The Manzoni Family (2 page)

Carlo Imbonati came from a rich, aristocratic family. As a boy, Parini had been his tutor. As an adult he lived abroad for a long time. He had only just returned to Italy when he and Giulia met. They became lovers. Giulia promptly decided to leave her husband. Love gave her strength and she resolved to bring things to a head. During her relationship with Giovanni Verri she had not thought of asking for a separation, feeling she lacked moral and material support, and also feeling infected by his idleness. Now it was all different. She wrote to Pietro Verri. He was the only person who had come to see her in the convent; and he had given her some support, even if it had proved to be very dubious since he had combined with her father to lead her into that unhappy marriage. She wrote to him:

'It is absolutely impossible for me to live with a family who are all hostile to me. My husband, fired by sacred zeal, wishes at all costs to procure me a place in Paradise through suffering here below; Monsignore [the canon of the Cathedral] sits in his villa refining ideas to impose upon his brother, who comes home, scours all the rooms and even searches behind the pictures, I suspect. The ex-nun takes it upon herself to keep creeping downstairs to hear what is being said, and then goes to report it all to the worthy Prelate, who, poor fellow, is troubled by a fairly obvious beam in his own eye. This is the picture of my family life. I have opened my heart to you by word and by letter, for I felt I must invoke your humanity on my behalf. Unfortunately I fear I may be deceiving myself, since I see you still maintain that friendship to which I was once innocently sacrificed. But at the time my father alone was responsible for my unhappiness; he knew me and the man he intended me to marry. You knew none of the circumstances, so your concern for my establishment arose from your affection for me and my father. Now things are quite different. Now that you are aware of my desperate circumstances, can you wish for a reconciliation which would make me a wretched, unhappy slave, simply because you are reluctant to oppose the effects of my father's despotism? He does not feel the horror of my situation, but is merely annoyed to see me shake off a yoke he imposed upon me. Forgive, Count Verri, the liberty I take in writing like this, but I am using the one thing no one can give or take from me, that is a strength of character that makes me speak the truth in the same voice whoever I am speaking to. A separation is essential; I can bear my present situation no longer.'

Don Pietro Manzoni then made a bid to keep his wife. She despised him because he did not belong to the high nobility, so he persuaded his brothers to put forward a petition for them to be admitted to the golden book of patricians. The petition was rejected. In any case, the rejection reached him when Giulia had already left.

The separation was legally granted in February 1792; Don Pietro Manzoni pledged himself to make a quarterly allowance of 2,000 lire to his wife; Giulia was supposed to move to the house of her maternal uncle, Michele de Blasco, who had meanwhile returned from South America; nothing was said about the boy, and it was therefore understood that he was to remain in the care of his legitimate father, Don Pietro Manzoni. Giulia took the boy to Merate, to the College of the Somaschi Fathers, and left him there. Before setting off for Merate, she took him to see his grandfather, Cesare Beccaria, who with the years had become enormously fat; Alessandro, who was seeing him for the first time and would never see him again, later recalled him rising heavily from an armchair to get him a chocolate from a drawer. He did not seem too pleased at their visit. Alessandro was then seven.

In 1788 Marietta, Giulia's sister, had died at twenty-two without ever having left her father's house, leading the obscure life of an invalid in the servants' quarters. At her death Giulia had brought an action against her father to obtain the right of inheritance to a portion of her mother's goods; separated from her husband, she devoted herself more passionately to this legal procedure. She presented a long memorandum of accusations against her father in which she recalled how he had forced her into a marriage which filled her with ‘agitation and repugnance' and had cheated her of all her maternal inheritance, allotting her a wretched dowry, although after the death of his own father, the Marquis Saverio, he found himself in quite a flourishing situation financially, with lands and houses. But in November 1794, Cesare Beccaria died suddenly, in his room, of an apoplectic fit; Anna Barbò, his widow, decided to come to terms with her step-daughter, and Giulia received much of what she was demanding. She left for Paris with Carlo Imbonati in the autumn of 1796. In May of that year, the French under Napoleon had entered Milan.

