It was then that I looked out the window for the first time, turning all such thoughts over in my mind, and I saw before me the very heights of Bellosguardo, crowned with its white stone villas and mediaeval tower. I sought the distant villa in which at that moment Mr. Spooner must have been engaged in his morning’s work. I knew that he would not be thinking of me, as seemed to be the case whenever he was painting, and I knew also that I now desperately needed to be free of him. I admired him. I liked him as a long-time friend and fellow artist, and now as a former lover. I knew, finally, that he would suffer in his own strange manly way were I to leave him, but I knew suddenly that I must leave him.
Having come to a decision, therefore, I found Miss Fuller and the Powerses and joined their conversation for some quarter of an hour more before I excused myself, after having suggested to Miss Fuller that I would indeed like to go to Rome.
As I was returning to Bellosguardo, I decided that it would be best to travel with Miss Fuller herself, and to say nothing until we were about to depart.
AS IT TURNED OUT, we left rather more secretly than I had expected, in mid-October. I had sent some things ahead, and then I told the Spooners only that I had arranged to meet Miss Fuller for a day at the Uffizi. But we met in the Boboli Gardens behind the Pitti. Our plans were a bosom secret between us. I left on my easel a long letter, carefully sealed, to Mr. Spooner wherein I explained—as calmly and honestly as I was able—once again my desire to leave for a period of independence and study in Rome, with the aid of my friend Miss Fuller. I had begged his understanding for such an abrupt departure, but I said that I hoped leaving as I had would be the least painful and acrimonious for both of us. By the time he read it, Miss Fuller and I were aboard the Tuesday Diligence for Rome, via Siena, spending a precious 75 Francesconi that we might arrive in forty-two hours, rather than in five days for 40 Scudi by vetturini.
I was not in fact fleeing from him, and I wanted him to know that. Shortly after arriving in Rome, I wrote another, perhaps more ameliorative, letter, which he later returned to me, and which best describes my circumstances at the time.
Rome, October 28, 1847
My Dear Mr. and Mrs. Spooner.
I have settled, with the help of Miss Fuller, into a small apartment in the Corso, close to the Piazza del Popolo, in the “city of the soul.” She herself is nearby, in rooms of her own. Rooms, like everything else, are more dear in Rome than Florence, but I have pinned my card on the door: “Allegra Fullerton, Artist in Oils,” and I continue to work on commissions which I brought with me and have the promise of one or two more by Miss Fuller’s help. If one can live in Florence on eight hundred to a thousand dollars a year, it is surely double that in Rome! Here I find no bachelor’s quarters for five dollars a month, nor would your family find suitable rooms for twenty or thirty. Nor a ten-cent breakfast or a good thirty-cent dinner, but I do frequent Caffé Greco for a cheap breakfast. Nor would Mr. Powers find here anything like his two-hundred-dollar-a year apartment, which would cost him twice or thrice that here and surely five or ten times that in New York.
From my delightful situation I see much of what happens in the city. And today, near the ending of the feasts of the Trasteverini in the old settlements across the Tiber (near the Janiculum) we found bands, bazaars, illuminations, fireworks, and handsome Trasteverini dancing the saltarel in their brilliant costumes. Miss Fuller says that this is the oldest part of the city, being inhabited continually since ancient times. She assures me that here in the glorious dance is truly the “Italian wine, the Italian sun.”
And then there have been maneuverings of the Civic Guard in that great field of ruins near the Cecilia Metella. Six thousand Romans passed in battle array. And all the Roman people were out. Their celebration struck me as something from the time of the Caesars, but it was not, if of smaller scale, unlike our great fete in honor of the National Guard in Florence last September. Let me say, rather, that the spirit is quite the same.
I haunt the galleries of the Capitol, the Vatican, the Corsini, the Borghese, and we frequent the Caffé delle Belle Arti and the Caffé Greco, where much discussion and debate rages. But has there ever been a more beautiful autumn than this, my dear friends, my dear master? If the countryside here is sere now, as I have seen it in Florence, the weather is heavenly, the light all golden. The gardens of the Villa Borghese are open, and I have grown fond of the fountains plashing into their weedy basins; of the old and weather-mellowed statues hiding among shrubs and trees and the very grass that grows upon them; of the paths, porticoes, arches, and temples in the vistas, beset by lawn and seasonal flowers; even of the little blue and green lizards that bathe and scamper in the sunlight. And one must include the massive old villa and its marble phantasmagoria of statues and bas-reliefs! And there is music on the lake.
