Margaret Fuller

by Megan Marshall

  The mood in the city was heartening, and Margaret would soon be caught up in it herself, invited to attend an elegant open-air dinner in celebration of Rome’s “natal day” two weeks later at the Baths of Titus, where writers just returned from exile stood among the ancient ruins to give speeches lauding Pio Nono as destined to become “a new and nobler founder for another State.” Music wafted on the breeze as the guests, seated under an effigy of “the Roman wolf with her royal nursling,” looked out toward the Colosseum and the arches of the Forum. “It was a new thing here, this popular dinner,” Margaret wrote in her account for the Tribune, “and the Romans greeted it in an intoxication of hope and pleasure.” Several days before, Margaret and the Springs had witnessed a torch-bearing procession—“a river of fire” streaming down the Corso from the Piazza del Popolo, past their apartment to the pope’s Quirinal Palace—formed spontaneously in tribute to Pio Nono after he’d issued a circular granting the states under his control, Rome among them, the right to elect representative councils. Pio Nono’s circular provided only a “limited” improvement, in Margaret’s view, compared with a fully representative democracy like the United States, but it was “a great measure for Rome.” Margaret had followed the parade, which advanced “slowly with a perpetual surge-like sound of voices” and torchlight flickering on “animated Italian faces” all the way to the Quirinal, where red and white “Bengal” flares were tossed into the night sky, lighting up the colossal statues of Castor and Pollux with their steeds. She watched as the pope stepped out on his balcony to shouts of “Viva!” from the crowd, which dispersed in an instant, torches extinguished, after receiving Pio Nono’s open-armed blessing. Margaret had “never seen anything finer.” Yet she worried that even Pio Nono was “not great enough” —how could he compare to Mazzini, who had risked his life and stirred an international movement?—or that the new pope lacked the temporal power to bring about “the liberty of Rome” that its people, with their “perpetual hurra, vivas, rockets,” had now come to expect. Then what would happen?

  At evening vespers on Maundy Thursday, Margaret had become separated from the Springs in a more subdued crowd of the worshipful, her thoughts still dwelling on the music—on the astonishing, transporting experience for a New Englander of a religious service that included no sermon. There had been simply a blending of male voices, “elaborate, expressive, and sacred,” as her countryman George Hillard, traveling in Rome the following year, would describe vespers at St. Peter’s, “weaving solemn airs” for nearly an hour “into a complicated tissue of harmony, such as tasked both the voice and the mind to unwind.” At first Margaret hadn’t noticed she was lost, and may have willed herself to become one of the multitude to test her self-sufficiency in the world’s capital.

  True to her French tutor’s prediction, the Italian language Margaret had mastered as a reader came more easily to her tongue, and in any case, as she’d written to James Nathan two years earlier at a time when she expected never to see the inside of St. Peter’s, “Rome has grown up in my soul in default of the bodily presence.” Margaret arrived in Rome as much a native as was possible for someone who had never lived there. “We know every nook of St Peters, every statue, every villa, by heart almost,” she’d admonished James Nathan from her desk at the Tribune when he contemplated writing about the city; “Rome is an all hacknied theme and by the most accomplished pens.” For Margaret, who at age twenty-three had read Goethe’s Italian Journey (the book that inspired “an earnest desire to live as he did”) and countless other reminiscences of travel since, whose knowledge of the antique world was that of a “genuine initiate,” as Mickiewicz easily saw, mere travelogue could never satisfy. Rather than “describe outward objects there in detail,” she advised James Nathan, he should find what was “characteristic”: analyze, interpret, and deliver “your own thoughts.” Another sign that Margaret had estimated James Nathan too highly was her expectation that he could readily offer up the knowing, incisive commentary that came instinctively to her. Even after receiving her explicit instructions, he had failed.

  But in the crowd of departing worshipers that Thursday night, with her Parisian clothes and American independence, Margaret did not blend in. When she couldn’t find the Springs at their appointed meeting place and drew out her lorgnette to see better, she attracted the attention of a tall, slender, twenty-six-year-old Roman, Giovanni Angelo Ossoli. The young man inquired in Italian—he knew no English or French—was she lost, did she need guidance to her hotel, her rooms? Perhaps she enjoyed answering him in Italian.

