Since she could not visit him, Margaret indulged herself in describing Nino to her friend, who was also a new mother. Nino had been “a strangely precocious infant,” Margaret thought, “through sympathy with me.” She tried to believe that it must be “a happiness for him to be with these more plebian, instinctive, joyous natures”—the family that cared for him in Rieti. Margaret herself had wished for a more ordinary upbringing. Yet “all the solid happiness I have known,” she wrote to Cary, “has been at times when he went to sleep in my arms.” She wished, “if I had a little money,” to “go with him into strict retirement for a year or two and live for him alone”—for “it is now I want to be with him.” But “this I cannot do.”
To Cary she could admit that in Rome “I only live from day to day watching the signs of the times.” Garibaldi’s regiment—men known to be “desperadoes,” even if they served the right cause—was stationed in Rieti, and King Ferdinand’s troops were massing only six miles off, across the border of the Papal States, readying to strike on Pio Nono’s behalf: “every day is to me one of mental doubt and conflict; how it will end, I do not know.” Margaret was ever vigilant, trying to “hold myself ready every way body and mind for any necessity.” It cannot be known whether Cary supplied the monetary assistance Margaret requested, but she agreed to keep Margaret’s secret, though she expressed doubt that any “secret can be kept in the civilized world.” Responding to Margaret’s sense of danger at hand, Cary offered to act as guardian for Nino if anything should happen to his parents. The gesture brought Margaret’s “profound gratitude,” but provoked her old caginess with Cary; while she sought her friend’s support and cherished her confidence, she disliked the feeling of dependence and wished to set the terms herself. “Should I live, I don’t know whether I should wish him to be an Italian or American citizen,” she answered Cary. “It depends on the course events take here politically.” Margaret no longer worried as much that “I might die”: “now I think I shall live and carry him round myself as I ride on my ass into Egypt,” referring to Mary and Joseph’s flight there. If Margaret was something of a Mary, whose son had been conceived mysteriously and born in rude surroundings, Giovanni figured as a kind of Joseph in search of vocation. Margaret had mentioned to Cary the title of marchese that she assumed was Giovanni’s, but explained that “being a nobleman is a poor trade in a ruined despotism just turning into a Republic.”
Margaret’s pen earned what little the couple could raise for Nino’s support. She had written two Tribune columns in late February of 1849 and completed a third in March, reporting: “The Roman Republic moves on better than could have been expected . . . Could Italy be left alone!” Instead, “treacherous, selfish men at home strive to betray, and foes threaten her from without on every side.” Ferdinand of the Two Sicilies and Charles Albert of Piedmont-Sardinia, the despised “King Wobble” who had fought for Italian unification when he thought he might be crowned king of all Italy, had both declared their opposition to the young Roman Republic. The only good news was Mazzini’s return. His rallying cry, “Dio e Popolo” (“God and the People”), encircling the Roman eagle, had already been minted on new coins; now he entered the Chamber of Deputies hailed as the champion of Italian unification who had fanned the flames of freedom into full blaze from abroad. Margaret reported on his speech from memory in her Tribune account: “Let us not hear of right, of left, of center . . . for us they have no meaning; the only divisions for us are of Republicans or non-Republicans.” After watching the failure of one insurrection after the next across Europe, Mazzini knew his first task was to preserve unity among the republic’s leadership if he hoped to sustain the revolutionary cause in Rome.
One night soon after his arrival, Mazzini answered a letter from Margaret with a surprise visit. “I heard a ring; then somebody speak my name,” she wrote to Marcus Spring, who had met Mazzini at the same time as Margaret in London. Italy’s hero looked “more divine than ever, after all his new, strange sufferings”—in the past year Mazzini had worked tirelessly to mediate a peaceful resolution to the northern Italian conflict, only to join the fighting along with Garibaldi’s foot soldiers in the mountains above Turin when negotiations broke down. Mazzini stayed with Margaret for two hours that night, and “we talked, though rapidly, of everything.” Margaret confided her own “new, strange sufferings,” as she had to Mickiewicz. Mazzini promised to return as often as possible, but the “crisis is tremendous.”
