The Manzoni Family Page 8

  The phrase ‘if I have suffered at the hands of one person’ refers perhaps to Sophie de Condorcet’s daughter, Eliza, or to her husband, General O’Connor; perhaps they showed some coldness to Fauriel, or hurt his feelings in some way. Eliza had always found it hard to accept that her mother lived with Fauriel, and now that her mother was dead, perhaps a long-standing resentment erupted. Fauriel’s relations with Sophie’s family deteriorated thereafter, the ‘comfort’ and ‘attentions’ did not last long. Certainly when Sophie died Fauriel found himself in a difficult and delicate situation, made more difficult by the fact that he had no money. In all this his susceptibilities suffered. He left La Maisonnette at once and moved to a small apartment in Paris, in rue des Vieilles Tuileries, and it was from there that he was writing.

  Manzoni wrote back telling him to set off at once. Everybody was waiting for him. The house in via del Morone was in a state of confusion as they had had to bring in workmen to do repairs, but Fauriel could share the confusion with them. Besides, they were thinking of a trip to Tuscany in the spring, recommended by the doctors for Enrichetta, because the air was better there, and Fauriel could go with them. However, a year passed and Fauriel had still not stirred from Paris. In any case, the Manzonis too had put off the trip to Tuscany, either because they wanted to go with Fauriel, or because, as Manzoni wrote to Fauriel, ‘mon ennuyeux fatras’, my tedious scribbling, in other words the novel, was occupying him a great deal, and he felt he could neither abandon it at that point, nor take it with him.

  In summer 1823, Fanny, the Manzonis’ French maid, went to Paris to the help of her sick mother. She took a letter to Fauriel. ‘My dear, and ever dearer friend, here is an unexpected messenger, but misfortunes make travellers almost as much as boredom’, Manzoni wrote to Fauriel. The Adelchi had meanwhile appeared in France, in Fauriel’s translation and with an introduction by him. ‘Oh, my friend! what have you done? what have you said?’ wrote Manzoni. ‘I am quite confused; I do not speak of the pleasure it has given me to see my sketchy thought so well rendered, or rather developed and perfected by your style: I anticipated this pleasure. But once again, what have you said of your poor author! You make me blush, and I hardly dare raise my head. Let’s speak of something else, and above all of this journey conceived so joyfully but constantly delayed. My dear friend, we cannot possibly leave here before the winter. The inconveniences arising from the work on our house in Milan have taken up the time which should have been spent on preparations essential for a large family. . . At the same time we have had preoccupations in which inconveniences were certainly the least painful of our problems.’ Clara, the last but one of the children, had died. ‘Pietro, Cristina and Sofia have had measles which proved to be quite a long, painful illness for them, but from which they have happily recovered. I cannot say the same of our poor dear little Clara, who was just two years old; after seeing her suffer for a long time, we lost her. And so we found ourselves close to the time when we had hoped to begin that blessed journey. We have been obliged to put the plan off again until next spring, and even then with some doubts arising from a host of possible and predictable obstacles, and also, when all’s said and done, from our tendency to give in to them too easily.’ Then he talks of the fatras, the novel: All I can say is that I have tried to achieve a precise knowledge of the time and place in which I have set my story, and to depict it faithfully. There is no shortage of material: everything that shows men in a wretched light is there in abundance: confident ignorance, pretentious folly, bare-faced corruption, were, alas, among others of the same kind perhaps the most striking characteristics of the period. Fortunately there were also men and traits which did honour to the human race, characters endowed with strong virtue, outstanding in proportion to the obstacles and opposition they encountered, and by their resistance, or sometimes their submission to conventional ideas. I’ve put in peasants, nobles, monks, nuns, priests, magistrates, scholars, war, famine. . . [here the page is torn and the phrase is illegible], which means it’s quite a book!’