I have fresh flowers every day, and Miss Fuller tells me I may expect such florescence through December. We walk, we discover, we ride in the Campagna (where young noblemen, astride their stallions, dash about like centaurs) and admire the grape harvest. Once, walking there over an unbroken succession of mounds and hills and the ruins of tombs and temples—can you believe it?—we met the Pope on foot, taking his exercise, flanked by two young priests, like Adonises robed in spotless purple. And what a setting in which to paint! The ever-changing color and shade as clouds fly overhead casting a brilliance of their own and mountains cast down their immense shadows at sunrise or sunset. Even now I am at work on a Rome Across the Campagna, making pencil and color sketches afield before returning to my rooms and a lovely large canvas.
And I have been in the Pantheon, heard the owls hooting by moonlight in the Colosseum, wandered about the vine-covered Forum among grazing goats and pigs, climbed the Janiculum Hill and the Roman Wall to drink in the eternal city’s rosy-golden domes and towers at sunset, and have observed mass in the Sistine Chapel. And I have seen the Artists’ Models crowding about the steps leading to the church of Trinita del Monte: The Patriarch Model (looking for all the world like Asa Perry—you recall my telling you about him?), the Assassin Model, the Holy Family Models, the Domestic Happiness Models, and such-like stock figures galore.
Do you see, my dear friends, that I believe I have entered the land of dreams?
Miss Fuller and her companion Count Ossoli at times invite me on such excursions—of an afternoon or an evening. But I work as well, like one possessed. Miss Fuller holds court on Monday evenings only—the rest of the week given over to her companion and to her new interest, perhaps a book project germinating now, on the history of the Italian Revolution and Unification, as they call it, or as Count Camillo Cavour has called it in the title of his newspaper, Il Risorgimento, or the Re-Awakening (or is Re-Arising, more exact?). You see, I need you still to correct my Italian!
On some Mondays I do and shall attend her gatherings. There, dear friends, I find Elizabeth and Christopher Cranch, Thomas Hicks, Jaspar Cropsey, and the Princess Radzivill, among others of accomplishment and intelligence.
I believe Miss Fuller and the young Count—her Caro Giovane—to be lovers! How could it be otherwise? She has found in him a sort of soul-mate and a passionate cause—the destruction of tyranny in Italy; nay, in Europe. He is younger than I, about Gibbon’s age, and she must be nearly forty. Of course she will undoubtedly raise a great scandal back home! But why should not anyone who knows her, who cares for her and for whom she cares, accept this liaison as the natural fruition of her being? This is the woman whose writings have excoriated the prolific hypocrisies of our age, who has loved and championed the writings of Sand, de Stael, and Wollstonecraft.
Of this capitulation to her passions, she says to me, as if I were a sort of Maenad sister under the Italian sun: “Shall we not act upon our deepest, truest impulse? Out of the very character in which God has formed us?”
But now my life has turned, is filled only with chaste study and work. This is a life better, nobler, for all. And is this not precisely the life I had sought?
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I remain most affectionately yours,
Allegra
I also sent a note to Tom, via Mr. Ruskin, to tell him of my new address in Rome.
About November William Story arrived (with his wife, Emelyn, and baby son, a flowing mustache, and a patch of chin whiskers to match), having recently thrown over the law in favor of a career as a sculptor. Miss Fuller had known him since Cambridge days, and he had attended some of her “Conversations” in Boston. Like Miss Fuller, he had left, as he put it, the “unendurable restraint and bondage of Boston,” where everything is criticized, “nothing loved,” and the heart grows stony. I believe Miss Fuller found him congenial for a similar evolution in their experience.