  Margaret never recorded the meeting herself, other than to say it was “singular, fateful.” Or maybe she did, but the “little book” in which she inscribed her account was lost. According to the American publisher George Palmer Putnam, who had taken the same paddle steamer from Livorno to Naples with her several weeks earlier and claimed to have chanced upon the two at St. Peter’s as she searched “bewildered” for the Springs, Margaret dropped Ossoli’s arm as soon as Putnam recognized her and set off on the long walk back across the Tiber River to the Corso alone. But something must have struck him about the pair—the uncharacteristically flustered and fashionably dressed American literary celebrity with the attentive young Roman at her side—despite his assertion that Margaret “certainly did not give her address” to the Italian youth. In a letter to Evert Duyckinck written soon afterward, Putnam speculated suggestively that “within the precincts of the sanctuary” the Tribune’s star reporter had “received very singular suggestions from the young men of Rome which may afford instructive notes to a future edition of Woman in the Nineteenth Century.”

  Margaret’s own testimony a few years later, reported by her friend and closest confidante in Rome, Emelyn Story, a Bostonian married to the expatriate sculptor William Wetmore Story, did not involve a surprise appearance by George Putnam. Rather, Margaret had kept hold of Ossoli’s arm through a fruitless search of the cathedral’s side chapels for the Springs, a vain foray into the streets surrounding the piazza looking for a carriage to hire, and then a stroll back to the Corso, where the kind young man left her, fully apprised of her address.

  Yet the facts of that night remain irretrievable. Margaret wished to obscure them, always preferred to “say nothing” about the details of her early involvement with Giovanni Angelo Ossoli. Her version of events may have been contrived to mislead. Indeed, George Putnam was certain he’d spotted Margaret and the young Italian on a Wednesday evening, at the singing of the plaintive miserere. Could the two have parted quickly after a chance first encounter, arranging to meet again at Thursday vespers, giving Margaret a night to consider whether she truly wished to be escorted home by the young man with a touch of melancholy about the eyes—if only she could detach herself from her chaperones, the Springs? His evident “simplicity” and “unspoiled nature” may already have signaled to Margaret that Ossoli was “ignorant of great ideas, ignorant of books,” a man whom most of her friends would consider “nothing.” Yet perhaps she saw in him instantly, as well, his “excellent practical sense,” his “native refinement” and “sweet temper,” qualities she would remark on again and again to those same uncomprehending friends several years later. She might have sensed too in those early moments in the cathedral that Ossoli was, like her if from a less learned perspective, “a judicious observer” of the passing scene: he had noticed Margaret’s distress and offered help. If all this had not been apparent in his manner, why else would she have taken the stranger’s arm?

  What happened next took place rapidly, for by April 10 Margaret was projecting a new and “better” love to Rebecca Spring and hinting that she might leave her traveling companions to make an independent tour of northern Italy in July and August, rather than follow the Springs into Switzerland and Germany and back to America. “I wish to be free and absolutely true to my nature,” she informed Rebecca, who only grew further alarmed. Was Margaret planning an impulsive return to Mickiewicz? No, she was considering a retu
rn to Rome, rather than Paris, at the end of the summer.

  A letter from Mickiewicz supported her choice—he was not yet free to see her under circumstances when “all of me could be with you.” She “needed” more of Italy, the poet advised. Margaret thought so too, even though, when the young man who was paying such ardent suit stunningly “offered me his hand through life,” she turned down his proposal of marriage. “I loved him,” but the prospect of a permanent “connexion” to the twenty-six-year-old unlettered Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, no matter how sweet-tempered, “seemed so every way unfit.”

  Could this momentous exchange—“singular, fateful”—have taken place as early as April 4, Easter Sunday at St. Peter’s, a date the two would later celebrate as an anniversary? Was it their first meeting, or the second, if Putnam is to be believed, or a third, at St. Peter’s on Easter Sunday, that caused Margaret to associate the cathedral and its expansive piazza with “the splendidest part of my life”? “No spot on earth is worthier the sun light,” she exulted; “on none does it fall so fondly.”

