As the day of the baptism approached, the day when she could leave if she chose, as she must, Margaret wrote a confused letter to Giovanni, directing him to find her a room in Rome, but not for long. Nino “becomes more interesting every day,” yet Margaret needed “to spend some time with you,” to “go once again into the world from which I have been apart now for 5 months.” But “I don’t want to settle in Rome so as not to be able to leave if I am too unhappy away from the baby.”
She would go. Still, Nino “has grown much fatter . . . he starts to play and dance . . . He bends his head toward me when I ask for a kiss.” And Giovanni? “I love you much more than during the first days because I have proof of how good and pure your heart is.” She could not now have them both—and Rome.
To a canny reader, Margaret’s Tribune columns told the whole story, from her loss of appetite, reported in late January, to the “swelling” hopes of a republic in March, to the cessation of her dispatches for six months of “seclusion” in summer and fall. And when she resumed her column in early December of 1848, at the end of a year of “revolutions, tumults, panics, hopes,” Margaret wrote of her return to the city by carriage after a weekend of torrential rains: “The rivers had burst their bounds, and beneath the moon the fields round Rome lay one sheet of silver.” As she waited at the city gate for her bags to be inspected, Margaret strayed onto the grounds of a ruined villa, the gardens of the first-century Roman historian Sallust—“the scene of great revels, great splendors in the old time.” Was a historian ever equal to the task of revelation? “Strange things have happened now,” Margaret wrote, “the most attractive part of which—the secret heart—lies buried or has fled . . . Of that part historians have rarely given a hint.” Yet here was Margaret’s hint, her cry: although “I was very ready to return . . . I left what was most precious”—that, “I could not take with me.”
“Were you here, I would confide in you fully,” Margaret wrote to her mother from Rome in mid-November, “and have more than once, in the silence of the night, recited to you those most strange and romantic chapters in the story of my sad life.” She had not been prepared for “this kind of pain,” she wrote later to Cary Sturgis Tappan, “the position of a mother separated from her only child.” This also was “too frightfully unnatural.”
But neither was she prepared for the “strange and romantic chapters” that unfolded in Rome on her return, and quickly she became absorbed in recounting them for her Tribune readers, in playing her “part therein.” By the time she returned to the city, nearly all of Europe’s revolutions had failed or lost their momentum; the “springtime of nations” had passed. In France, the fragile coalition of socialists, workers, and shopkeepers that had formed so swiftly to depose King Louis Philippe in February had splintered during the terrible “June Days” of bloody street fighting in Paris. The ensuing election of the Imperialist party’s Prince Louis Napoleon as president brought about only a sham Second Republic, which would turn Empire in little more than a year. Similar dissension among the leaders of uprisings in Germany, Hungary, and Vienna opened the way for the return of autocratic rule. But although Pio Nono had refused to support the radicals in Milan, Ferrara, and Naples in outright war with their sovereigns, the Papal States under his rule, a wide band at the center of the Italian peninsula that included Rome and the ancient university town of Bologna, remained the one portion of Italy, perhaps of the entire Continent, where a popular impetus toward the “radical reform” that Margaret favored remained strong.
Rome was “empty of foreigners” now, Margaret wrote to her Tribune readers in early December 1848: “most of the English have fled in affright—the Germans and French are wanted at home—the Czar has recalled many of his younger subjects; he does not like the schooling they get here.” Giovanni had easily found Margaret a room in a central location, on the top floor of a high corner building overlooking the Piazza Barberini. From her windows she had views of the pope’s palace at the Quirinal and, across the piazza with Bernini’s immense travertine Triton Fountain as its centerpiece (the brawny kneeling sea god held an enormous conch to his lips and blew jets of water high into the air), of the Palazzo Barberini, the imposing residence of one of Rome’s principal families, and beyond that, the dome of St. Peter’s. The palazzo, also of Bernini’s execution, dominated the square with its several stories of arched, leaded glass windows, speaking the message to the outside world of its baroque interior ceiling fresco, Allegory of Divine Providence and Barberini Power. At the foot of Margaret’s own modest stucco building at 60 Piazza Barberini, on the opposite corner of the square from the palazzo, was nestled Bernini’s more delicate Fountain of the Bees, another tribute to the Barberini family and a watering spot for passing wagon horses.
