The Manzoni Family

by Natalia Ginzburg

  Fauriel was a philologist. He was born in modest circumstances in a village in the Cévennes, Saint-Etienne. He studied at Tournon. In 1793 he was made lieutenant in an infantry battalion. During the Directorate he retired to Saint-Etienne and studied Greek, Latin and Turkish. He was a friend of Fouché and on his return to Paris he became his secretary and inspector of police. As a police official he was extremely attentive to the needs of those about him, sympathetic to their misfortunes and swift to help. He resigned when he was about to make a successful career, for he had no ambition and no wish to attain too high a rank. Sainte-Beuve called him a perpetual resigner. He loved botany, nature and especially the countryside on the banks of the Loire, and the places around his village. He loved to wander through the country in the early morning gathering plant specimens. Again in the words of Sainte-Beuve, he always loved to return to the origins of things: he liked ‘the sources of rivers, the birth of civilizations’, art and poetry in their primitive forms and, when he was botanizing, he concentrated on mosses in particular. He was very handsome and popular with the ladies: Stendhal said he was the handsomest man in Paris. He was tall and dark, with very full lips, strongly marked features, and sad, pensive eyes. He had a strong sense of friendship. He would become passionately interested in the topics his friends were studying and take them up in his turn. He was a good listener and everyone confided in him. He had many friends; Cabanis, Madame de Staël, Benjamin Constant, and later, Manzoni. He was an extraordinary translator. A vain man, he loved to hear his works praised, especially the translations. Sophie de Condorcet lived with him for twenty years, but she would not marry him, because he was not noble and belonged to a class inferior to her. It would have been a mésalliance. The Revolution had taken place, and Sophie de Condorcet was in many ways a person without prejudices, but the idea was deeply rooted in her mind that it would be humiliating to marry a man of humble origins. Many years later when Sophie died, Fauriel was rejected and scorned by her relatives, with whom he had lived for so long on the most intimate terms. They broke off all connection with him.

  Sophie de Condorcet’s manners were polite and easy, and yet controlled and proud. Giulia admired her but went in awe of her, for the other woman’s manner was distant and protective. Giulia displayed her affection for Sophie impulsively, and received courteous but cold responses. She was hurt and confided in Fauriel: ‘It is a cruel thing for love to be unrequited, but it is no less a torment to feel loved against your wishes: this is precisely the situation between me and that unique and gracious lady for whom I have and always will have the liveliest affection, and friendship between us must be reciprocal, or I can not and will not sue for it.’

  It has been thought that Sophie de Condorcet might have been very jealous of Giulia, and for this reason sometimes cold with her.

  Nevertheless, at a moment of great distress Giulia received very real and strong support from Sophie de Condorcet. Carlo Imbonati died suddenly of bilious colic. He had suffered from liver trouble for some time, but nobody had realised the gravity of his illness. Sophie de Condorcet, Cabanis and Fauriel were the first to hasten to the house in Place Vendôme. Giulia was sobbing upon the corpse which she refused to leave. Sophie suggested that Giulia should have the body embalmed and taken to Meulan to the garden of La Maisonnette. No priest was asked to bless the body. In the course of an afternoon Sophie found an embalmer. There was a chapel in the garden of La Maisonnette, but it had long remained unconsecrated. The embalmed body of Carlo Imbonati was placed there, violating all the ecclesiastical laws which forbade burial in unconsecrated ground. Giulia felt bound to Sophie by eternal gratitude.

  Carlo Imbonati had made a will years before in Milan, when he and Giulia were about to leave for France. On his death the will was opened before a lawyer in Milan and communicated to Giulia who had remained in Paris. She already knew its contents, because Imbonati had told her, but she did not know how they were expressed. There were fourteen legacies to relatives and domestic servants; the rest was left to Giulia. ‘Of all my other goods, chattels and estates, investments, accounts and shares, and anything of which I die possessed, I have pronounced and do pronounce my sole heiress Giulia Beccaria Manzoni. . . and this my free and incontrovertible decision stands as a solemn public testimony to the pure and just feelings I owe to and feel for my aforesaid heiress for the constant and virtuous friendship I have professed for her, from which I gain not only complete satisfaction in the years I have spent with her, but an intimate conviction that I owe to her virtue and disinterested attachment that peace of mind and happiness which will go with me to the grave; for which, since I can never find words to express all that I feel in my heart for my aforesaid heiress, I pray Almighty God, Father and Creator of us all, to receive the humble prayers I offer in the fullness of my heart for the greatest good of my aforesaid heiress, and that He will grant that we may bless and adore Him together in all eternity.’