  In 1823 Canon Tosi was appointed bishop at Pavia, so he left them. ‘I need hardly repeat how warmly you are remembered in our family,’ Manzoni wrote to him, ‘. . . I would not have presumed to ask you to write to me sometimes in the little spare time that will remain to you; but since you have deigned to promise to do so, I remember your promise with the sincerest gratitude. Meanwhile, the hope of seeing you again, after a long interval, is one of the thoughts I turn to in those moments when physical and mental labours make me feel the need of some living, tranquil consolation.’ Canon, now Bishop, Tosi displayed some anxiety about the work on which Manzoni was engaged. He wrote: ‘I cannot refrain from an urgent personal plea that you curb this tendency to throw yourself so whole-heartedly into all the writing schemes you dream up. I observe that your health suffers from occupations that involve you in too intense meditation. Moreover, I see that the fruit of such labour must be very slight, for the interest of the world will be short, and the dissension, malignity and envy of the literati may cause you grave anxiety. My son, if you must consume yourself, let it be for things that bear real fruit. And what is this real fruit, other than the reward you can expect from the Lord?’ Canon, now Bishop, Tosi was still hoping Manzoni would resume his Morale cattolica. Manzoni replied: ‘Since you have deigned to show some anxiety for the ill effects which the work on which I am at present engaged may produce on my health and my peace of mind, I will admit, as for the first, that the research I am absorbed in is indeed somewhat fatiguing, but I try to combine work and rest so that the former shall cause me no serious indisposition, and indeed for some time, apart from the occasional grey day, I have been keeping quite well. As for literary hostility, I think I can rest assured that the publication of my scribblings will provoke none. Since I trace ideas as carefully as possible and commit them faithfully to paper as I find them, it is true I find myself in opposition to many people, but not in league with any party. . . My lone, dispassionate opinions may seem exravagant or foolish, but not provocative; and the poor author may perhaps inspire scornful pity, but, I hope and think, no anger. ’

  ‘I still don’t know how I’ll set out, ’ Fauriel wrote in October. ‘They want to embark me with a great Russian gentleman whom I don’t know, and who, they say, would be very pleased to take me to Italy, where he is going. I will see him, but I don’t think I’ll accept this mode of travel, however convenient it may seem. On the other hand, I have promised two English ladies, who are at present in Switzerland preparing to go on to Italy, to pick them up if I should happen to travel at the same time as them; I don’t quite know what detour or delay this promise might involve; in short, it’s not certain whether I will descend, like Hannibal, from Mont Cenis, or, like so many others, from the Simplon. If we discount the Russian, it seems likely that I’ll set out with Fanny. ’

  Fauriel arrived in Milan, at via del Morone, a month later. The two English ladies were with him, so he had stopped in Switzerland, and probably always intended to do so. The two English ladies took lodgings at the Pension Suisse. They were a mother and daughter called Clarke; with the daughter, Mary Clarke, Fauriel was having an amorous relationship which had begun a few months before Sophie died.

  Mary Clarke was then twenty-nine. She was born in London, her mother in Scotland; the mother, a captain’s widow, had settled in France with her two daughters when her husband died. Mary Clarke had brown curly hair, and was small and graceful though very slightly hunch-backed; she was attractive rather than beautiful. She painted; she loved paintings and music, and liked to travel and to meet artists.

  This is how the relationship between Mary Clarke and Fauriel had begun; she had written to Fauriel asking him to pose for her; she intended to give the portrait to Augustin Thierry: ‘You are more dear to him than anyone, and nothing could please him more. She had had a relationship with Augustin Thierry which she wanted to bring to an end. Fauriel wrote agreeing to the proposal; he was not happy about this portr
ait, because he did not like the idea that his picture should be a farewell present for poor Thierry: ‘But if I am to have only one opportunity in my life of obeying you, I shall obey you sadly, but with all my heart.’

