real grace has no success.'

Fauriel neither wrote nor came. He seemed deaf to the pleading of Signora Arconati and Mary Clarke. He preferred silence and absence. Perhaps he did not come because it seemed too painful to see the Manzoni family as they were now. He and Manzoni might have found themselves face to face with a burden of memories too heavy to bear. He did not write because a few lines in a letter seemed a miserable offering. As Manzoni had said, ‘at times there are words bitter to pronounce, even impossible to find, for the simple reason that they are in vain'. Fauriel died ten years after Giulietta, in 1844. Giulietta's letters
(Mon cher parrain),
her portrait and a drawing by her together with letters from Manzoni and Giulia, were found in his apartment in Paris and returned to the Manzonis by Jules Mohl, an orientalist who had been a friend of Mary Clarke.

Why did the friendship between Manzoni and Fauriel die away? And when did it die? What happened between them? Why did what was only negligence on both sides in their letter-writing become over the years such a strange and profound silence? Perhaps there is no precise explanation. The day Fauriel left Milan, in autumn 1825, abruptly and without a word of goodbye, perhaps the relations between the two men had fractured, or were on the point of fracture. Perhaps Fauriel had things to do in France and did not want to be detained; perhaps he had run out of money; he was known to dislike goodbyes; there are so many hypotheses. But perhaps fundamentally he had realized that what had been a friendship was becoming something else: a cold, formal connection which it would be sad to continue. Perhaps Fauriel had lost all faith in himself; and felt he was going downhill while Manzoni was climbing, so that their steps could no longer be directed towards the same places. Or perhaps the explanation lies elsewhere, in the nature of Fauriel. Sainte-Beuve said he loved ‘civilisations at their birth and the springs of rivers'; he loved dawn, not midday or dusk; so, in human beings, he loved the search, promise and expectation, not fulfilment. Perhaps Manzoni had understood this too and felt the other becoming ever more distant and strange; and so there was nothing more between them, no letters; they never wrote or met again. And when Manzoni was stricken with grief, Fauriel felt incapable of sending him a simple word of pity and affection, because the pity was too great, and affection fell silent in contemplation of so many vicissitudes, so many contrasting, interwoven and scattered emotions.