When Mazzini couldn’t visit, he sent Margaret tickets to attend his speeches to the assembly. Margaret admired “the celestial fire” that fueled his oratory, but she was drawn as much to a quality they shared, a worldly pragmatism that could acknowledge, at least in private, the precarious state of the republic: “the foes are too many, too strong, too subtle.” Margaret also recognized in Mazzini an exhaustion and sadness much like her own, if stemming from a different cause. After delivering each stirring speech in his “fine, commanding voice,” Mazzini appeared drained of energy, “as if the great battle he had fought had been too much for his strength, and that he was only sustained by the fire of his soul.” Neither would give up the cause, but only because of the hope that “Heaven helps sometimes.”
As spring arrived, Rome remained “as tranquil as ever, despite the trouble that tugs at her heart-strings,” Margaret wrote in the Tribune, ending her column with a rare digression from national politics to review the work of several American artists she had met in Italy. She paid special attention to Hicks, her portraitist, who was “struggling unaided to pursue the expensive studies of his art.” Margaret hoped that when Hicks returned to the United States, “some competent patron of art—one of the few who has mind as well as purse” would become his benefactor. She left her readers with a glimpse of a typical evening in the piazza beneath her windows: contadini gambling at the hand-game called morra, priests returning home by way of the nearby Porta Pia, stone cutters emerging from the sculptor Tenerani’s studio. High above all the activity in the square at day’s end, “the setting sun has just lit up the magnificent range of windows in Palazzo Barberini, and then faded tenderly, sadly, away, and the mellow bells have chimed the Ave Maria.” “O Stella!” Margaret called out to the evening star soon to rise in the night sky, to the star that marked the conclusion of her column, to Stella herself, the ideal beauty famously conjured up by Philip Sidney as the feminine embodiment of “sweet poesy”—“O Stella! woman’s heart of love, send yet a ray of pure light on this troubled deep!”
Margaret left Rome at the end of March for two weeks in Rieti, traveling with papers probably furnished by Mazzini that identified her as “la cittadina Margherita Ossoli,” a native of Rome twenty-nine years old; Mazzini had dropped ten years and made the American journalist an Italian by birth. At Rieti, she found Nino “in excellent health” and “so good that he sleeps in bed alone, day or night . . . sucking his little hand.” Best, after Nino’s momentary look of surprise, back in Margaret’s arms and “alone with me, he seemed to recognize me and bent his head and frowned as he did in the first days.” Nino was her own precociously sympathetic child again, now seven months old.
This time Margaret wondered in her letters to Giovanni whether it might be possible at last to “tell our secret.” Perhaps disclosure was “necessary for him”—for Nino’s sake—so the family could be united: “who knows if it will not be the best thing in the end?” Chiara was “good as always,” though the men of the Fiordiponte family revealed themselves to be crude drunkards. One night Margaret rushed downstairs in response to Chiara’s cries of “aiiuto” to find that Chiara’s husband, Nicola, had drawn a knife against his brother, who threw a piece of stove wood, narrowly missing Margaret’s head. She imagined that Nino might have been killed if she hadn’t been there. Giovanni urged her to bring Nino to Rome if his life was at risk. But Margaret understood that “it is necessary to think of everything . . . because our whole future lives depend upon the discretion of this moment.” Giovanni had
angered his older brothers enough by serving as an officer in the Civic Guard, which, since the day of Rossi’s assassination, considered the pope its enemy. His duties now included night watches, and he had not been able to join Margaret in Rieti for their April 4 anniversary: “We must pray to be happier another year.” Even if Giovanni was willing to risk a complete rift with the Ossolis, he would not be able to live with Margaret and Nino as a family. And by mid-April 1849, it had become too dangerous—more so than leaving their child in a household headed by a violent drunk—to bring Nino to Rome, whether or not Margaret and Giovanni decided to “tell our secret.”
Margaret returned to a city preparing for assault. Not only was France proving unsympathetic to its sister republic, but the retrograde French president, Prince Louis Napoleon, had dispatched a force of ten thousand men to regain the city for the pope. The French battalion took up a position thirty-five miles from Rome on the coast at Civitavecchia, flying the tricolor flags of both France and Italy, a deliberate ruse. Scarcely two months had passed since the morning when, as Margaret had written for the Tribune after the assembly’s brave vote, “I rose and went forth to seek the Republic.” That day the streets of Rome were filled with men wearing bright red liberty caps; a crowd had gathered in the Campidoglio, where Italy’s tricolor was raised and senators read out the ambitious provisions of the new constitution to shouts of “viva la Republica! viva Italia!” Margaret’s American companion that happy morning, unnamed in her Tribune account but possibly her friend Emelyn’s husband, the sculptor and former judge William Wetmore Story, had predicted the new republic wouldn’t last a month.
