But on December 20, three days after posting her Tribune column, Margaret guessed she might be pregnant. Could she not have expected this? Her health had never been steady, and at thirty-seven she was “no longer young.” Perhaps she believed herself too frail, too old to conceive a child. Had Giovanni, young and pious, so “truly the gentleman,” attempted any means to prevent conception? In America, where she had not—probably never would have—found her way into such a crisis, Margaret might have dared to employ an abortionist; the practice was legal there, a last resort elected, increasingly, even by married women who wished to limit family size. But here in Italy, with “none to help me,” as Margaret wrote to Waldo Emerson that awful day, she could only wait to see what the “incubus of the future” might bring—whether “accident or angel” might guide her, as she wrote to Cary Sturgis Tappan three weeks later—whether the pregnancy would take hold in the body she again considered weak, though signs of health were unmistakable in her fatigue, nausea: “I am tired of keeping myself up in the water without corks, and without strength to swim.” Just days before, she had rejoiced in her “surprizing” vigor. Now, she wrote Waldo, “nothing less than two or three years, free from care and forced labor, would heal all my hurts, and renew my life-blood at its source”: the length of time it would take to bear, nurse, and wean an infant. She had longed for a child—she trusted Giovanni as a lover. But what would he say when she told him? Would the young man wish to be a father? And how arrange their lives if he did?
Margaret’s anxious letter must have crossed with Waldo’s of early December. Now she received his ill-timed counsel: “I rejoice in your beatitude . . . but you must not stay alone long.” How many weeks had it been since she’d written to him of all the ways in which she was contentedly “alone” in Rome? He passed along recent news of “all the good people of that bog of ours”—Sam and Anna, the Channings, Cary. And then Waldo raised his own lament: “Shall we not yet—you, you, also,—as we used to talk, build up a reasonable society in that naked unatmospheric land”—in Concord—“and effectually serve one another?” Was there not still time to form the covenant of hearts and minds? In holding on to this hope, he told her, “I certainly do not grow old . . . All the persons who have been important to my—imagination . . . retain all their importance for me. I am their victim, & ready to be their victim, to the same extent as heretofore.” Still delivering lectures in England, Waldo wished only to return to the company of those “persons who speak my native language, & love what I love. Few—few!” But his proposal, more nostalgic than practical, was no help to Margaret now. Although Waldo would stay in Europe for another six months, she could not suggest a meeting.
A letter arrived from Richard, describing more of his own romantic reversals and asking her to return and set up housekeeping with him and their mother. “God knows I have not myself been wise in life,” she wrote to him on New Year’s Day, 1848. Although “the first two months of my stay in Rome were the best time I have had abroad,” the past two weeks had “quite destroyed me.” Now she expected “my health will never be good for any thing to sustain me in any work of value.” She was just thirty-seven years old, but her prospects seemed few. She imagined, almost hopefully, the end of her life: “I must content myself with doing very little and by and by comes Death to reorganize perhaps for a fuller freer life.” In a second letter, Margaret explained that she could make no definite plans until autumn: “There are circumstances and influences now at work in my life, not likely to find their issue till then.” Her child—if it lived, if she lived—would be born in September. For now, quite simply, “I am tired of life and feel unable to face the future.”
Writing to Cary, who had sent news of her wedding, Margaret was even more despairing: “this year, I enter upon a sphere of my destiny so difficult, that I, at present, see no way out, except through the gate of death . . . I have no reason to hope I shall not reap what I have sown, and do not. Yet how I shall endure it I cannot guess; it is all a dark, sad enigma.” She imagined Cary’s days as a new bride: “you have really cast your lot with another person, live in a house I suppose; sleep and wake in unison with humanity; an island flowers in the river of your life.” None of this could be Margaret’s, although she too had “cast her lot” with another. Of “my present self,” Margaret would say nothing, except that “a love, in which there is all fondness, but no help, flatters in vain. I am all alone; nobody around me sees any of this.”
In Rome that January, the winter rains set in—ten days, sixteen, thirty—with no letup. To her sister Ellen, Margaret wrote, “Rome is Rome no more.”