Just days after her return, Pio Nono’s newly appointed prime minister, Count Pellegrino Rossi, whose forthright opposition to Italian unification many credited with the pope’s disappointing concessions to Austria, was stabbed in the back as he climbed the steps to a meeting of the Chamber of Deputies and left for dead by his own troops, who “remained at their posts, and looked coolly on,” Margaret wrote the following day in her letter to her mother. That evening the streets filled with soldiers and civilians united in singing “Happy the hand which rids the world of a tyrant!” Although she didn’t join in, Margaret too felt the “terrible justice” of the deed. The same crowd stormed the Quirinal the next day, firing on Pius IX’s residence when he refused to appear; the pope’s Swiss Guard returned fire. From her room, Margaret heard gunshots followed by the drumbeat of the Civic Guard called to arms. Through her eagle’s-nest window, she could see a wounded man carried by on a stretcher, followed soon after by Prince Barberini’s carriage, which clattered to a halt in the palace courtyard while liverymen hurriedly barred the gates. “Thank Heaven, we are poor, we have nothing to fear!” exclaimed the servant of Margaret’s landlady, who had joined Margaret at the window. It was a sentiment Margaret shared and, as she wrote to her mother, hoped would “soon be universal in Europe.” Scarcely more than five years earlier, in rejecting a founding stake in the Brook Farm community, Margaret had scoffed, “Utopia is impossible to build up” on earth. In Europe, she had become a believer.
Although she’d begun her letter by admitting to a sadness she would not name and confessed that “at one time . . . I thought I might die,” Margaret assured her mother that she was safe on the streets of Rome despite the civic unrest: “I am on the conquering side.” Besides, as she’d written of the journey from Rieti over treacherously flooded roads, “I have never yet felt afraid when really in the presence of danger, though sometimes in its apprehension.” This was the closest she could come to telling her mother about the anxious months awaiting Nino’s birth, and her courage during labor.
Back in Rome, Margaret once again invited considerable risk by throwing in her lot with the revolutionaries, but the high stakes reinforced her difficult decision to leave Nino. This was a moment like no other—or rather, for Margaret, a time that recalled the uncertain beginnings of the American republic, a chapter in history she had glimpsed as a girl attending a reception for that revolution’s hero, the marquis de Lafayette, whose arrival in Boston had made her painfully aware that “to a female . . . the avenues of glory are seldom accessible,” even as she aspired to tread them. “These events have, to me, the deepest interest,” she wrote to her mother now from Rome. “These days are what I always longed for,—were I only free from private care!” In response to her mother’s urging that she come home, Margaret replied: “I wish to see America again; but in my own time, when I am ready, and not to weep over hopes destroyed and projects unfulfilled.” In her thirty-eight years she had wept too often over disappointed hopes and abandoned plans.
In Margaret’s Tribune account of the Rossi assassination and its aftermath, she implored “America” to send a “good Ambassador” to Rome in the crisis, “one that has experience of foreign life, that he may act with good judgment; and,
if possible, a man that has knowledge and views which extend beyond the cause of party politics in the United States.” In the spirit of Woman in the Nineteenth Century she continued, “Another century, and I might ask to be made Ambassador myself . . . But woman’s day has not come yet.” Margaret revealed that “these past months” of seclusion had “sharpened my perception as to the ills of Woman’s condition and remedies that must be applied.” She had hope for Rome, for Italy, and for her own effectiveness as advocate for the cause in the American press. But as for women, “I am very tired of the battle with giant wrongs, and would like to have some one younger and stronger arise to say what ought to be said, still more to do what ought to be done.” To achieve “radical reform” of women’s lives would require methods more sophisticated than armed revolt. “Enough!” she declared. As to the matter of an ambassador, in the end President Polk, whom Margaret so reviled for waging war with Mexico, would send the young, untried Lewis Cass Jr., son of Senator Cass, one of Polk’s chief supporters on the Mexican War and an advocate of states’ rights on the question of slavery.
