Now came a longer wait, as lonely and suspenseful, as full of worry and fear, as the past summer’s wait for Nino’s birth. Would France honor the truce Mazzini had brokered? “The French seem to be amusing us with a pretence of treaties, while waiting for the Austrians to come up,” Margaret wrote to her brother Richard. She closed her May 27 letter to the Tribune with these words: “I am alone in the ghostly silence of a great house, not long since full of gay faces and echoing with gay voices, now deserted by every one but me.”
It was when she thought about Nino that Margaret lost her courage, “became a coward”: “It seemed very wicked to have brought the little tender thing into the midst of cares and perplexities we had not feared in the least for ourselves.” At night she “imagined every thing.” Perhaps Nino would be killed by troops massing outside the city, as she had heard the Croatian soldiers fighting for Austria in Lombardy had massacred babies; they might set fire to Chiara’s house and Margaret would not be there to save him. Giovanni could be killed in the fighting; Margaret herself might not survive the French assault. What would become of Nino then? Since Nino’s birth, “my heart is bound to earth as never before.” But she could not leave, she “could not see my little boy.”
Garibaldi’s desperadoes had repelled the Neapolitan army at Frascati, but Louis Napoleon had sent his own reinforcements to Italy rather than wait for Austria to join the offensive, tripling his army and supplying powerful siege artillery and a corps of engineers to dig trenches. In the early morning hours of June 2, violating the truce due to expire in two days, the advance guard of a force of thirty thousand French soldiers reached the outskirts of Rome, seized the strategic hillside villas Pamfili and Orsini, and began to fire at long range on the city.
“What shall I write of Rome in these sad but glorious days?” Margaret began a June 10 letter to the Tribune. “Plain facts are the best; for my feelings I could not find fit words.” She had written out the plain facts in a letter to Emelyn Story immediately following that first “terrible” battle, a “real” one that Margaret witnessed from the top-floor loggia of the Casa Diez. Beginning at four in the morning, the fighting lasted “to the last gleam of light”—sixteen hours. “The musket-fire was almost unintermitted,” punctuated by the “roll of the cannon” from Castel St. Angelo, the fortress near the Vatican gardens where she knew Giovanni and his men must have joined the fray. With a spyglass Margaret could see “the smoke of every discharge, the flash of the bayonets.” She could see the men. “The Italians fought like lions,” she would write later to Waldo Emerson.
Under clear skies and a full moon, the “cannonade” continued night and day until the morning of June 6. Margaret made her way to the hospital each day, arriving once just as a rocket, fired over the city walls, exploded in the Fate Bene Fratelli’s venerable interior courtyard. The “poor sufferers” in their cots called out in fear: “they did not want to die like mice in a trap.” But with an army half the size of the French legion, and most of its soldiers untrained, the citizens of the Roman Republic could hardly hope for any other fate.
Mazzini—and Margaret—had known the situation was hopeless, save for the unlikely “help” of heaven. If Louis Napoleon hadn’t supplied his own reinforcements, the Austrians would have been next to lay siege to Rome, joined by King Ferdinand’s Sicilian army at full force. Hope, if there was any, lay in holding out as long as possible, presenting to the eyes of the world a brave defense, and proving the French assault morally indefensible. Margaret’s dispatches to the Tribune and her projected book became key elements in a strategy that would outlast the immediate conflict. If the effort “fails this time,” they both believed, it will succeed in the coming “age.” But the cost to the city and its people would be enormous.
“Rome is being destroyed,” Margaret wrote to Waldo Emerson in mid-June as the French advanced their trenches ever nearer to the city walls: “her glorious oaks; her villas, haunts of sacred beauty, that seemed the possession of the world forever,” all these “must perish, lest a foe should level his musket from their shelter.” Margaret pitied Mazzini as the leader of the republic’s desperate stand: “to me it would be so dreadful to cause all this bloodshed, to dig the graves of such martyrs . . . I could not, could not!”
Yet Margaret did, in her own way, help dig the graves by attending the injured and dying in the hospitals each day, learning firsthand “how terrible gunshot-wounds and wound-fever are,” watching a brave university student kiss his arm goodbye after it had been cut off to save his life and reporting the moment to her readers. At such times Margaret began to “forget the great ideas” that propelled Mazzini, Garibaldi, and the Roman assembly, and instead to “sympathize with the poor mothers” who had nursed these “precious forms, only to see them all lopped and gashed.” But the “beautiful young men” themselves would not forget the ideas that had sealed their fates. One crippled youth looked forward to wearing his uniform, tattered by gunshot, on festival days celebrating the founding of the republic. Another cheered Margaret by clasping her hand “as he saw me crying over the spasms I could not relieve, and faintly cried, ‘Viva l’Italia.’” She watched another soldier “kissing the pieces of bone that were so painfully extracted from his arm, hanging them around his neck.” He would wear them “as the true relics of to-day,” mementos proving he had “done and borne something for his country and the hopes of humanity.” In her work as a volunteer nurse, Margaret was also accomplishing a great deal in “the way of observation,” as she wrote Waldo Emerson, playing her part in Mazzini’s campaign of moral suasion. All these anecdotes would be shaped for publication in the Tribune, conveying with their pathos the power and righteousness of the Roman Republic’s “great ideas.”
