Margaret Fuller

by Megan Marshall

  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.

  Trying to be brave, she wrote to Charles King Newcomb, the protégé of her Rhode Island years, describing her landlady as “a lively Italian woman who makes me broth of turnips and gets my clothes washed in the stream.” Her residence in the mountains was a “beautiful solitude,” she told him, invoking the Transcendentalist virtues. Each day that she was well enough, Margaret walked or rode by donkey beyond the town limits, through wheat fields edged with red poppies and yellow cornflowers to ancient monasteries, entering churches to take shelter from the sun, where she found sacred paintings, “not by great masters, but sweetly domestic”: “the Virgin offering the nipple to the child Jesus, his little hand is on her breast, but he only plays and turns away”; and “Santa Anna teaching the Virgin, a sweet girl of ten years old, with long curling auburn hair[,] to read, the Virgin leans on her mother’s lap; her hair curls on the book.” How long had it been since an auburn-haired Sarah Margaret Fuller sat with her mother, writing a letter to her absent father, and then, when asked to “hold the baby,” exchanged pen for swaddled infant? She had been a daughter, a virgin with book in her lap; now she would be the mother.

  As Margaret walked the roads of L’Aquila, she wrote to Charles Newcomb, “The country people say ‘Povera, sola, soletta, poor one, alone, all alone! the saints keep her,’ as I pass. They think me some stricken deer to stay so apart from the herd.” She did not tell Charles Newcomb that the “povera, sola” walking, riding a donkey, was a lone woman swollen with child, six months pregnant. Another painting showed “the Marriage of the Virgin,” in which “a beautiful young man, one of three suitors . . . looks sadly on while she gives her hand to Joseph.” Had Margaret been inspired to write to Charles Newcomb, one of several handsome younger American men she had once fancied, as she was about to give her hand to Giovanni? Would Margaret marry? Giovanni addressed his letters to her at L’Aquila “Mrs. M. Ossoli.” Was this a scheme to protect his lover, alone and pregnant in an Italian hill town, or had the couple already married in secret?

  “I don’t like this place at all,” she wrote Giovanni, “non mi piace niente.” “Si solamente era possibile venire più vicino a ti”—“If only it were possible to come closer to you.” The only reason to stay was for “the good air and its safety”—“per buon aria e sicurezza.” Here “I never see any English or Americans,” she wrote to Waldo Emerson, still not disclosing her location; she now thought “wholly in Italian.” Once it was too late to join him on his return to America, she confessed that “my courage has fairly given way, and the fatigue of life is beyond my strength.” Worse: “I do not prize myself, or expect others to prize me.” In her “mountain solitude,” Margaret debated anew the choices she had already made and could not now unmake.

  Then L’Aquila too was no longer safe. Close to Rome, yet within the boundaries of Ferdinand II’s Sicilian kingdom, the windy mountain village was fast becoming a billeting post for Neapolitan soldiers who, by the end of July, had begun arresting republican sympathizers. Margaret quickly moved down the mountainside to Rieti, within the Papal States, a riverside “hive of very ancient dwellings” in a verdant plain crosshatched with vineyards, just one day’s ride from Rome. Giovanni could visit so reliably now that she had coffee waiting for the two of them to share when he arrived on Sunday mornings after a journey made under cover of darkness. Margaret was beginning to discover, as she would later write, that “we are of mutual solace and aid about the dish and spoon part”—the trivial pleasures of domestic life.

  No sooner had Margaret settled in second-floor rooms overlooking the rapids of the Velino River, with rent and board cheaper than any she had found in Italy (quantities of “figs, grapes, peaches” and “the best salad enough for two persons for one cent a day,” she wrote to her brother Richard, surely puzzling him about her living arrangements), than Giovanni found himself pressured to join a regiment that would leave Rome for Bologna to defend against the Austrians led by Count Radetzky, who had regained first Milan and then Ferrara by late July. Giovanni wanted to go, and after a time, Margaret agreed to the plan: “if it is necessary for your honor, leave and I will try to be strong.” When she wrote to Richard in mid-August, “All goes wrong,” she meant not only in the Italian city-states—where “the Demon with his cohort of traitors, prepares to rule anew,” where “my dearest friends,” the radicals of Milan, “are losing all”—but also in her hideaway in the “mountains of Southern Italy,” the indeterminate address she used in writing to Richard. Margaret wrote to Giovanni that she would prefer to spare him the “ordeal” of the birth if she was “sure to do well,” but she feared the possibility, if he went to Bologna, that she might “die alone without touching a dear hand.”