Mr. Story soon appeared to befriend the Marchese Ossoli, as well. They met frequently in Miss Fuller’s rooms, and Story seemed to have taken interest immediately in political matters. Ossoli served as a kind of guide, which smoothed over the men’s differences in temperament, for Ossoli was reserved. He did not speak English well, but was gentlemanly, if rather melancholy. He was in fact taciturn even with Mr. Story, but the two understood one another, and we all soon became a circle of intimate friends.
Yet with the relentless December rains, we seemed to grow morose. Everything became damp, cold, gray as the overcast skies. My own spirits began to sink, and, moreover, I began to fear the worst: chaos, war, and revolt throughout the Italian peninsula. For the first time since my arrival in Italy, I thought of returning home.
What is more, I began to fear for Miss Fuller. Her mind in this dreary season took a turn, and she was not well. Her illness and the chilling, dank weather seemed to have beaten her down. But upon my insisting that we find her medical assistance, she confided in me that she now believed she was pregnant. I was sworn to tell no one because there were potentially disastrous complications for the young Marchese, should his family—expecting the old Count to die at any time—discover the truth.
“How should I hope,” she said to me, “that I shall not reap what I have sown? Yet how I shall endure I cannot guess.” She was strong nevertheless; she had once resolved to follow her friend Mickiewicz’s admonition to free her spirit by “responding to the legitimate needs of your body,” and she was not about to whine and swoon for the result.
She told me, furthermore, that earlier in her life she had prayed for a child, and written her inmost thoughts in her journal: “Why,” she had asked herself, “should I live without a child when the woman in me has so craved the experience that for want of it I have felt paralyzed? Why should there be no bud on my tree of life—so scathed by lightning and bound by frost? Surely a being born of my being would not let me lie in so cold and lonely a sadness.” Now amidst her new and passionate life, when perhaps she least required it, the bud had swelled upon her tree.
“Is life rich to you?” she asked me one evening as we sat in her rooms discussing her bedevilments and her hopes.
“It is, Margaret, since I’ve come to know you,” I said. “And seems to grow more so every year.”
“Bless you, Allegra.” She smiled, the first smile since I entered her rooms. She took one of my hands in both of hers. “I feel a true … enrichment since meeting Ossoli. Do you understand such a thing?”
“I do. Yes, I understand.”
BY THE NEW YEAR, 1848, all Rome seemed to know that Italy was rising toward a great crisis. Even if the rains had not quit, there was to be another storm yet—the bursting of revolutionary passions throughout Europe. In Rome we heard cries of “Viva Pope Pius IX! Death to the Jesuits!” Milan exploded in the tobacco riots, against the monopoly of the Austrian tyrants, and ended in the massacre of eighty Milanese. In Palermo, on the very birthday of the Bourbon King Ferdinando, insurrection arose and then spread to Sicily and Naples. Demands were made, and later met, for a constitution in Piedmont and Tuscany. The people of Rome grew frantic with hope and fear at the news of the uprisings and suppressions. No one doubted war, or a series of battles like a string of deadly explosions rippling over the land. And by March Miss Fuller’s Adam Mickiewicz was in Rome to muster a legion of Polish exiles to fight beside the Italians.
There was a single glorious March-mild day of respite from all such concerns and wet weather, when Margaret, her Caro Giovane, Mickiewicz, and I rode out for a gallop on the Campagna. Ossoli led us to a grassy, flowery, undulating stretch of ground where we all suddenly gave free rein to our horses, who leapt madly for the vigorous chase. Larks overhead soared in circles and spirals of melody toward purple clouds that flung their shadows on the turf about us and endampened the powerful smell of violets crushed beneath our horses’ hooves. Such delicious images and sensations—the very spirit of spring it seemed—constituted a day of perfect pleasures of body and soul.