But Margaret’s private anguish, unexpressed in these weeks under siege to any beyond Giovanni and Lewis Cass, to whom she had at last confided her secret, was no use as propaganda, even as it was the true source of her sympathy with “the poor mothers” of the wounded soldiers. Margaret spent hot afternoons waiting in line at the post office, hoping for news of Nino. He “is perfectly well,” Margaret finally reported to Giovanni on one of Rome’s terrible June days. She told Giovanni she had given Nino’s baptismal papers and other important documents to Lewis Cass for safekeeping, specifying that Emelyn Story should care for Nino if they both should die. Margaret had begun to think that Nino would be better off in America, but “if you live and I die,” she wrote to Giovanni, he could take the papers back “as from your wife” and “do as you wish.” She urged, “Be always very devoted to Nino. If you ever love another woman, always think first of him—io prego prego, amore—I beg you, beg you, love.”
She wrote to Waldo in similar desperation, confiding her fear that she might never return to America. Even if she survived the war, “I am caught in such a net of ties here.” Again she almost revealed her secret: “if ever you know of my life here, I think you will only wonder at the constancy with which I have sustained myself.” But she would not. “Meanwhile, love me all you can; let me feel, that, amid the fearful agitations of the world, there are pure hands, with healthful, even pulse, stretched out toward me, if I claim their grasp.”
Had she forgotten his coldness? Or had Margaret understood all along that there was love for her within Waldo’s reserve, the love that had moved him to insist she come home with him? Could she have guessed, as Waldo had written in his private journal years before, his reluctant awareness that he had “underrated” his friend, a woman whose “sentiments are more blended with her life” than were his own, “so the expression of them has greater steadiness & greater clearness”? Could she have known that it was her own image that, Waldo wrote, “rose before me at times into heroical & godlike regions, and I could remember no superior women”? Indeed, to Waldo, who had once unkindly disrupted her Conversations on classical myth, Margaret was best compared to “Ceres, Minerva, Proserpine, and the august ideal forms of the Foreworld.” He had not told her this, but perhaps som
ehow she knew.
Margaret’s courage may have failed her “in apprehension,” when she thought of Nino, but she could always act when required. She wrote two lengthy dispatches to the Tribune, on June 10 and 21, 1849, denouncing the French, “who pretend to be the advanced guard of civilization” yet “are bombarding Rome” in an “especially barbarous manner”: aiming for the Capitoline Hill and Rome’s “precious monuments,” lobbing explosives at the hospitals marked with black flags. But “wounds and assaults,” Margaret reported, only strengthened the resolve of Rome’s “defenders,” who by then included many more than the armed soldiers under Garibaldi’s command. She wrote of the brave Trasteverines, women living near contested ground at the Palazzo Spada, who seized bombs as soon as they fell and extinguished their fuses, who gathered cannonballs and passed them to the republican army. But provisions in the city under siege were dwindling, and in the June heat many fell ill with Roman fever.
On June 20, the Casa Diez began to fill with residents fleeing the opposite bank of the Tiber, and in the early morning of the twenty-second, the city’s outermost walls were breached. It was “the fatal hour,” Margaret wrote. From then on, “the slaughter of the Romans became every day more fearful” as the French fired from the high ground of the Janiculum, where Margaret had once wandered with Giovanni, learning “the unreserve of mingled being.” Now those gardens were “watered with the blood of the brave.” Garibaldi himself led one last reckless charge up the hillside, only to find his daring band overpowered. Although “the balls and bombs began to fall round me also,” Margaret could no longer “feel much for myself.” The hospital scenes had become too grievous to describe.
Margaret would always treasure the handful of letters she received from Mazzini that June, letters written “for you only.” But Mazzini was also accounting for his actions in anticipation of Margaret’s book. “My soul is full of grief and bitterness, and still, I have never for a moment yielded to reactionary feelings,” he wrote to her, refuting rumors spread by the French that he had ordered the placement of mines on the grounds of St. Peter’s. He described settling disputes between officers and generals, nightlong strategy sessions, and watching at the bedside of a friend, “a young soldier and poet of promise,” who could not be saved. On June 28, as bombs “whizzed and burst” near Margaret’s Casa Diez, and thirty fell on Lewis Cass’s residence at the Hotel de Russie, Mazzini wrote: “I don’t know whether I am witnessing the agony of a Great Town or a successful resistance. But one thing I know, that resist we must, that we shall resist to the last, and that my name will never be appended to capitulation.”
Mazzini argued before the assembly that the entire “Government, Army and all should walk out of Rome” to set up a government in exile in one of the mountain towns beyond the city. He sent Margaret a copy of his “protestation” to document his effort, but the assembly rejected the plan and Mazzini resigned his post as triumvir rather than concede defeat. Garibaldi appeared before the assembly too, in blood-spattered uniform, refusing to continue what had become a fight for each city block. Garibaldi also advocated relocating the government to the mountainsides—“Wherever we go, there will be Rome!”—but he could not gain enough support.
