The Manzoni Family Page 7
Meanwhile Manzoni was getting worse all the time. After that fainting turn on 10 May, his temperature had remained high, he could not get out of bed and he was not eating. The doctors diagnosed a bilious fever and inflammation of the brain and chest. Enrichetta and Giulia did not trust the Parisian doctors and wrote to their family doctor in Italy, Doctor Cozzi, who sent advice. Their letters to the Canon were more and more anxious. They asked him to pray for them. ‘I am sorry to hear that so many people we care about are not well, and especially our dear, good Signora Parravicini. I do not ask you to pray for us,’ wrote Giulia, ‘I know you will all do so. Oh, for the love of charity, do not stop!’ Slowly the invalid recovered. He could sip a little eau de poulet and a little eau de violette. Slowly he got back on his feet. Giulia to the Canon: ‘These last few days he has had a touch of diarrhoea which seems more or less to have gone today, he is taking a decoction blanche de Siduham and that is all, the doctor says not to take any medicine but to leave it to Nature, he eats a little and often and takes his chocolate every day, but he’s so thin and wasted you would hardly know him; I’ve been reading aloud to him and still do so almost all day to distract him, but today he wanted to read himself, which worries me, but I can’t say a word. Only the good God can guide him!’ They had to tell him his young friend Loyson was dead, and he recited the De profundis, with tears in his eyes.
On 6 July the departure began to seem possible. Giulia to the Canon: ‘Oh God! please, please pray for us and welcome us with true love and charity. I am so exhausted that all I want is to creep into a corner to recover. . . Alessandro is better, but he has so little strength! and his nerves! and his imagination! Oh, please pray for us and keep all these things in your heart.’ That is to say, the Canon was to say nothing, to anyone, about the sometimes indignant letters he had received from them. ‘It is a relief to know we will definitely have Giuseppino.’ The servant they wanted was ready to welcome them. ‘Please be so kind as to see that Giuseppino gets ajar of barley water and Sant Agostino lemon juice so that it is waiting for us when we arrive at Brussu. . . I shall seize the first possible opportunity to set off because we know to our cost that he who hesitates is lost, and I have been hurrying to pack the valises. ’
They finally left Paris on 26 July. In spite of the heat, the journey went well. They stayed with the Somis family in Turin for a day. Manzoni went to call on Abbé Lodovico di Breme, whom he had met years before, when they passed through Turin in that distant summer of 1810 when Giulietta was a tiny baby. Lodovico di Breme had had an adventurous and unhappy life. It was said he had had a mistress among the aristocracy — a sister of the marchesa Trivulzi — and that ‘he unintentionally caused her death with a potion, to free himself rather than her of the scandalous consequences of their love’, according to Niccolò Tommaseo. He had been one of the group collaborating on the newspaper II Conciliatore, which had gone out of production in 1819. Di Breme was now suffering from an incurable disease, and felt his faith in God fading with his life. It seemed that death appeared to Manzoni at every turn at that time. Many years later Tommaseo recounted that last meeting between Manzoni and di Breme: ‘When “il Nostro” [Manzoni] was passing through Turin on his return from Paris, di Breme, already close to his end, sent for him to discuss his doubts on matters of faith, and his squalid appearance with his hair standing on end was fearful to behold.’ Manzoni was deeply distressed. The abbé died in August.
And there they were at last at Brusuglio, at Brusú or Brusú as they usually called it, with the welcome cool of the spacious rooms and the shady trees in the garden. And to think they had intended, not many months ago, to sell this house! It was such a welcoming, restful, hospitable place. Manzoni found all his old friends. Canon Tosi had become more cautious and considerate, and stopped badgering him about the Morale cattolica. Immediately after their arrival the philosopher Victor Cousin, a friend of Fauriel, stayed with them; he was going through a difficult spell; chiefly because he too was in poor health, but also because he was being attacked in France for political reasons, and they wanted to deprive him of his teaching post; he too felt better in the peace of the countryside. When Cousin left them, Manzoni gave him a parcel of books he wanted Fauriel to read, among them Ildegonda, a novella in verse by Tommaso Grossi. In the letter he enclosed with the parcel, he told Fauriel about the friends he had met again in Italy, Berchet, Visconti, Grossi, and about a new tragedy he was thinking of beginning, about the end of the reign of the Longobardi. Fauriel was slow to reply and they still had not heard from him in the winter, that is, several months after leaving Paris, and all the news they had of him was in a few brief lines from Madame de Condorcet.