  Carlo Imbonati had died on 15 March 1805; he was fifty-two and Giulia forty-three. The closing words of the will turned her thoughts to God. She had never thought of Him much. The ambience in which she lived was devoid of any religious thinking. She went to see a Protestant minister, Federico Menestraz, whom she had met at the house of an elderly Genevan lady, Carlotta Blondel. She asked him for consolation and advice. He exhorted her to dedicate her life to the sufferings of her fellows. At that time she conceived the idea of becoming a hospital nun. She gave away furniture and household objects, and wrote to Carlo Imbonati’s sisters offering them part of the inheritance left to her in the will. She did not want to go back to the house in Place Vendôme, so she took an apartment in rue Saint-Honoré. In the summer her son arrived. Then they moved to a bigger house in rue Neuve du Luxembourg.

  Giulia Beccaria II

  When he was twelve Alessandro left the College of the Somaschi Fathers which he hated. (‘Filthy sheepfold’ he was to call it later.) He was transferred to the Longone College in Milan, which he hated just as much. But he made friends, there; Arese, Pagani, Confalonieri, Visconti. He stayed there until he was sixteen. Then he went to live in the house in Santa Prassede Street, where he was received by the dark melancholy of Don Pietro, the gloom of the maiden aunts, Uncle Monsignore with the beam in his eye, and everything that had bored and depressed Giulia when she lived among these people. As for Don Pietro, he felt neither affection nor hostility for the boy. His presence in the house disturbed him, as it reminded him of Giulia and his unfortunate marriage. However, he felt it his duty to behave with decorum. The law had consigned this boy to him, and he placed law in the highest sphere of the human condition. But he could offer him only a severe and weary gaze and inhibited, speechless protection. Moreover, the boy himself was uncertain how to behave towards this melancholy man. He was ill at ease. He had a group of friends and imitated their behaviour. He talked with them about women, and in the evenings went to gamble at the Ridotto della Scala. It was at that time that he got to know the poet Vincenzo Monti, and saw in him an authoritative presence, a model to be emulated. He wrote verses which Vincenzo Monti read. One evening in the theatre, sitting in a box beside a certain Contessa Cicognara, he saw Napoleon Bonaparte; like a flash of lightning, the General’s gaze alighted for a moment on the Contessa who he knew loathed him, and then moved scornfully away; those penetrating, scornful eyes remained in the boy’s memory for ever.

  Vincenzo Monti was the guest of Giulia and Carlo Imbonati during a visit to Paris not long before Imbonati died, and he spoke of Alessandro. Then Imbonati wrote to Alessandro inviting him to visit them. He was curious to make his acquaintance and felt guilty since he and Giulia had never given a serious thought to the boy growing up far away. In fact, he had taken his mother away from him. Perhaps he also had a subconscious premonition of his death and wanted Giulia to have her son beside her. Alessandro was then nineteen. When he received Imbonati’s letter, he asked Don Pietro for the money for the journey. Don Pietro gave it to him and thought of his departu
re with a sense of liberation. In the spring the news of Imbonati’s death reached them. Alessandro left for Paris in June.

  In Paris, in rue Saint-Honoré, mother and son found themselves face to face like two people who had never met before. They were not mother and son but a woman and a man. She was suffering a recent bereavement and bore the traces of grief in her face. He felt suddenly called upon to sustain her. They were not mother and son because the maternal and filial bonds between them had been severed over the years in which they had been living far from each other, each wanting to forget the other. In his memory was buried the image of the mother who had abandoned him and vanished, and it bred anguish and a confused rancour. . . In her was buried the image of an infant to whom she had given no motherly affection and from whom she had fled, and it bred anguish and remorse. All these buried emotions suddenly flared up briefly between them before sinking back again into obscurity, but not without emitting flashes and clamour which dazzled and bemused them. A new life was beginning for both.