  But Margaret could still write honestly to her brother Richard in mid-April of her stay so far in Rome, “I have not yet formed any friendship of the mind, such as I had in London and Paris” with Mazzini and Mickiewicz. Giovanni Ossoli, she had discerned correctly, was “a person of no intellectual culture”—he may never have read a book all the way through. “Nature has been his book,” Margaret would one day write to defend him, and “of that some lines he has spelled thoroughly.” But he had never been to school, received only cursory tutoring in liturgical Latin from a parish priest. Despite his air of “refinement,” Giovanni Ossoli was also very much “an obscure young man.” The fourth and by far the youngest son in a family of faded nobility, a half-orphan who still mourned the mother who died when he was six, he shared with an older married sister the care of their elderly father, with whom he lived in an apartment near the Capitol, a short walk from the Springs’ rooms on the Corso.

  “Giovanni,” as Margaret introduced her “gentle friend” to the Springs, who suspected no romantic involvement with so young a foreigner, could walk with Margaret the several blocks to the Church of Santa Maria Maddalena near the Piazza Colonna to show her the ornate Ossoli chapel, with its columns and panels of richly colored marbles, its seventeenth-century painting of the Virgin Mary and St. Nicholas, savior of the hungry and the destitute. Although Giovanni was descended from the same prosperous baker who had earned the title of marchese two centuries before—hence the family’s choice of St. Nicholas, known for his miraculous multiplication of wheat—this was not truly Giovanni’s sacred altar. This Margaret would never learn, or never reveal that she knew, if she did: Giovanni was not heir to the title marchese Ossoli. That title belonged to his oldest brother, and would pass to the first son of that brother—a nephew. Giovanni’s correct title was Giovanni Angelo dei Marchesi d’Ossoli, of the marquises d’Ossoli, a mere member of the family. Still, he was honest about his prospects. The majestic Palazzo Ossoli in the Piazza Quercia had been sold a century earlier, and the Roman law of primogeniture meant he would gain little of what remained of the family fortune at his father’s death. Giovanni had not made up his mind whether to enter papal service, as his older brothers had. His future in Rome was as uncertain as Margaret’s.

  Yet he affected her powerfully. When Margaret turned down his proposal—“never dream[ing] I should take it” —and, both eager and sorrowing, left Rome for Venice with the Springs, soon to part from them as well, Giovanni Ossoli told her he would wait. She would change her mind and come back to him.

  Margaret wrote openly to Mickiewicz for advice, but to no one else. “Do not be too hasty about leaving places,” he counseled by return mail. “Prolong your good moments. Do not leave lightly those who would like to remain near you. This is in reference to the little Italian you met in the Church.” Even Mickiewicz shared the prejudice Margaret anticipated in other friends, terming Ossoli “the little Italian.” But Poland’s great national poet had taken up with his children’s governess. Was he encouraging an extramarital involvement with Ossoli that he saw—that Margaret might see—as similar: a powerful literary personage loving and loved by a younger besotted “nothing”? Mickiewicz urged Margaret to come back to Paris, but first “try to bring away from Italy what you will be able to take of it in joy and in health.” Could Mickiewicz have hoped to welcome a more “thoroughly” experienced Margaret at their next meeting, when he might be free to offer “all of me” in return?

  She wrote to family and friends in America, asking Horace Greeley for further advances on columns, requesting loans from her brother Richard, her mother, even Waldo Emerson, so that she could stay on in Europe without the support of the Springs. “A single year is so entirely inadequate to see all which I wish to see,” she wrote to Mary Rotch of Rhode Island, a wealthy friend to Waldo Emerson and the late Reverend Channing, and “I find myself better here.” She explained to them all, however, that she had little time to write letters, that they must follow her progress now through her Tribune columns. The dispatches recorded a vital outward life: “I take interest in the state of the people,” she wrote to William Channing. “I see the future dawning.” She predicted it would be “in important aspects Fourier’s future”—egalitarian, socialist.