That winter Enrichetta realized she was pregnant again. ‘It is my ninth pregnancy,’ she wrote to Cousin Carlotta de Blasco. She had not written to her for a long time; the cousin meantime had married a certain Signor Fontana. Enrichetta told her everything; how they had gone to Paris, their eight months there, Alessandro’s illness, their return. She described her five children one by one. Now she had to prepare herself for the arrival of the sixth. ‘I assure you this new task is a great distress to me. . . but we must submit to the will of God. ’
They spent the winter months in Milan, in the house in via del Morone; this too they had wanted to sell, but now it seemed very dear to them as well. They went back to Brusuglio in the spring. The governess they had brought back from France with them, successor to Mademoiselle de Rancé, was called Perrier. But the air, either in Milan or at Brusuglio, did not suit her, and she left after less than a year.
‘Dear Fauriel, I prefer to send a very short, sad letter than to let slip another opportunity of writing to you. We’ve been in the country for a few days and mean to stay all summer,’ Manzoni wrote to Fauriel. It was Spring 1821, the dark days of the proceedings against the Carbonária. ‘Mother, as usual, is not-ill rather than well. Enrichetta is in the seventh month of a difficult pregnancy, which gives hope of a happy outcome, to be achieved by a lot of patience and rest. As for me, it would be better to say nothing. I can get by when I can work: this gets me through four or five hours in the morning, and then I am too tired to think for the rest of the day; but for some time I’ve all too often had days of enforced idleness, because I simply cannot get my head working, and these are often rather gloomy days. I must bow my head and let the storm pass over; it’s true it could happen that we must pass on, before the storm. In these black days, I pick up a book, read a couple of pages, put it down and take another, which meets with the same fate. . . When will we meet again, dear Fauriel? Addio. If you write to me, it will indeed be a charitable office.’ The word ‘black’ is underlined, and evidently refers to the political situation.
In April that year Manzoni began to write a novel. The title was Fermo e Lucia. Then he abandoned it to finish the tragedy about the end of the Longobardi: Adelchi. Meanwhile he was reading historical novels: he got his antiquarian friend Gaetano Cattaneo to look for them: ‘The Abbot, or The Monastery, or The Astrologer (sic): something for pity’s sake.’ These were three novels by Walter Scott. He gave Cattaneo no peace with his constant requests for books. ‘Here I am as usual, pestering you like a baker for bread. I would like the Dictionary of the French Academy. . . Here I am again. I would like the Crusades of Michaud, in the original or in translation, it doesn’t matter.’ He apologized for never going to see him: ‘Remember a poor convulsive can’t go and see his friends when he’d like to, and please continue to love your grateful friend.’
In July of that same year 1821, in the Gazzetta di Milano appeared the news of the death of Napoleon. He had died two months before, on 5 May. Manzoni spent three days writing the ode which was to become famous. ‘Ei fu. Siccome immobile, / dato il mortal sospiro. . .’ These verses were written while Enrichetta sat at the piano and played non-stop any piece of music that came into her head, at his request.
In August a baby girl was born, and was called Clara. Enrichetta became seriously ill with p
uerperal fever. She nearly died but they managed to save her.