  Alessandro fell in love with Giulia, and not only with her but suddenly with everything around her, with the memory of Carlo Imbonati, with Paris, Sophie de Condorcet and Fauriel. Later a very real and profound friendship would develop between Manzoni and Fauriel, but at this early stage he was only someone dear to Giulia and illuminated by her radiance.

  He sent his verses to Fauriel who gave his opinion of them. Alessandro replied: ‘Knowing you were so well informed about Italian literature, I was afraid to show you my verses: and the same reason makes your reception of them all the more flattering. . . I close, assuring you of my real distress that I can not express my feelings to you in person. Shall I never clasp that hand which placed my dear, unhappy mother’s in the cold hand of her and my Carlo? But our hands can only be joined by my mother’s.’

  He wrote a long hymn, On the Death of Carlo Imbonati, dedicated to his mother. Later he came to dislike it, and rejected it.

  To his friend Pagani in Milan he wrote that he wished from now on to be called Alessandro Manzoni Beccaria. ‘Yesterday I had the honour of dining with a great man, a supreme poet and superb lyricist, Le Brun. Having honoured me with the gift of one of his printed works, he insisted on writing on the copy, which I shall keep for ever: to Monsieur Beccaria - C’est un nom — he said - trop honorable pour ne pas saisir l‘occasion de le porter. Je veux que le nom de Le Brun choque avec celui de Beccaria. I had the honour of placing two kisses on his wan, emaciated cheeks, sweeter to me than if I had plucked them from the lips of Venus.’

  Alessandro and Giulia wrote a joint letter to Vincenzo Monti in Milan, telling him of their meeting and their happiness. In him it was the happiness of one who had left grey, empty days behind him. In her it was mingled with the torment of her recent misfortune. Together they were seeing the world with new eyes. Manzoni wrote: ‘I have felt a real need to write about my happiness to you who predicted it; to tell you I have found it in a mother’s arms; to say this to you who have so often spoken to me of her and know her so well. Oh Monti, I do not seek to dry her tears: I weep with her: I share her profound, but sacred and tranquil grief. . . I do not know when I may see you. I live only for my Giulia, and with her to adore and emulate that man you used to tell me was virtue itself. . . Love me and write to me. Now I willingly pass the pen to my Giulia, who is almost snatching it from me to write a few lines to her Monti.’ And Giulia: ‘Dear Monti, I should like to add a line or two to what my Alessandro has written. Oh, you who love him, you who really know him since you could propose my beloved Carlo as a model to him, you can measure the immense love I bear him by the immense love and sacred, incurable grief I feel for Carlo. Oh! do not tell me yet to seek distraction or consolation, you cannot imagine how I aspire to set these tears in the eternity which has already begun for me since it has closed upon him. Oh Monti, do write to me, so that I may write to you.’

  Giving up the plan of going to Geneva to become a hospital nun — which, in any case, she had never seriously intended to do — Giulia devoted herself to her son. She was a practical person with her feet on the ground. She had learned to organize her own life with great good sense. She thought her son’s exalted love for her could be a heavy encumbrance on their daily life, wearing and painful for both of them, and that in the long run they would tire of being alone together. Her son must marry as soon as possible, and have a family and children, so that she would have a firm, clearly defined role and, surveying this new landscape, peopled and cheerful, she would grow old in wisdom and happiness. But it was essential to choose the right person, one who would intuitively know her place between the two of them. So she must look around, either in France or in Italy. Imbonati had left her, among all the other things, a large property at Brusuglio, near Milan. It would be a good thing to go and see it. Mother and son set out. Here is a letter to Fauriel from Genoa: ‘I was lying in bed this morning, thinking how long we had been waiting to hear from you, when I heard my mother shout: Alessandro, a letter from Fauriel; I jumped out of bed, ran into her room, and we savoured your dear letter together. I cannot tell you the pleasure I get from the growing hope that I will be your friend, and this hope is also the joy of my mother, who keeps saying: Oh, if only you could become necessary to that divine Fauriel! Don’t be angry, the epithet slipped from my pen.’ Immediately after that, still in Genoa, he received a letter from Milan saying that Don Pietro Manzoni was very ill; ‘I set off at once,’ he wrote to Fauriel, ‘my good mother accompanied me; but on my arrival they told me I was not to have the consolation of seeing my father, for the very day on which I heard of his illness was his last.’ He did not go to see his dead father; he did not stop in Milan; ‘Peace and honour to his ashes,’ he wrote to Fauriel. He and Giulia spent a few days at Brusuglio, then went to Turin for a month. Don Pietro Manzoni had made a will: he left his possessions to Alessandro, and begged him ‘not to forget the maxims and principles’ in which he had sought to bring him up. ‘To my lady wife I leave two diamond pendants as a token of my esteem and remembrance of her.’