  To William she confided a little more: “Art is not important to me now.” She would no longer write to him “of the famous people I see, of magnificent shows and places. All these things are only to me an illuminated margin on the text of my inward life”—an inward life she would not describe, but that now took precedence. She needed “a kind of springtime to renovate my faculties,” she wrote to Mary Rotch. She would find it in Rome, in the fall.

  So far as can be known, Margaret did not communicate with Giovanni Ossoli during the summer of 1847 as she traveled from Venice, where she spent an evening at Florian’s on the Piazza San Marco after parting tearfully with the Springs, to Florence (too “busy and intellectual,” Margaret complained, “more in its spirit like Boston, than like an Italian city”), and finally to Milan, where she fell in with “a circle of the aspiring youth,” disciples of Mazzini. In letters to Marcus Spring and anyone she hoped might aid her materially, Margaret emphasized the difficulties of solo travel. She had become ill in Brescia after making a journey “very profitable to the mind” through Vicenza, Verona, Mantua, and Lago di Garda. Though she had lived alone “in our own country,” it had been a frightening experience to fall sick “here where there is no one on whom I can call for aid in any case.” Once recovered, she had “nearly killed myself finishing a letter for the Tribune” in hopes of meriting another advance from Greeley. Traveling briefly into Switzerland, she was overcharged by her guide, then pestered by a well-meaning traveler who assumed she wanted company when all she wished for was a “quiet room . . . in a place where I was unknown, and where there was nothing, except the mountains to distract my attention.”

  But writing to her mother, who promised to send one hundred dollars once she’d received the sum from brother Eugene in repayment of a loan, Margaret stressed the “advantage I derive from being alone”: “if I feel the need of it, I can stop,” and she had in fact made a detour to visit the Armenian monastery on an island near Venice frequented by Byron. In Tuscany she paused to watch women braiding one another’s hair; in Assisi she mingled with a crowd of curious schoolgirls, inquired about their studies (reading, writing, and sewing), and chatted in Italian with a woman who called down to her from an upstairs window. “Who can ever be alone for a moment in Italy?” she asked her Tribune readers. To Richard, who finally extracted the hundred dollars from Eugene, Margaret wrote that since leaving the Springs, “I passed happier and more thoughtful hours than at all before in Europe.”

  The truth may have been somewhere in the middle—euphoric moments when she felt happy to be “alone with glorious Italy,” mixed with anxious ones and even times when, after being away for so long, Margaret felt “a yearni
ng for the loved familiar faces” and bravely vowed not to “yield to it.” To one of those longed-for familiars, Cary Sturgis, Margaret confessed what she would never tell the Springs—she had begun to feel “a wicked irritation against them for being the persons who took me away from France.” After floating as the sole passenger on a gondola that first week in Venice on her own, “I seemed to find myself again.” At last, “I begin to be in Italy”; she wished to “drink deep of this cup.”

  Without the Springs in tow, Margaret could mingle freely with the community of expatriates and returning exiles whose fervor for the cause of independence she instinctively shared and her travels had affirmed: “In this Europe how much suffocated life!” Particularly in Italy, Margaret believed, “the signs have improved so much since I came.” She felt “most fortunate to be here at this time,” she wrote to Richard. In Milan she cultivated a friendship with the marchioness Costanza Arconati Visconti, whom she had met first at the open-air dinner in Rome, and again in Florence for a celebration of Grand Duke Leopold’s relaxation of press censorship in Austrian-controlled Tuscany. But in Milan Margaret saw Arconati Visconti in her private residence, newly established after a twenty-five-year exile in Belgium and France, as well as at the marchioness’s villa on Lake Como, where Margaret spent two weeks in August. Here she could scrutinize this “specimen of the really highbred lady,” to Margaret a new breed entirely. Most striking was the way her hostess managed, “without any physical beauty,” to employ “the grace and harmony of her manners [to] produce all the impression of beauty.” An “intimate with many of the first men” of Italy—Mazzini, and the great poet Alessandro Manzoni, to whom Margaret gained an introduction in Milan—Costanza Arconati Visconti possessed a mind that was “strong clear, precise and much cultivated by intercourse both with books and men.”