‘I told you my tragedy Adelchi was finished, apart from some revising I still have to do, so I must add that I’m not at all pleased with it, and if in this brief life some tragedies had to be sacrificed, then this one of mine ought certainly to be suppressed,’ Manzoni wrote to Fauriel, who had written at last. Fauriel’s letter was brief, and was brief ‘particularly on those matters I should like to hear you discuss more fully’, that is, the work on which the lazy and never-satisfied Fauriel was engaged. Manzoni, by contrast, wrote pages and pages to him. ‘How often have I, even more than usual, cursed the distance that separates us. . .’ ‘How I reproach myself with not having made you talk more when I was lucky enough to be near you, with not having had the impudence of the customs officer to search in your portfolio.’ ‘I can’t finish without saying something of a matter which has sadly preoccupied us and caused us to spend days I would rather forget. You know from Madame de Condorcet that my Enrichetta has been so ill as to cause us anxiety. Slowly but surely she is now recovering. Never have I felt so keenly the uncertainty, danger, and even terror which underlies even the most peaceful happiness. As for me, I am better than when I last wrote to you: I work, and my nerves leave me more or less in peace the rest of the time. ’
The next year Enrichetta was pregnant again. A young Scot turned up at Brusuglio, recommended by Fauriel, and was taken on as a tutor. In the summer there was a tremendous hailstorm at Brusuglio that devastated fields, vines and mulberries. ‘This disaster came straight from Heaven,’ Giulia wrote to Sophie de Condorcet, ‘so that we cannot and must not complain about it; by the same token we should be resigned to all the rest; but the problem is that your friendship is strong and generous, and mine tearful, which make it almost a duty for you to sustain and console me.’ Sophie de Condorcet was gravely ill, but they did not know; and consolation and support would never again come to Giulia from that quarter. The children had scarlet fever, Giulia a very painful whitlow, and my Enrichetta, wrote Manzoni to Fauriel, ‘without staying in bed, is always indisposed, and her sight is pitifully weak, which grieves us very much; but we are led to hope, indeed we are assured, that this new weakness is the result of her pregnancy and the birth will cure it.’ Regarding his novel, he wrote, he was half-way through the second volume; regarding the Adelchi, he had delivered it to the printer. Fauriel was translating the Adelchi into French, and they had decided, he and Manzoni, that the French edition should appear at the same time as the Italian; so the Italian publisher had to delay the appearance of the book until the French edition was also ready. ‘Believe me, it will be a happy moment for both of us when we can write to each other without always having the tedious Adelchi as a burdensome third party between us. ’
The news reached them that Sophie de Condorcet was poorly, yet she seemed to be already on the road to recovery. On 12 September Manzoni wrote congratulating Fauriel on her recovery. But she had died four days before.
On 17 September another baby girl was born, and was called Vittoria. Enrichetta’s sight did not improve after the birth; the hope had proved illusory. The doctors advised a change of air. They planned to go to Tuscany. Meanwhile they had heard of the death of Sophie de Condorcet: they thought they might persuade Fauriel to join them in Tuscany. But Alessandro could not interrupt his work on his novel and the project was abandoned. They did not write to Fauriel immediately. Instead Visconti wrote to him in October: ‘Grossi and the Manzoni family ask me to send you their love. Manzoni wanted to write to you, but after the loss of Madame de Condorcet didn’t know how to touch upon a matter too painful to you, as to him and to all his family. In sending you my sincere condolences, I think I should tell you that, after this sad news, Manzoni cannot regard as definitive the final date fixed by you for the publication of the Adelchi for the twentieth of this month. But he is waiting for you to fix a later date. ’
The Adelchi was published in Italy in November. It was dedicated to Enrichetta with these words, in which there is a strange commemorative and funereal note:
‘To his beloved and revered wife Enrichetta Luigia Blondel / who together with conjugal love and maternal wisdom / was able to preserve a virginal soul / the author dedicates this Adelchi I regretting that he has no more splendid and lasting monument / to which to commit her dear name and the memory of such virtues.’
Fauriel
‘Giulietta is drawing a little head for you,’ wrote Grandmother Giulia to Madame de Condorcet. It was summer 1822; Sophie de Condorcet would be dead a few weeks later. ‘Pietro is studying French. They are all well and drink tea from the little Easter tea-cups [perhaps a gift from Sophie de Condorcet]. At last I’ve had a letter from you, my dear friend . . . ’ This was Giulia’s last letter to Sophie, and the drawing was sent with it. It was found by Jules Mohl and Cabanis’ daughter among Fauriel’s papers when he died many years later. There was also a portrait in miniature of a little girl which Cabanis’ daughter thought must be Giulietta. Portrait and drawing were sent back to the Manzonis.