  Enrichetta Blondel I

  There are several portraits of the young Alessandro Manzoni which vary greatly although they were painted within quite a short space of years. In one his hair is arranged in tight little symmetrical waves, his nose is pointed, and he has a judicious look. In another he has a thick, dishevelled mane and cloudy eyes and looks like Ugo Foscolo. In another he has a big nose and sulky mouth. In yet another he has hollow cheeks, a penetrating gaze, and crisply curling whiskers.

  There is one portrait of the young Enrichetta Blondel in her bridal veil. She has a round, childlike face with gentle, unformed features. She was born in 1791 at Casirate d’Adda in the province of Bergamo. Her father was called Francesco Blondel, her mother Maria Mariton; he was Swiss, she came from Languedoc. They were Calvinists. They had eight children, four boys and four girls, and Enrichetta was the third. All the children had been baptised Catholics, because the father wanted them to be the same as everyone else. The mother had made no objection, although she hated the Catholic religion and brought her children up in the Protestant faith. The father was of a gentle disposition, the mother severe and authoritarian. He had made money out of a silk-farm. He traded in silk and had many mills. Early in the century they bought the Imbonati house in Marino Street in Milan. They were related to the Carlotta Blondel who in Paris, after the death of Carlo Imbonati, had sent Giulia to Pastor Menestraz.

  Enrichetta was small, fair and graceful, with fair eyelashes. She had modest, submissive ways and said little. To Giulia she seemed the ideal daughter-in-law she had long imagined. She seemed quite perfect, created to slip gently and harmoniously into their little world. She was considered during a second trip to Italy, after two or three other matrimonial plans had come to nothing. One was with a certain ‘angelica Luigina’, whom they had known to be already promised, and another with a French girl, daughter of friends of Fauriel called De Tracy, who had thought they were not sufficiently aristo
cratic.

  In October 1807, shortly after meeting Enrichetta, Manzoni wrote to Fauriel from a friend’s house at Belvedere sul Lago: ‘I have something to tell you in confidence; I have seen in Milan the girl I told you about; I thought she was very charming; my mother who has also spoken to her and at greater length, thinks she has an excellent heart; she thinks only of her home and the happiness of her parents who adore her; in short, she is full of family feelings (and I’ll say in your ear that she’s the only one here with such feelings). For me there is another advantage, and a very real one in this country, at least for me: she is not an aristocrat, and you know Parini’s poem. Moreover, she is a Protestant; in fact, she’s a treasure, and it seems to me before long there will be three of us wanting your company; as yet, however, nothing is settled, and she herself knows nothing of it. I think, when it happens, it will be my duty to inform the worthy man whose alliance I was hoping to obtain, so please tell me what you think about it. For the moment it must be kept completely secret. . . My mother has just interrupted to tell me to say that the little girl I speak of speaks French all the time, is sixteen, and is simple and unpretentious. So now you know it all.’

  And in another letter when the marriage was about to take place:

  ‘So I can tell you that my bride is sixteen, has a sweet nature, upright feelings, the greatest affection for her parents and apparently some little for me. . . She shows such love mingled with respect for my mother you would think she was her own daughter; and indeed she always calls her ‘Mama’. No doubt you will think I have been rather hasty, but as soon as I really got to know her, it seemed pointless to delay. Her family commands respect for the harmony that prevails among them, and for their modesty, goodness and every estimable sentiment. In short, I am certain that this will bring happiness for me, and for my mother, without which there could be none for me. ’