Now when she went for her morning walk the streets were quiet. The Borghese gardens, where she had fished Eddie Spring out of the fountain two years before, were empty even of their grand old oaks, cut down for use as fortifications. Giovanni’s regiment was stationed in the gardens of the Vatican, where the white peacocks that supplied feathers for the pope’s processional fans once strutted among scarlet poppies, fragrant orange trees, and rose hedges. The great birds, with tails “like golden ripples,” were gone now, along with the pope and his cardinals, replaced by armed men and their campfires on the gardens’ grassy banks. Margaret could still recall the “refreshment, keen and sweet,” she’d received when walking in the Vatican gardens during the spring of her first meeting with Giovanni. Now he was quartered there, his presence allowing her important access as a journalist to the innermost workings of the republic’s defense—and, as “wife,” to her “Carissimo Consorte.”
Alone in her room on the morning of April 28, after listing a series of recent betrayals—Charles Albert’s declaration of war, his son Victor Emmanuel II’s flight to Spain, Genoa’s refusal to join the republic, a “reaction” in Florence, ending with “the infamy of France”—Margaret made a final entry in her Roman diary: “Rome is barricaded, the foe daily hourly expected. Will the Romans fight?” From her window she could see “they are bringing boards I suppose to make a support for cannon, and it seems to be such play for men and boys alike.”
Did she remember writing long ago, from a small New England town where a revolution began, “I wish I were a man . . . I weary in this playground of boys, proud and happy in their balls and marbles”?
Margaret had wondered if she would be “called to act.” She did not fight, although she would hear of one brave woman, a mere girl of twenty-one and already a two-year veteran of the Italian campaigns, who “fought like a man, rather say a hero” alongside her husband, defending the walls of the city until struck by a cannonball in her side. She died crying “Viva l’Italia.” But as Rome fortified itself against invasion, Margaret was called by the “energetic and beneficent” Princess Belgioioso, who had already given a good portion of her fortune to fund a regiment at Milan, to direct one of the hospitals for the wounded in the expected attack.
On the morning of April 30, “Margherita Fuller” was named “Regolatrice” of the most ancient of Rome’s hospitals, the Fate Bene Fratelli on Tiber Island, and requested to report there by noon “if the alarm bell does not ring before.” She would be responsible for organizing the schedules of female nursing volunteers in order to staff the hospital “night and day,” as well as for attending at the bedsides of the wounded herself. Princess Belgioioso’s plan was a pioneering one; Florence Nightingale’s mission to Crimea was five years in the future. Although the exit from Rome of many of its priests left the hospitals understaffed, the presence of Belgioioso’s nurses was initially resisted at some of the nine hospitals she commandeered for the cause; doctors and medical students objected to the “female invasion” and specifically to the undignified sight of “a woman seated at a desk (exercising the greatest power in the hospital).” But the need for the volunteers became rapidly evident.
That same morning, a guard posted on the dome of St. Peter’s sighted French troops advancing in columns. Garibaldi’s regiment of “desperadoes,” twelve hundred seasoned patriots and six hundred veterans of the Lombardy war, had already arrived to join the Roman army—the Civic Guard, augmented with volunteers, students, and defectors from the Papal Guard, under Mazzini’s direction. France had expected an easy occupation, a merging of tricolors in the capital city of the religion both nations shared. But Mazzini and Garibaldi knew Louis Napoleon’s aim was to return the pope to power once his legion took up residence in Rome. Soon the unthinkable was happening, as Margaret exclaimed in a May 6 column for the Tribune—“the soldiers of republican France, firing upon republican Rome!”—firing on St. Peter’s, their cannonballs directly striking the Vatican.