In 1822 Giulietta was fourteen, almost the age at which her mother had married, and her awareness of this made her grownup, sensible and motherly towards her brothers and sisters. She led a sober, disciplined life, without much in the way of amusements and without many friends of her own age; she did not go to school but was taught at home by a governess; after Mademoiselle Perrier, who went back to France because the climate did not suit her, a governess called Mademoiselle Burdet was sent by Abbé Billiet. Long summers at Brusuglio, long foggy winters in Milan. At home, whether at Brusuglio or Milan, there were always plenty of visitors, friends of her father. It would have been a monotonous existence without the comings and goings of visitors, her noisy brothers and sisters and the bustle of the servants. It would have been a peaceful life without her mother’s poor health, her father’s nerves, and the illnesses of the many little siblings.
That summer of 1822, Tommaso Grossi was writing a poem, ‘The Lombardians at the First Crusade’. Manzoni was writing the second volume of his novel. Ermes Visconti had finished a very lengthy essay On Beauty; he sent it to Fauriel: ‘I am just writing a few lines, my dear Sir, to tell you I have at last sent off the manuscript of On Beauty by the mail-coach, addressed to you. . When la petite caisse containing the manuscript arrived, Fauriel had other things to think of: Sophie de Condorcet had died. Knowing the essay was on its way, he had planned to have it translated into French by cette angélique créature que nous n’avons plus, that is by Sophie; some time later he glanced at the great bundle of paper, spoke to Cousin about it, and they both set about trying to find another translator. Fauriel was a generous, patient man, always ready to listen even when most absorbed in his own affairs; always ready to collaborate with others, and place his time and intelligence at their service.
‘I put off writing to you after the misfortune that overwhelmed me,’ said a letter from Fauriel. Almost three months had gone by. He was answering a letter Manzoni had finally written to him. ‘I don’t think I have been weak in my misfortune; at least I have tried not to be; I have tried not to exaggerate my loss; but the riches I have lost are not such as can be named on earth, such as can be sought and found: and this knowledge makes my tears flow more freely perhaps than if my grief were more vulgar and easily expressed. I weep for something heavenly and pure. . . My heart is not dead to life’s interests or to human affections; but alas! even if I should still find some happiness or remnant of happiness along the road that lies before me, I shall never forget that Heaven has taken from me a greater treasure than I deserved, and which I am no longer allowed even to desire. Forgive me, dear friend — dear friends, since I am writing to you all; I weep with all of you; forgive me this slight and fleeting effusion of a grief that words cannot express, and which you will understand better than I am able to describe it; it is a grief that deserves your grieving, it has nothing at all to do with those feelings that humanity condemns, and this I dare to testify
by that supreme power before which man is as nothing. . . There is much I could tell you about my present situation, but so little can be said in a letter, especially things of this nature. I will just say that all the family of this angel who has gone from me have proffered every comfort and attention I could wish; and if I have suffered at the hands of one person, at least there was no personal motive involved. My friends, too, have done everything that could be done for a fellow human being in such circumstances, in particular Thierry [the historian Augustin Thierry, then twenty-seven, and very close to Fauriel], and Cousin, who chose to spend the first week of my distress with me in the country. So I lack neither friendship, nor comfort, nor attention; neither do I lack the means to lead a peaceful and independent little life. But the fact is that, by some unhappy concatenation of chance circumstances and events, my life becomes more bitter and disturbed every day. . . . There are very bitter particulars in my general misery: at present I feel quite incapable of finding distraction in any serious work, and disinclined to seek distraction outside my usual habits; which all combines to leave such scope for memories, laments, comparisons between what remains and what I have lost that I would fall into a state of discouragement and despair, if I did not create for myself a perspective which gives me strength to bear my present situation for a time, on condition that I may change it soon, or as soon as possible. I feel a pressing need, both moral and physical, to temper my shattered being in a new atmosphere, among old friends and new objects. Do you know where I have found this perspective? You will have guessed, I hope, dear friends: in your midst. To come to you, spend some time with you, find you all unchanged, and love you even more than I have done till now, work with my dear Alessandro, and at his side try to create something worthy of him, this has been for three months my fondest dream, the only one which satisfies every present need of my heart. This project, then, is the refuge and dwelling-place of my hopes. Do you approve of my plan, dear friends? you have no objections? does it appeal to you at all? The sooner you reply, the better, for in my present state my sick heart and mind need some secure resting-place. Once I have received your reply, I can discuss in more detail this delightful dream which today I can only mention in passing.’