19
“A being born wholly of my being”
EVEN AT HER MOST DEJECTED, WRITING TO WALDO EMERSON at her first suspicion of the pregnancy, Margaret had managed to shift moods to express her intention to write for the British press on “my view of the present position of things here” in Italy. She repeated to Waldo what she had written to Cary Sturgis from Paris: “I find how true was the lure that always drew me towards Europe. It was no false instinct that said I might here find an atmosphere to develop me in ways I need.” Those ways were as much professional as personal.
Although Margaret couldn’t write home about the specifics of her private life—she “made a law to myself to keep this secret as rigidly as possible”—her Tribune dispatches were a source of detailed news that her American readers found not just absorbing but indispensable as a wave of revolution swept across Europe in 1848. “God ’twas delicious,” recalled the poet Walt Whitman of the time when, working as a New York City newspaperman himself, he eagerly followed Margaret’s accounts of “That brief, tight, glorious grip / Upon the throats of kings”—the year when it seemed that all of Europe might fight its way to freedom. The style of reporting Margaret had developed, first in her travels in the West and then on her forays into the netherworld of the Great Metropolis, personal in tone but visionary in scope, was a perfect match for the tumultuous world events of the next eighteen months. As Margaret would later write, Europe had come to seem “my America,” an unsettled territory where liberty was at hand, while the New World she had left behind had grown “stupid with the lust of gain, soiled by crime in its willing perpetuation of slavery, shamed by an unjust war,” the imperialist conflict with Mexico over the annexation of Texas.
Margaret had predicted revolution in a column, composed during her “happiest” days of October, that reached the Tribune’s pages on January 1, just as she sank into depression. “Still Europe toils and struggles with her idea,” Margaret had observed of the forces gathering against the old regime, but “all things bode and declare a new outbreak of the fire, to destroy old palaces of crime!” Austria had sent troops to occupy Ferrara the previous summer in hopes of provoking resistance that would in turn justify an Austrian invasion of central Italy. In response Pius IX had armed the Civic Guards in Bologna and Rome and matched Tuscany in granting press freedoms. Mazzini, watching expectantly from London, exploited the moment by writing an open letter to the pope, widely circulated in Rome and even tossed into the pontiff’s carriage by a conspirator, urging Pio Nono to take charge of all the Italian states under Austrian rule and lead them in a fight for independence and a national democracy. “Our age is one where all things tend to a great crisis,” Margaret had written hopefully, “not merely to revolution but to radical reform.”
January brought “the fortieth day of rain, and damp, and abominable reeking odors” to Rome, Margaret mustered the energy to write for the Tribune. “As to eating, that is a bygone thing; wine, coffee, meat, I have resigned; vegetables are few.” The only food she could stomach was rice. But there was “authentic news” to report: “full insurrection” in Palermo and threatened uprisings in Apulia, Basilicata, Calabria, and Naples—where, she added in a last-minute postscript, “revolution has now broken out” —had forced the Sicilian king Ferdinand to grant a popular constitution to his lands in the south, more than half the Italian peninsula.
By March, Margaret wrote to William Channing, “war is everywhere,” but she was thrilled, not dismayed: “I have been engrossed, stunned almost, by the public events that have succeeded one another with such rapidity and grandeur.” The ferment and frustration Margaret had witnessed firsthand in both Europe’s workers and the intelligentsia could no longer be contained. Uprisings across the Continent brought a new French republic, the resignation of Austria’s Prince Metternich in Vienna, the separation of Hungary from Austrian rule. There had been popular insurrections in all the states of Germany. Margaret was optimistic that democracy in Italy, where Milan was now “in the hands of my friends”—the young radicals she had met the previous summer—would be achieved without “need to spill much blood.”
The turmoil meant “I cannot leave Rome”; it was simply too dangerous to travel, Margaret reported to William, with regiments forming and leaving the city to join the fight against Austria. To an acquaintance in Paris, from whom she hoped to gather a firsthand account of King Louis Philippe’s “dethronement,” she explained simply, “I am nailed here by want of money.” But her physical safety, her straitened finances, even her pregnancy were surpassed by a more compelling reason for staying in Rome. “It is a time such as I always dreamed of, and for long secretly hoped to see,” she wrote to William; she expected to “return possessed of a great history.” The book for which she had been gathering material now seemed both urgent and epochal, destined to become the saga of “a great past and a living present.”