“Rome has at last become the focus of the Italian revolution and I am here,” Margaret wrote in her diary on January 1, 1849. She had traveled to Rieti at Christmastime, satisfying herself that Nino “seems to be well,” although “not much bigger than when I left him,” she wrote to Giovanni. Their son, now almost four months old, seemed much the same—“same gestures” and “very charming”—and his daily habits, sleeping, and fretting seemed “better than with me.” The rooms where he stayed with Chiara’s family were unheated, and Margaret caught cold, but “surely” Nino would be “stronger for having been so exposed in his first few months,” she persuaded herself. She had been appalled to find his little body—though not his face—marked with scars and lingering pustules, the remainder of what she at first took to be smallpox, despite her successful efforts to have Nino inoculated against the disease before she left for Rome. The doctor she had asked to look in on him had never come—“I suppose he thought it wasn’t worth saving our child,” she wrote to Giovanni, but mercifully Nino had survived the illness, which was after all only chickenpox.
The baby “seemed to recognize me,” Margaret wrote, relieved—and “when I picked him up he rested his dear head on my shoulder for so long.” Nights were best: “I had so much pleasure in sleeping with him.” During the day, “it doesn’t go so well; there is hunger, cold.” Mother and son listened to the church bells on Christmas Eve. “He seemed very excited . . . he did not want to sleep, nor let the others sleep.” It would be painful to “leave our dear child” again. But “Rome is always Rome.” She needed to return.
A week after Rossi’s assassination, the pope had fled the city, departing the Vatican through a secret doorway and disguised as a priest, taking refuge with Sicily’s King Ferdinand. Pio Nono appointed a council to govern in his absence, made up of “men of princely blood” but with “character so null that everybody laughed and said he chose those who could best be spared if they were killed,” Margaret wrote in the Tribune; no one paid the council any attention. The way was clear for the meeting of the Constitutional Assembly, and in early February representatives from all over Italy began to fill the hotels in Rome, so recently abandoned by “the Murray guide book mob.”
Margaret watched from a balcony on the Piazza di Venezia, for centuries the hub of Roman carnival festivities, as a grand procession of the delegates passed, led by regiments of soldiers, many of them wounded in the recent war with Austria, flying the banners of the Sicilies, Venice, and Bologna. The flag of Naples was “veiled with crape,” in mourning for King Ferdinand’s savage bombardment of the city the previous spring. The bands “struck up the Marseillaise,” the battle hymn of the first French republic, as the representatives entered the piazza, among them Giuseppe Garibaldi, the hero of the past summer’s fighting in the north and Mazzini’s confederate in the failed uprising of two decades before. Garibaldi had spent his own twenty-year exile in South America, first joining gaucho rebels in Brazil and then raising an “Italian legion” to fight in the Uruguayan civil war; he’d brought sixty of his most loyal soldiers, the core of his highly skilled regiment, back with him to Europe.
On this day, everyone “walked without other badge of distinction than the tricolored scarf” of a unified Italy, Margaret noted, in contrast to Pio Nono’s council, which had first met “only fourteen months ago”; mostly men of noble rank, they arrived in “magnificent carriages lent by the Princes for the occasion,” with “liveried attendants follow[ing], carrying their scutcheons.” Now “Princes and Counselors have both fled or sunk into nothingness.” In those former “Counselors was no Counsel,” Margaret wrote for the Tribune. “Will it be found in the present? Let us hope it!”
On February 8 came the proclamation of a republic. An expectant crowd gathered in the same courtyard where Rossi had fallen, waiting late into the night for the assembly’s decree, and at an hour past midnight the news was delivered. The jubilant multitude rushed away to “ring all the bells.”
Reflecting on the rapid series of events, Margaret wrote to her American readers, “The revolution, like all genuine ones, has been instinctive, its results unexpected and surprising to the greater part of those who achieved them.” In a subsequent session, the assembly voted to call Mazzini to Rome, where he would soon become the most powerful of three triumvirs selected to lead the young republic through its infancy, as the new government prepared to implement a program of drastic reform. A punitive tax on flour would be repealed, a national railway system constructed, church properties claimed for inexpensive housing, and papal lands outside Rome divided among the contadini (Italy’s peasant class).