  Fauriel posed for Mary Clarke, and the portrait was completed; then she left for England and a steady exchange of letters began between them. Mon ange, she wrote to him; ma chère douce amie, he wrote to her. At first he said nothing of Sophie, as if she did not exist. He mentioned her later, in August; for weeks Mary had heard nothing from him and he begged her pardon: ‘chère douce amie,’ he wrote, ‘dear, sweet friend, the last time I wrote to you, I promised to write at least a few lines every day. . . I made this promise from the heart, or rather I felt such joy in promising it to myself that you would have loved me at that moment. And yet I have not written, dear friend; indeed I chose not to write to you: for if I had written then, either I would not have told you what I felt, which is inconceivable, or I would have upset and saddened you, which I did not want. The fact is, I have spent the saddest month I could ever have imagined. Madame de Condorcet has been extremely ill, in a way that has worried her family and friends, and me more than anyone. This anxiety was so overwhelming that for some days I suffered physically more than I could say or reveal. In this sad space of time every sort of anguish came thick and fast upon me: the memory of you and hope of a letter from you were my only consolation. I resume this letter, which was interrupted this morning, as I return from my evening walk, which I almost always take alone, and which I enjoy only if I am alone. Only then can I think of you at my ease, immerse myself in memories of the time when you were here, and in sweeter dreams of the day when I shall see you again. I think a great deal about that day, but the past and absence are strong, and I do not want to struggle too much against them; there is no bitterness in the sadness they can cause me and which may sometimes appear in my letters, as they do on my face and in my manner: for me one idea and one feeling dominate all others, the idea and the feeling that I am loved by you, only I tremble slightly at the thought that you may not be sufficiently convinced of all you mean to me: and when I hear you say that I don’t love you enough, I feel a spasm of fear that this means I am incapable of making you happy: oh! how could I prove to you that my heart has never known such enchantment as you have created for me? I could not resume this letter after I broke off. I have not been feeling very well in the meantime, and have been acutely distressed, since my usual anxiety for the sick friend I spoke of has redoubled. . . But whether I write a lot or a little, briefly or at length, I implore you not to forget, my dearest, that I see you and speak to you every moment, and at every moment seek your voice and your image. . . Goodbye for today, my sweet hope [in English in original]; goodbye, be near me a while in spirit, and let me hear you say it to me.’ Mary Clarke replied angrily: ‘What on earth is this Madame de Condorcet? I didn’t know the illness of any lady could be enough to make you ill: what on earth is a lady to you, that her illness should be more distressing to you than to her own family? to the extent of preventing your writing to me? ... I wrote back the day your letter arrived, in all the bitterness of my first reaction, but thank Heaven I put aside that letter and after reading it the next day before posting it, I decided not to send it, but however I may control myself, I cannot pretend. . . Just imagine if I wrote to you like that and spoke to you of a man whose name you had never heard me pronounce before? ... I have some sort of confused notion about this Madame de Condorcet that is painful to me, but I can’t remember what it was, how I came by it or what it relates to; I’ve never heard you mention her, and I don’t even remember who did, unless it was Amédée Thierry, brother of Augustin – ... I thought I would not speak my mind, partly because I don’t want to upset you, but I couldn’t help it and a slight squall is better than perpetual clouds. ’ This letter was dated 3 September: Sophie de Condorcet died the next day.

  A year passed in which Mary Clarke was again often away; she and Fauriel wrote many letters to each other; they planned the Italian trip, and here they were at last in Milan together.

  Mary Clarke became very friendly with the Manzoni family. She and her mother spent the whole of that winter of 1824 in Milan, and they used to spend the evenings at the Manzoni house. Many years later Mary Clarke remembered those evenings clearly; she described them in a letter to someone who had asked her about them (it was Angelo de Gubernatis, who was writing a study of the relationship between Manzoni and Fauriel). They were happy evenings; the children played blind man’s bluff and Enrichetta and Mary Clarke joined in, while Giulia and Mrs Clarke chatted by the fire, with Manzoni, Fauriel, and other friends who called every evening: Grossi, Visconti, Cattaneo, a poet called Giovanni Torti, and Luigi Rossari, who was an Italian teacher. In this letter Mary Clarke presented a different and unusually youthful image of Enrichetta: ‘You would have thought she was the sister of her older children,’ Mary Clarke observed. ‘You’ve been enjoying yourself, little wife,’ Manzoni said once to Enrichetta, who was rosy and excited after one of these games of blind man’s bluff, putting his arm round her waist, and she agreed. But is was certainly a modest sort of entertainment, playing blind man’s bluff with the children through the rooms of the house; the Manzonis did not frequent high society, they never went out in the evenings, and in Milan they had the reputation of being unsociable.