Garibaldi led a fierce defense of the city walls, and on the afternoon of April 30, the French expeditionary force beat a hasty retreat after losing five hundred men in battle. Margaret speculated that the “quick and shameful” flight was the result of the French soldiers themselves feeling “demoralized by a sense of what an infamous course they were pursuing” in attempting to “destroy the last hope of Italian emancipation.” Garibaldi had wanted to drive the French troops all the way back to their ships on the coast, but Mazzini restrained him; there would be no reprisals, no needless displays of military might, only a dignified defense signaling to the outside world that the Roman republicans were reasonable men, not vengeful revolutionaries like the French, with their guillotines of the past century, their bloody “June Days” of last summer. Mazzini would negotiate with the French; he had already secured a temporary armistice. Besides, Garibaldi was needed to defend against King Ferdinand’s Neapolitan army, which crossed the border into the Papal States at Frascati as soon as the French withdrew.
And “Roman blood has flowed also,” Margaret wrote. She had spent the night of April 30 in the hospital on Tiber Island, where she had witnessed “the terrible agonies of those dying or who needed amputation . . . their mental pains, and longing for the[ir] loved ones.” Many were university students who “threw themselves into the front of the engagement” with no previous experience of battle. Margaret moved from one cot to the next in the large receiving hall, assisting in the flickering lamplight under the painted gaze of a flaxen-haired angel that filled an enormous canvas on one wall of the room, a beneficent feminine presence that may have merged with Margaret’s in the unsteady vision of injured and dying men. Mercifully, Giovanni was not among them. Across the river, the city was illuminated with celebratory bonfires and torchlight parades, and Margaret herself felt the thrill of righteous victory. As she walked the quiet streets at dawn on the first of May, she felt these had been “grand and impassioned hours.”
She met Giovanni in the Vatican gardens, and he showed her where the cannon had been concealed amid the flowering shrubs: “we climbed the wall to look out on the rich fields; the contadini were coming up with little white flags of peace; figures with black flags were still searching for dead bodies in the gully, and amid the tall canes.” On the wall beside her, Margaret noticed “a long red streak where a man’s life-blood had run down,” a vivid
reminder of the risk Giovanni faced. Climbing farther up into a tower “where charts and models had been kept,” she found a few officers sleeping on straw. Margaret had wanted to “look through the windows, each of which presented a view of distinct beauty, a calm Roman landscape, calmest in the world.” Gazing out on Italy’s storied campagna, she wondered, “How can men feel” the enmity of war when beholding such vistas of pastoral harmony?
Leaving Giovanni’s encampment, Margaret found the city had come to life again. In a later account for the Tribune, she reported finding the cardinals’ ornate carriages burning in the streets, wooden confessionals dragged out of the churches, and men making “mock confessions” in the piazzas: “I have sinned, father . . . Well, my son, how much will you pay to the church for absolution?” On Mazzini’s orders, the mayhem soon stopped, although not before six priests had been massacred. The “brotherly scope of Socialism” must be proven by maintaining order and showing respect for Rome’s sacred spaces, Mazzini insisted, even if its highest religious leader, Pio Nono, was no longer welcome. Dio e popolo.
At the gates to the Vatican gardens, Margaret had met the new American chargé d’affaires, Lewis Cass Jr., and found him more sympathetic to the republic than she’d expected. Cass knew Margaret at once: a small woman with auburn hair, dressed in one of her now faded Parisian gowns, she was easily recognized as the sole American journalist remaining in Rome, the one whose Tribune letters had stirred widespread support for the republican side. By the end of June, as her accounts of the siege reached American shores, Margaret would be singled out for blame as “the female plenipotentiary who furnishes the Tribune with diplomatic correspondence” in an angry letter from New York’s Bishop Hughes to the New York Courier and Inquirer, decrying the “reign of terror” instigated by the “revolutionists in Rome.” Concerned for her safety, Cass urged Margaret to move from her perch on the Piazza Barberini, dangerously near to one of the city’s gates, and into the more sheltered Casa Diez, a hotel near the Spanish Steps, now all but vacant of its usual English and American tourists and not far from Cass’s own lodgings at the Hotel de Russie. Cass would see to it that an American flag was raised, offering a modicum of protection in the event that the French broke through the city walls. Margaret readily agreed. From the Casa Diez on the Via Gregoriana, she could reach Tiber Island more quickly, and a newly improvised convalescent hospital on the grounds of the pope’s own Quirinal Palace was only blocks away.
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