Mickiewicz arrived in March with a small “squadron” of Polish exiles on their way home to make revolution, planning to recruit any of his countrymen living in Rome. He quartered his regiment on the Via della Pozzetto, not far from Margaret’s rooms, but he may have stayed with her. “Mickiewicz is with me here, and will remain some time,” Margaret wrote in a letter to Waldo explaining why she would not meet him in Paris, where he planned a respite from his lectures in May, “if bullets have ceased to sing on the Boulevards.” She didn’t hide from Waldo the fact that Mickiewicz had been her main object in considering a return trip to Paris, and “I have him much better here.”
But there was no long-delayed tryst. Margaret was nearly three months pregnant. She had not been surprised to find that Giovanni proved himself “unswerving and most tender. I have never suffered a pain that he could relieve,” she would later write. But her health was still poor. “At present, I am not able to leave the fire, or exert myself at all,” she wrote to Waldo. A doctor she consulted gave the opinion that her health would “of itself revive,” and she mentioned vaguely to Waldo a plan of “moving for the summer,” making her recovery, as the doctor advised, “the first object.” Perhaps as encouraging as the doctor’s assurances, which she did not tell Waldo concerned a pregnancy, and Giovanni’s steady attendance, was Mickiewicz’s acceptance of her situation. Her mentor in “full and healthy” living saw nothing wrong in her unlooked-for pregnancy, and Margaret began to welcome, cautiously, the prospect of motherhood. Years ago she had given up hope of becoming “a bestower of life,” but she had never given up longing for a child, “a being born wholly of my being.” To Waldo, who had sent news of his second son, three-year-old Edward, she wrote, “Children, with all their faults, seem to me the best thing we have.”
After confiding in Mickiewicz and finding relief, it was hard to keep her vow of silence. In a letter to Jane Tuckerman, a favorite pupil from Greene Street School days, Margaret came close to revealing her secret. “The Gods themselves walk on earth, here in the Italian Spring,” she wrote as the weather improved and the wave of revolution swept onward. “But ah dearest, the drama of my fate is very deep, and the ship plunges deeper as it rises.” Margaret expected that “my present phase of life” would “amaze” Jane, if only she could “know how different” it was, how her former teacher had “enlarg[ed] the circle of my experiences.” All Margaret would say now was “I love Rome more every hour; but I do not like to write details, or really to let any one know any thing about it. I pretend to, perhaps, but in reality, I do not betray the secrets of my love.” It had been a decade since Margaret taught a teenage Jane Tuckerman the myths of Aspasia, Daphne, and Atalanta, “who wished to live in the enjoyment of ‘single blessedness.’” Now Margaret informed her one-time pupil, provocatively, “I have done, and may still do, things that may invoke censure.” Yet “in the foundation of character, in my aims, I am always the same:—and I believe you will always have confidence that I act as I ought and must.” Would Margaret marry Giovanni Ossoli now? Or wait to see if their child lived? Or, even then, retain her “single blessedness”?
In late March of 1848, she traveled, probably with Giovanni, to the coast at Ostia. “A million birds sang,” Margaret wrote on April 1 in a dispatch for the Tribune, “the surf rushed in on a fair shore . . . the sea breezes burnt my face, but revived my heart; I felt the calm of thought, the sublime hopes of the Future, Nature, Man.” It was the first column she had completed since late January. “Now this long dark dream—to me the most idle and most suffering season of my life—seems past,” she wrote. “Nature seems in sympathy with the great events that are transpiring; with the emotions which are swelling the hearts of men.” Returning to Rome, she learned the astonishing “official” news that, with the capitulation of the Hapsburg viceroy at Verona on March 22, all of Italy had become “free, independent, and One.” She hoped this would “prove no April foolery, no premature news.”