  During this visit from Fauriel, the friendship between him and Manzoni changed, and became somehow more simple and natural. Fauriel would chat for a long time with Enrichetta and Giulia, and play with the children. A real affection grew up between him and the children, in the light of which Enrichetta too became his friend, more than she had been in the past. The children called him Tola, a name invented by one of the little ones.

  In the spring, the two Clarkes set off for Venice, and Fauriel followed them. From Venice he wrote to Manzoni: ‘We were a bit chilled and weary arriving here, but otherwise fairly well. In spite of its ruined palaces, and pretty unbearable weather with rain and cold, I like this Thousand and One Nights town very much. . . Goodbye for now my dear friend, I hug you all, each and every one of you, again and again, my dear “god-mother”, and your Enrichetta who is so close to my heart. Tell my dear little Giulia I have no one to play skittles with, which is very sad; and I have no one to ride on my shoulders or to call me Tola. Mrs and Miss Clarke talk of nothing but you, of all of you.’ Fauriel was working on a collection of Greek folk songs, and there was a very large Greek colony in Venice: with a friend of his and of Manzoni, the Greek Mustoxidi, he went to Trieste, where there was also a Greek colony, parting from the two Clarkes who wanted to tour Italy. Fauriel to Mary Clarke, from Trieste: ‘I am not sorry to have come here: Mustoxidi knows everyone here, and is liked by many people who have welcomed me for his sake. . . I spend all my evenings at the theatre, where they act tragedies and comedies quite well, or no worse than in Milan; I don’t enjoy it very much, as you can imagine; but at least the evenings are less tedious to me there than elsewhere, and I can see more people without being obliged to talk. Three or four boxes are available to me, and I can choose to be alone or in company. . . I don’t know yet whether I’ll set off alone or whether Mustox is coming with me; he is still the best of men, but I do wish he could think of one thing for ten minutes on end, and that he was not so addicted to his pipe. Goodbye, dear life of my heart, I must go out and rush round, think about my departure, and I can’t talk to you any longer. Goodbye, say you haven’t forgotten me among all the grand things you are seeing; I assure you I love you more than ever.’

  Fauriel to Mary Clarke from Venice, where he had paused before returning to Milan (Mary and her mother, meanwhile, were in Rome): 1 can’t open my eyes or take a step without seeing something that reminds me that you were here with me, and I have to fight against tears; and I don’t always succeed, especially when I am alone in my room. I really don’t know why, but I came back to our hotel, though I did take care to find a nook as far as possible from the rooms
we had then: but this precaution avails me little, for I keep returning instinctively to those rooms, and I have to turn back on my tracks, with a suffocating sense of the unspeakable pain of your absence. Yesterday, in an unguarded moment, I suddenly found myself standing in the middle of my old room, face to face with a man glued to the table at which he was writing, and looking at me in astonishment; I babbled a few laborious words of apology about my memory. ... I haven’t had the courage to go back to the Lido where we once saw the sea in its awful beauty. Goodbye, my dearest life, I must end this letter, and I can end it only by telling you I love you, and that I love you as much as you can desire, and that I would do so even if you did not love me [this in Italian, the rest of the letter in French]. Goodbye again, dear friend, my dear, sweet friend; this Italian language does not seem serious enough for a declaration of my love, so I repeat it in the language in which I said it for the first time and for ever. ’