It had been a Roman winter unlike any other, even in terms of the weather, with each day as sunny as the previous one. In the middle of the excitement, Margaret received letters from both Sarah and James Clarke, Sarah asking advice in planning a European tour, James providing news of Boston friends and asking when she’d come home. Margaret had begun to worry that “people in U.S. are fast forgetting me,” but her interest in the New Englanders who had once made up her “large and brilliant circle” was waning too. “O Jamie,” she responded. “What come back for?” Certainly not for “Brownson [and] Alcott and other rusty fusty intel. and spiritual-ities.” Here in Rome, “men live for something else beside money and systems, the voice of noble sentiment is understood.” She had found in Italy “a sphere much more natural to me than what the old puritans or the modern bankers have made” in America, the now stagnant and degraded “new” world.
Margaret had not lost her affection for the Concord Puritan, Waldo Emerson, to whom she wrote a half-truth: “I am leading a lonely life here in Rome.” She was missing Nino, and she saw Giovanni less often since he’d been quartered with his regiment of the Civic Guard, now the army of the republic. But “the sun shines every day,” and Rome “seems my Rome this winter”—“my spirits have risen again to concert pitch.” To Emelyn Story, Margaret admitted that she had “screwed my expenses down to the lowest possible peg,” but “nothing can be more tranquil than has been the state of Rome all Winter,” she told her American readers, perhaps wishing to advertise the peaceful nature of this revolution.
But Margaret was not so blindered by optimism that she did not see threats to the stability of the fledgling Roman state. As she wrote to Sarah Clarke, “France is not to be depended on” despite its status as a republic, “and the Pope is now become decidedly a traitor, willing to make use of any means to recover his temporal power.” She expected Pio Nono to “call the aid of the foreign armies. We shall know by April or May.” Even if reports of the “Marseillaise” being played in the Piazza di Venezia reached Paris, little could be done to rouse French support of Italian unification in what Margaret suspected were the last days of Louis Napoleon’s Second Republic. To her brother Richard, Margaret wrote of her determination to “accomplish at least one of my desires”: “to see the en
d of the political struggle in Italy and write its history.” She believed the republican cause would “come to its crisis within this year. But to complete my work as I have begun I must watch it to the end.” If “written in the spirit which breathes through me,” her book might record “a worthy chapter in the history of the world.”
Margaret was keeping from Sarah and Jamie, Waldo and Richard, the pain of her separation from Nino, which deepened as weeks passed without seeing her son. She sent yet another letter of oblique disclosure to William Channing—“I am not what I should be on this earth . . . a kind of chastened libertine I rove, pensively, always, in deep sadness.” Sometimes guilt over leaving Nino, perhaps over giving in to the passion that brought the boy to life, gripped her. “Nothing is left good of me, except at the bottom of the heart, a melting tenderness,” she wrote, perhaps seeking absolution from the Unitarian minister, her comrade and friend. “She loves much,” Margaret wrote, paraphrasing Luke’s well-known account of the pardon of Mary Magdalene: “Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much.” But Margaret found no solace in so cryptic an admission: “Thus I now die daily.”
Finally she made a frank confession to Cary Sturgis Tappan, requesting that Cary keep her secret and asking for help in paying for Nino’s care. Margaret’s letter does not survive, but two subsequent ones reveal the “true consolation” she experienced in communicating her feelings. Margaret had not even told Giovanni, as she did Cary, of the reproach she’d felt from Nino when she’d first taken him in her arms again at Christmastime: the “little swaddled child” had “made no sound but leaned his head against my bosom, and staid so,” as if to ask, “how could you abandon me?” The wet nurse Chiara told Margaret that on the day she’d left for Rome, Nino “could not be comforted, always refusing the breast and looking at the door.” The brief reunion with her son had been as heart-rending as it was gratifying.
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