The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton (32 page)
Read The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton Online
Authors: Robert J. Begiebing
“A delightful adventure, Miss Fuller!” I said. “Shall you meet again?”
“Perhaps. I leave that up to him, after I return to Rome.”
“But you hope you do, I take it?”
She looked at me as if hesitating before trading a confidence, but only for a moment.
“I do. Yes. And you see that I am very interested in these matters of Italian liberty and unification. I have met no other here who can enlighten me as to the struggles of Italy better than he.”
“I see.”
“He is of a noble Roman house. But now nearly impoverished. His mother died when he was an infant. His father, the Marchese Filippo Ossoli, grew ill recently, and if he dies, which seems likely, he will leave many debts and encumbrances behind him. His brothers shall be provided for in Papal service, but he is to be denied such a career for his liberal principles.”
She did not just then reveal any stronger feelings for this man who was, she admitted, somewhat younger than she. But there was, I felt, something more beneath the surface of her conversation. She knew my intimations, I am sure, but I said nothing about them at the time.
I
T WAS NOT LONG BEFORE
Miss Fuller was off on her travels to Bologna, Milan, Venice, Lake Como, et cetera, during that
Wanderjahre
in the middle of her life, and I could not detain her longer in Florence. When she took her leave, however, she elicited a promise from me to visit her in Rome, to release myself from the burdens of guilt and passion, to see something of the city when she returned, as she secretly hoped, in the autumn. She might even be stopping by Florence on her way, at the invitation of her bold new friend, Marchioness Costanza Arconati Visconti. She had also met old friends in Rome, she added, a number of them artists, and mentioned two particularly from old Brook Farm daysâGeorge Curtis and Christopher Cranch. Surely, she said in parting, you must soon decide to come away to Rome.
I dared not mention any of this to Mr. Spooner, for she had said nothing of the Spooners visiting her along with me, and, moreover, I was once again growing on my own account ever more desirous of an independent sojourn. I had come to feel too much like some disenchanted bacchante, who had once been overfilled with the mind and flesh of another.
TWENTY-FOUR
My leave-taking
W
hen Miss Fuller returned to Florence that September, as she had promised en route to Rome, she was fatigued to the point of illness from her hectic travels. She stayed several days in bed, looked after by Mrs. Mozier, wife of the American sculptor. After Milan and Venice and Verona, after Switzerland and Mantua and Vicenza, and after meeting her friends Madame Arconati and Princess Radzivill, and our young American Hicks, the painter, and the young patriot Guerrieri, and after the Correggios and Parmegianos of Parma, and Lord knows how many viewings of art and how many conversations with other youthful patriots, she had returned more firm than ever in her Republicanism, more convinced than ever that Italy's great past adumbrated her great future.
I met Miss Fuller, as planned, at the Pitti galleries one late-September forenoon, a week or two before the Spooners and I were to return from the rooms in our hillside villa to quarters in the city. I remember our discussions of Giorgione's
Concert
, Titian's
La Bella
, Durer's
Adam and Eve
, Da Vinci's
Ginevra
, and Ruben's self-portrait as if it were last week, rather than a succession of busy years ago and several thousands of miles.
Again I was invited to Rome, and again I thought of all the times I had considered leaving the Spooners, for all our sakes, and I began to tell her of my deepest worries and thoughts in that regard. We had stepped aside from the paintings for a moment, to stand by a window and discuss the matter in some privacy. She understood my troubled heart, and she lent me every encouragement to strike out on my ownâand to begin by visiting her in Rome. As we were speaking, Mr. and Mrs. Powers entered the gallery and, seeing Miss Fuller for the first time since her return to Florence, engaged her in enthusiastic conversation about her experiences and thoughts abroad.
I excused myself. I began to wander distractedly about, looking at some of the paintings, but the masterworks no longer seemed to register upon my mind. Somehow, I made my way back to the very window where Miss Fuller and I had been conversing before Mr. and Mrs. Powers came in, and now I began a solemn consideration of Miss Fuller's invitation. Could I finally, even heartlessly, leave Mr. Spooner to his wife and son in the city we together had come to love?
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.
A
S 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 explainedâas calmly and honestly as I was ableâonce 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 templesâcan you believe it?âwe 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 Perryâyou 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 excursionsâof an afternoon or an evening. But I work as well, like one possessed. Miss Fuller holds court on Monday evenings onlyâthe 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 Countâher
Caro Giovane
âto be lovers! How could it be otherwise? She has found in him a sort of soul-mate and a passionate causeâthe 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?
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 familyâexpecting the old Count to die at any timeâdiscover 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 lifeâso 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?”