Garibaldi made the heroic gesture on his own, gathering what remained of his army—four thousand men—and marching out of Rome on the afternoon of July 2 as the French prepared for occupation the following day. Margaret followed the regiment along the Corso and on to the city’s southern gates, beyond the broad piazza at the Basilica of St. John Lateran. She watched as the men, still “ready to dare, to do, to die,” passed in waves, parted only by the ancient Egyptian obelisk at the center of the piazza, the oldest and tallest monument in Rome, scavenged fifteen centuries before from Karnak.
“Never have I seen a sight so beautiful, so romantic and so sad,” Margaret wrote for the Tribune. “The sun was setting; the crescent moon rising, the flower of the Italian youth were marshaling in that solemn place.” Wearing bright red tunics and carrying their possessions in kerchiefs, their long hair “blown back from resolute faces,” Garibaldi’s men marched behind their leader as, high on his horse and dressed in a brilliant white tunic, he took one glance back at the city, then ordered them onward through the gates. “Hard was the heart, stony and seared the eye,” Margaret wrote, “that had no tear for that moment.” Garibaldi’s Brazilian wife, Anita, an expert horsewoman who had fought with the legion, rode beside him, pregnant—although Margaret mentioned nothing of it in her account—and suffering from malaria. On this quixotic last mission, chased by the armies of all the nations opposed to the Roman Republic, Garibaldi’s legion would dwindle to a handful. Anita died in his arms within a month of their proud exodus.
On July 3, French troops claimed the city, marching “to and fro through Rome to inspire awe into the people,” Margaret wrote, “but it has only created a disgust amounting to loathing.” The assembly had not decamped to the mountains, but the deputies would not surrender easily. Instead they kept their seats, reading aloud once again the provisions of the new constitution, voting in measures to aid the families of the dead and awarding citizenship to any who had defended the city, until French soldiers entered the chamber and ordered the deputies’ removal. Margaret had dreaded this day and “the holocaust of broken hearts, baffled lives that must attend it,” as she’d written in the Tribune. But what she had seen was bravery.
“It is all over,” Mazzini wrote in one of his last letters to Margaret. He wandered the streets of the city for most of a week, at liberty, it seemed, because the French did not want to make a martyr of the failed republic’s greatest hero. Now it was Margaret’s turn to procure a false American passport for a Roman citizen, asking the favor from Lewis Cass, so that Mazzini could travel safely into exile once more. She would secure another for Giovanni; the couple would make a trip to their son’s home, their first one together.
“But for my child, I would not go,” Margaret told Lewis Cass. She worried about the Roman soldiers still in the hospitals, “left helpless in the power of a mean and vindictive foe.” Margaret had not completed her “observations” either. One day in early July, soon after the fighting ceased, she walked the deserted battlefields outside the city, surveying the ruined villas. One of the contadini showed her where a wall had crumbled, burying thirty-seven republican soldiers, after just one cannon blast. “A marble nymph, with broken arm” looked on sadly from her fountain, empty of water. Farther on, Margaret studied the terrain held by the French, “hollowed like a honey-comb” with trenches. “A pair of skeleton legs protruded from a bank of one barricade,” she reported, giving the “plain facts.” A dog had scratched away the soil to uncover a man’s body, fully dressed, lying face-up. How Margaret felt, she did not say: “the dog stood gazing on it with an air of stupid amazement.” The dead had not yet been counted, but of the many soldiers who lost their lives in the bloody June days of the Roman Republic, three thousand would be buried in the shade of the cypress trees of the Cimitero di Santo Spirito.
“Rest not supine in your easier lives,” Margaret exhorted her readers in a final Tribune letter from Rome. “I pray you do something; let it not end in a mere cry of sentiment.” To Richard she wrote, “I shall go again into the mountains,” giving yet another oblique explanation of her plans. “Private hopes of mine are fallen with the hopes of Italy. I have played for a new stake and lost it.”
• VII •
HOMEWARD
“Tasso’s Oak, Rome,” engraving by J. G. Strutt belonging to Margaret Fuller, inscribed “From the Wreck of the Elizabeth”
20
“I have lived in a much more full and true way”
NINO WAS NO LONGER “PERFECTLY WELL” WHEN MARGARET arrived in Rieti. Had it not been enough to fear for Giovanni’s life? On the night of the fiercest bombardment, when she had lain “pale and trembling” on the sofa in her “much-exposed” apartment, knowing that Giovanni was commanding a battery on the Pincian Hi
ll, the most vulnerable position in the city, Margaret had vowed she would not spend another anxious night alone under fire. She arranged for Giovanni to come for her at the ringing of the Angelus the next evening and lead her to the Pincian gardens, now shorn of their towering oaks, preferring to die with him if they must. There she found many of the soldiers’ wives already camped with their husbands. Spending the last night of the Roman Republic with Giovanni, making no secret of their connection among his comrades, may have helped Margaret begin to frame the revelations she would soon make to friends and family—“I have united my destiny with that of an obscure young man,” she began one of them. The morning after that surprisingly peaceful night on the Pincian Hill came the assembly vote to surrender, and with it the imperative for republican soldiers to evacuate the city. Giovanni could no longer safely lead a separate life in Rome.
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