  As September approached, Margaret found it difficult to write; perhaps, with so many reversals, her chronicle would no longer “seem worth making such a fuss about,” she worried. She had written to her friend Emelyn Story in mid-June, “If anything should occur to change my plans for the summer,” she would certainly visit her and the Cranches in Sorrento. But there had been no “accident,” as Margaret had once both feared and hoped, tormenting herself: “was I not cruel to bring another into this terrible world”? She could only wait, looking often at the daguerreotype Giovanni had given her—his dark hair, searching eyes, so young, so thin. She worried about him too.

  Just as it seemed he would leave for Bologna, the Austrian forces withdrew, and Giovanni was free to join Margaret in Rieti, to wait with her for labor to begin. She brewed morning coffee on Sunday, August 27. He stayed until September 6, the day after the birth of Angelo Eugene Philip Ossoli.

  The baby “still cries a lot,” Margaret wrote a day later, addressing Giovanni for the first time as “Carissimo Consorte,” the “dearest husband” to whom she could give kisses and hugs “in this dear baby I have in my arms”—“dandoti un abbraccio, ed un bagio in questo caro Pupo.” Then soon Giovanni was again “mio caro,” “mio amore” in the letters Margaret wrote every day, then every other day, until the end of September when he could make his next visit. She told him that her milk would not come in, that she’d had a fever; like her sister, Ellen, she could not nurse her child; “he refuses my breast.” Then all was well; she had hired a wet nurse, Chiara Fiordiponte. Now she could write “I am delighted to see you in the baby who I have always close to me.” He is “very beautiful, everybody says so”; he “has your mouth, hands, feet: I think his eyes will be turquoise. He is very naughty; understands well, is very obstinate to have his will.” And “he is still so pretty; his gestures as delicate as a ballerina’s.”

  They had named their son Angelo for his father, giving him Giovanni’s middle name; for Eugene, the oldest of Margaret’s brothers; and for Giovanni’s father, Filippe, who had died in February, leaving Giovanni, who cared for him through his final illness, to war with his “odious brothers” over such inheritance as might be allowed a youngest child. The ancient law of primogeniture was one of the reasons Giovanni was so committed to the republican cause—the code favoring eldest sons in all things would be abolished. The wrangle over his modest share of his father’s estate was Giovanni’s motive too for hiding the child; to anger his brothers, all in the employ of the pope, with a connection—married or not—outside the church would ruin his chances of receiving even his meager allotment.

  Giovanni was also determined to have the child baptized, which required Margaret and the baby to stay forty days in Rieti before the ritual could take place; Giovanni wished to establish the baby’s paternity,
to ensure his son’s inheritance, one day, of Giovanni’s tiny fortune—and, Margaret believed, of the title marchese. They must find a man to stand as godfather. Margaret proposed Mickiewicz: “He knows about the existence of the baby[,] he is a devout Catholic, he is a distinguished man who could be a help to him in his future life, and I want him to have some friend in case something happens to us.” But Mickiewicz was on the march. Giovanni confided in his nephew Pietro, in line to become the true marchese Ossoli, who obliged with signature, seal, and family crest on the necessary documents and promised to keep Giovanni’s secret from the “odious brothers” as long as needed.

  When Giovanni left Rieti after his early-October visit, Nino, as they called the child, short for the affectionate Angelino, “seemed to look for you,” Margaret wrote. “He woke up before sunrise, looked, refused his milk; cried very much and seemed to look for something that he could not find.” Margaret missed Giovanni too. Would she miss Nino as much—more? She knew she must return to Rome, to resume writing Tribune columns, gathering material for her book; it was the only way to support herself and, now, beautiful, naughty, obstinate, delicate Nino—with his “exstatic smiles.”

  She spent, she would say afterward, “entire” nights “contriving every possible means by which, through resolution and energy on my part, I could avoid that one sacrifice”—leaving Nino. “It was impossible.” Could she rent rooms for Chiara and Nino, separate from hers, in Rome? But Chiara would have to leave her husband and bring her own baby to the city as well. The plan was both too expensive and too risky, Giovanni argued, and Margaret knew it. Rebecca Spring had left her three-year-old daughter for more than a year with no qualms; Nino was only an infant, so young he might miss his mother less than an older child would, Margaret may have believed.