Sad and solitary, Don Pietro Manzoni contemplated both the end of his marriage and the end of an era; disorder and confusion reigned in his city; it was thronged with soldiers he hated; he belonged to the past, and all around him he saw the civil and religious stability in which he had lived swept away by a hurricane; he left his home on the Navigli which held too many memories, and moved to a house in Santa Prassede Street; but he spent much of his time in the quiet of II Caleotto; he rarely sent for the boy. One day he received a complaint from the Head of the College of the Somaschi Fathers. Alessandro had cut off his pigtail in an attempt to express his sympathy for the new ideas which were blowing throughout Europe.

In 1797 Pietro Verri too died of an apoplectic fit. As for his brother, Giovanni Verri, he had gone to live at Belvedere on Lake Como with his mistress, one Signora Curoni, and her husband.

Giulia was happy in Paris. At last she had everything she had lacked hitherto. She was free. She lived with a man she loved who loved her, in a great city where the fact that they were not married created no problems, a man with a noble mind and generous nature, a handsome man, who was rich, admired and esteemed by all. They had a fine house in a fine district, in Place Vendôme. They had lots of friends. Suddenly she was pleased with her maiden name of Beccaria, which was known to everyone in cultured and worldly circles. She met with a cordial and lavish reception whereever she went. Everyone remembered her father and his famous book
Of Crimes
and
Punishments.
Her long legal battle and bitter, humiliating clashes with her father, and the rancour and resentment that had built up inside her against him, poisoning her life so long, now seemed quite remote and in any case soothed and almost effaced by his death. She rarely thought of her little boy at Merate at the College of the Somaschi Fathers. He was part of a dark former life she despised, and over the boy's head hung shadows and a sense of guilt that she did not wish to recall. She never wrote to him.

The dearest friends she and Imbonati had in France were a couple who like them lived together unmarried, Claude Fauriel and Sophie de Condorcet. They lived at Meulan near Paris in a house called
La Maisonnette
that had once been a monastery. Giulia too dreamed of having a house in the country, that she would call
La Chaumière.

Sophie de Condorcet was then about thirty. She was dark-haired and olive-skinned. She had led a very eventful life. Her husband, the Marquis de Condorcet, philosopher and mathematician, was a Girondin; when the Girondins fell in 1792, he was pursued and threatened with arrest; he hid in a peasant house; his wife would come to see him dressed as a peasant, and meanwhile she had sued for divorce in order to save their confiscated goods. Then Condorcet tried to escape, was captured, and poisoned himself with stramonium, which he got from a doctor friend, Pierre Cabanis. To support her daughter, her sister and an old governess, the widowed Sophie went to the prisons every day to paint portraits of people condemned to the guillotine. She retrieved part of the confiscated property. One day she met Claude Fauriel walking in the Jardin des Plantes; they shared a love of botany. She took him from Madame de Staël, with whom he had a relationship at that time. But Madame de Staël and Fauriel remained friends.

Fauriel was a philologist. He was born in modest circumstances in a village in the Cévennes, Saint-Etienne. He studied at Tournon. In 1793 he was made lieutenant in an infantry battalion. During the Directorate he retired to Saint-Etienne and studied Greek, Latin and Turkish. He was a friend of Fouché and on his return to Paris he became his secretary and inspector of police. As a police official he was extremely attentive to the needs of those about him, sympathetic to their misfortunes and swift to help. He resigned when he was about to make a successful career, for he had no ambition and no wish to attain too high a rank. Sainte-Beuve called him a perpetual resigner. He loved botany, nature and especially the countryside on the banks of the Loire, and the places around his village. He loved to wander through the country in the early morning gathering plant specimens. Again in the words of Sainte-Beuve, he always loved to return to the origins of things: he liked ‘the sources of rivers, the birth of civilizations', art and poetry in their primitive forms and, when he was botanizing, he concentrated on mosses in particular. He was very handsome and popular with the ladies: Stendhal said he was the handsomest man in Paris. He was tall and dark, with very full lips, strongly marked features, and sad, pensive eyes. He had a strong sense of friendship. He would become passionately interested in the topics his friends were studying and take them up in his turn. He was a good listener and everyone confided in him. He had many friends; Cabanis, Madame de Staël, Benjamin Constant, and later, Manzoni. He was an extraordinary translator. A vain man, he loved to hear his works praised, especially the translations. Sophie de Condorcet lived with him for twenty years, but she would not marry him, because he was not noble and belonged to a class inferior to her. It would have been a
mésalliance.
The Revolution had taken place, and Sophie de Condorcet was in many ways a person without prejudices, but the idea was deeply rooted in her mind that it would be humiliating to marry a man of humble origins. Many years later when Sophie died, Fauriel was rejected and scorned by her relatives, with whom he had lived for so long on the most intimate terms. They broke off all connection with him.