But of course it was. As quickly as revolution had forced concessions and abdications throughout Europe, reaction set in. Margaret had seen the Austrian coat of arms “dragged through the streets of Rome” and burned in the Piazza del Popolo to cries of “Miracolo, Providenza!” She had read accounts of the hero’s welcome Mickiewicz received in Florence when he arrived with his regiment—“O, Dante of Poland!”—and she had given her Tribune readers his full address to the cheering crowds. She learned of Mazzini’s triumphal return to Milan in April; until this month the target of a death warrant, this “most beauteous man,” in Margaret’s estimation, was now greeted as his country’s true leader. But with Mickiewicz no longer in Rome, her spirits flagged. At Easter on April 22, in contrast to last year’s blissful discoveries at St. Peter’s, the “gorgeous shows” were “fatiguing beyond any thing I ever experienced,” the “benedicti leave me unblest.” And on April 29, the holy man who had celebrated his first Easter mass as pope only a year earlier turned traitor to the cause of Italian unification, withdrawing his support from the war against Austrian rule, taking the course opposite to the one Mazzini had urged in his open letter of six months before. Pressured by Catholic monarchies on the run in France, Austria, and Spain to retreat from civil leadership, Pio Nono now instructed the people of Italy to “abide in close attachment to their respective sovereigns.” Angry mobs filled the Corso in front of Margaret’s apartment on the morning of the pope’s announcement, and the Civic Guard took control of the gates to the city. Demonstrations lasted well into May. “Italy was so happy,” Margaret grieved along with the citizens of Rome, in “loving” this “one man high placed” who seemed willing to serve the people rather than distant, corrupt, and exploitive monarchs. “But it is all over.” In mid-May, the ousted Ferdinand II, king of the Two Sicilies, regained Naples in a coup, and an Austrian counteroffensive led by the brilliant military strategist Count Joseph Radetzky began to systematically undo the work of the “radicals” in the north.
By now Margaret had made plans to spend the remaining months of her pregnancy in L’Aquila, a remote “bird’s-nest village of the Middle Ages” in the Abruzzi Mountains, seventy miles northeast of Rome, where she would deliver the baby in secret. Although most foreign tourists avoided Rome in the summer for fear of contracting Roman fever—malaria—Margaret’s body already revealed enough of her condition that she had hidden from a courier sent by Costanza Arconati Visconti to deliver a letter, and the American novelist Caroline Kirkland was expected to arrive soon and seek o
ut Margaret. She could not settle in any of the closer spa towns—Ostia, Frascati, Tivoli—frequented by American tourists or wealthy Italians. And she would have to live alone. Giovanni must remain in the city so as not to arouse the suspicions of his family and to serve with his regiment; after the pope’s defection, the Civic Guard had increasingly operated under its own leadership, readying to fight under the banner of a republic, if it was raised.
Margaret would not tell the name of the town—only “I am going into the country,” or “into the mountains,” as she wrote to her brother Richard, Waldo, and Costanza Arconati Visconti. At the urging of Mickiewicz, she allowed a young American artist with an atelier in Rome, Thomas Hicks, to paint her portrait before they both left the city at the end of May—Margaret for her “mountain solitude,” Hicks to meet Waldo Emerson in London, bearing gifts of engravings for Margaret’s friends and family and “a piece of the porphyry pavement of the Pantheon” for Waldo, which Margaret had acquired “by bribe” from workers mending the tiles. Hicks was the “only artist” Margaret had met in Europe as “deeply penetrated by the idea of social reform” as she, perhaps the result of his own poverty. Hicks’s “struggles and privations” equaled Margaret’s; he’d been similarly overlooked by rich relatives and was getting by on rare commissions. He was probably the man Margaret had in mind when she wrote to her former pupil Jane Tuckerman, “The artists’ life is not what you fancy; poor, sordid, unsocially social, saving baiocchis [pennies] and planning orders.” Hicks knew her secret too. In the portrait, Hicks seated Margaret fancifully on a red velvet bench in a Venetian portico, pale but full-bodied, swelling with her unborn child. A portrait bust of Eros on a pillar hovers in the background, just as the lyrical Erato had over her bed. The young socialist, enamored of Italian sacred art, had painted Margaret as an expectant, careworn Madonna, with Love as her god.
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