And yet there was apprehension, as I say, and I grew fearful for my own safety. I found it more and more difficult to hold on to the Carbonari belief in the destined coming of liberty, unity, and self-rule under a constitutional monarchy. It must have been such hope among the people, however, that turned the enduring spring showers into manna during Carnival week, making even the dreary rains feel suddenly alive and golden. Romans thronged the Corso, dressing as if spring had indeed arrived, throwing flowers at one another as they sang. Women in ball dresses and costumes piled into carriages and drove up and down in the rain. Contadine sat in the streets in white cambric dresses and straw hats filled with roses. From all the myriad balconies hangings of bright red, green, blue, white, and gold stirred damply in the shifting breezes, and from windows and housetops and parapets streamers of rich, gaudy, or sparkling colors flapped outward upon the street. Shopfronts had been taken down so that parties might fill them like boxes at a theater to watch the crowds and carriages and the races of riderless horses decorated with shining ornaments, plaited manes, and spiky goads and bells. Masked balls filled the evenings—the German Artists’ ball, featuring music, the Italian ball, featuring intrigue, and so on, where every manner of creature and character frolicked. A few churches were even plundered in all this exuberance and melee.
As much as Miss Fuller rejoiced to be in the center of it all, as much as the rebellions and the celebrations were salutary to the Italian people, I nonetheless felt it all to be distraction and danger. By spring, I was certain that any city might be engulfed, and certainly Rome might. In the Colosseum young men enlisted by the thousands. It was not safe either to flee to France or Germany—the bourgeois king, Louis Philippe, dethroned, Metternich crushed in Austria, the fires of revolution burned everywhere.
That April, to take but one instance, when the Pope announced that he could not make war, the Roman people, who had been ecstatic and celebrating, turned angry and, led by the wine-carrier-turned-orator Ciceruacchio, began to riot. Then a young follower, whom I had seen haranguing a crowd outside the Caffé delle Belle Arti, was later kicked to death by members of one reactionary faction or another, some blaming the Sanfedists.
As I had suspected, it was not long that fateful year before the forces of reaction strengthened in the south as well as in the north, and I began to feel mutiny and anarchy at every turn.
So I determined to return to America. I wrote the Spooners to explain my developing plans and ask whether they wished to accompany me. I could not help fearing for their safety as well. Many of the English and Americans had begun their flight, I explained, and even the Germans, French, and Russians were recalled to homelands. But Mr. Spooner and Gibbon were in the midst of several commissions, he felt not the same forebodings as I in still-quiet Florence, and they were no doubt feeling the scars of my leaving them behind. So they determined to stay on.
Thus did I spend the end of April and early May completing my last commissions, packing my belongings, terminating my years of Italian studies, and arranging for transit home. I did not know that my last letter to Tom would never reach him, for even as I posted it, he had already left England to make his progress to Florence in futile search of me.
TWENTY-F
IVE
The wreck of the Elizabeth
I did not regret my flight to America. In those few letters from Miss Fuller, I came to understand the misery and real danger I had left behind. The following spring and summer she had experienced the demise of the new Roman Republic, if one could say there ever was one. Garibaldi, after his heroic return from twelve years of exile and guerrilla warfare in Uruguay, was never the savior of Rome; Charles Albert of Piedmont marched again against the Austrians, only to be defeated at Novara; the French had decided to “liberate” Rome from her Italian anarchy, and by June had placed the city in a state of siege. Amidst all this, Miss Fuller had taken to directing the hospital of Fate Bene Fratelli, and soon the dying and wounded had begun to pour in. French shells slammed into the city. “Rome,” she wrote to me, “is being destroyed. The glorious oaks, the villa Raphael, the Villa Albani, the home of Winckelmann, and many other sanctuaries of beauty.”
And by the end of June, the French had breached the Janiculum, and Garibaldi had left with thousands to regroup and continue the struggle wherever destiny might lead him. This news soon arrived in America; and I recall reading Miss Fuller’s descriptions of Garibaldi’s legion in their red tunics, Greek caps, and long hair blowing back from their resolute, courageous faces. They left the city following their hero in his bold white tunic, in many cases leaving their wives and families behind with Mazzini. Her letters caused me great fear for my friend’s life and, though they were safer in Florence for the moment, for the Spooners’ lives as well. Yet she would not return, however much her friends and family pleaded, however loud the El Doradon blandishments of the American future—the expansions of the Mexican War, the discoveries of gold in California, the promises of an unlimited future.
The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton Page 31