Sophie de Condorcet's manners were polite and easy, and yet controlled and proud. Giulia admired her but went in awe of her, for the other woman's manner was distant and protective. Giulia displayed her affection for Sophie impulsively, and received courteous but cold responses. She was hurt and confided in Fauriel: ‘It is a cruel thing for love to be unrequited, but it is no less a torment to feel loved against your wishes: this is precisely the situation between me and that unique and gracious lady for whom I have and always will have the liveliest affection, and friendship between us must be reciprocal, or I can not and will not sue for it.'

It has been thought that Sophie de Condorcet might have been very jealous of Giulia, and for this reason sometimes cold with her.

Nevertheless, at a moment of great distress Giulia received very real and strong support from Sophie de Condorcet. Carlo Imbonati died suddenly of bilious colic. He had suffered from liver trouble for some time, but nobody had realised the gravity of his illness. Sophie de Condorcet, Cabanis and Fauriel were the first to hasten to the house in Place Vendôme. Giulia was sobbing upon the corpse which she refused to leave. Sophie suggested that Giulia should have the body embalmed and taken to Meulan to the garden of
La
Maisonnette.
No priest was asked to bless the body. In the course of an afternoon Sophie found an embalmer. There was a chapel in the garden of
La Maisonnette,
but it had long remained unconsecrated. The embalmed body of Carlo Imbonati was placed there, violating all the ecclesiastical laws which forbade burial in unconsecrated ground. Giulia felt bound to Sophie by eternal gratitude.

Carlo Imbonati had made a will years before in Milan, when he and Giulia were about to leave for France. On his death the will was opened before a lawyer in Milan and communicated to Giulia who had remained in Paris. She already knew its contents, because Imbonati had told her, but she did not know how they were expressed. There were fourteen legacies to relatives and domestic servants; the rest was left to Giulia. ‘Of all my other goods, chattels and estates, investments, accounts and shares, and anything of which I die possessed, I have pronounced and do pronounce my sole heiress Giulia Beccaria Manzoni. . . and this my free and incontrovertible decision stands as a solemn public testimony to the pure and just feelings I owe to and feel for my aforesaid heiress for the constant and virtuous friendship I have professed for her, from which I gain not only complete satisfaction in the years I have spent with her, but an intimate conviction that I owe to her virtue and disinterested attachment that peace of mind and happiness which will go with me to the grave; for which, since I can never find words to express all that I feel in my heart for my aforesaid heiress, I pray Almighty God, Father and Creator of us all, to receive the humble prayers I offer in the fullness of my heart for the greatest good of my aforesaid heiress, and that He will grant that we may bless and adore Him together in all eternity.'

Carlo Imbonati had died on 15 March 1805; he was fifty-two and Giulia forty-three. The closing words of the will turned her thoughts to God. She had never thought of Him much. The ambience in which she lived was devoid of any religious thinking. She went to see a Protestant minister, Federico Menestraz, whom she had met at the house of an elderly Genevan lady, Carlotta Blondel. She asked him for consolation and advice. He exhorted her to dedicate her life to the sufferings of her fellows. At that time she conceived the idea of becoming a hospital nun. She gave away furniture and household objects, and wrote to Carlo Imbonati's sisters offering them part of the inheritance left to her in the will. She did not want to go back to the house in Place Vendôme, so she took an apartment in rue Saint-Honoré. In the summer her son arrived. Then they moved to a bigger house in rue Neuve du Luxembourg.