The Manzoni Family (3 page)

When he was twelve Alessandro left the College of the Somaschi Fathers which he hated. (‘Filthy sheepfold' he was to call it later.) He was transferred to the Longone College in Milan, which he hated just as much. But he made friends, there; Arese, Pagani, Confalonieri, Visconti. He stayed there until he was sixteen. Then he went to live in the house in Santa Prassede Street, where he was received by the dark melancholy of Don Pietro, the gloom of the maiden aunts, Uncle Monsignore with the beam in his eye, and everything that had bored and depressed Giulia when she lived among these people. As for Don Pietro, he felt neither affection nor hostility for the boy. His presence in the house disturbed him, as it reminded him of Giulia and his unfortunate marriage. However, he felt it his duty to behave with decorum. The law had consigned this boy to him, and he placed law in the highest sphere of the human condition. But he could offer him only a severe and weary gaze and inhibited, speechless protection. Moreover, the boy himself was uncertain how to behave towards this melancholy man. He was ill at ease. He had a group of friends and imitated their behaviour. He talked with them about women, and in the evenings went to gamble at the Ridotto della Scala. It was at that time that he got to know the poet Vincenzo Monti, and saw in him an authoritative presence, a model to be emulated. He wrote verses which Vincenzo Monti read. One evening in the theatre, sitting in a box beside a certain Contessa Cicognara, he saw Napoleon Bonaparte; like a flash of lightning, the General's gaze alighted for a moment on the Contessa who he knew loathed him, and then moved scornfully away; those penetrating, scornful eyes remained in the boy's memory for ever.

Vincenzo Monti was the guest of Giulia and Carlo Imbonati during a visit to Paris not long before Imbonati died, and he spoke of Alessandro. Then Imbonati wrote to Alessandro inviting him to visit them. He was curious to make his acquaintance and felt guilty since he and Giulia had never given a serious thought to the boy growing up far away. In fact, he had taken his mother away from him. Perhaps he also had a subconscious premonition of his death and wanted Giulia to have her son beside her. Alessandro was then nineteen. When he received Imbonati's letter, he asked Don Pietro for the money for the journey. Don Pietro gave it to him and thought of his departure with a sense of liberation. In the spring the news of Imbonati's death reached them. Alessandro left for Paris in June.

In Paris, in rue Saint-Honoré, mother and son found themselves face to face like two people who had never met before. They were not mother and son but a woman and a man. She was suffering a recent bereavement and bore the traces of grief in her face. He felt suddenly called upon to sustain her. They were not mother and son because the maternal and filial bonds between them had been severed over the years in which they had been living far from each other, each wanting to forget the other. In his memory was buried the image of the mother who had abandoned him and vanished, and it bred anguish and a confused rancour. . . In her was buried the image of an infant to whom she had given no motherly affection and from whom she had fled, and it bred anguish and remorse. All these buried emotions suddenly flared up briefly between them before sinking back again into obscurity, but not without emitting flashes and clamour which dazzled and bemused them. A new life was beginning for both.

Alessandro fell in love with Giulia, and not only with her but suddenly with everything around her, with the memory of Carlo Imbonati, with Paris, Sophie de Condorcet and Fauriel. Later a very real and profound friendship would develop between Manzoni and Fauriel, but at this early stage he was only someone dear to Giulia and illuminated by her radiance.

He sent his verses to Fauriel who gave his opinion of them. Alessandro replied: ‘Knowing you were so well informed about Italian literature, I was afraid to show you my verses: and the same reason makes your reception of them all the more flattering. . . I close, assuring you of my real distress that I can not express my feelings to you in person. Shall I never clasp that hand which placed my dear, unhappy mother's in the cold hand of her and my Carlo? But our hands can only be joined by my mother's.'

He wrote a long hymn,
On the Death of Carlo Imbonati,
dedicated to his mother. Later he came to dislike it, and rejected it.

To his friend Pagani in Milan he wrote that he wished from now on to be called Alessandro Manzoni Beccaria. ‘Yesterday I had the honour of dining with a great man, a supreme poet and superb lyricist, Le Brun. Having honoured me with the gift of one of his printed works, he insisted on writing on the copy, which I shall keep for ever: to Monsieur Beccaria -
C'est un nom
— he said -
trop honorable pour ne pas saisir l‘occasion de le porter. Je veux que le nom de Le Brun choque avec celui de Beccaria.
I had the honour of placing two kisses on his wan, emaciated cheeks, sweeter to me than if I had plucked them from the lips of Venus.'

Alessandro and Giulia wrote a joint letter to Vincenzo Monti in Milan, telling him of their meeting and their happiness. In him it was the happiness of one who had left grey, empty days behind him. In her it was mingled with the torment of her recent misfortune. Together they were seeing the world with new eyes. Manzoni wrote: ‘I have felt a real need to write about my happiness to you who predicted it; to tell you I have found it in a mother's arms; to say this to you who have so often spoken to me of her and know her so well. Oh Monti, I do not seek to dry her tears: I weep with her: I share her profound, but sacred and tranquil grief. . . I do not know when I may see you. I live only for my Giulia, and with her to adore and emulate that man you used to tell me was virtue itself. . . Love me and write to me. Now I willingly pass the pen to my Giulia, who is almost snatching it from me to write a few lines to her Monti.' And Giulia: ‘Dear Monti, I should like to add a line or two to what my Alessandro has written. Oh, you who love him, you who
really
know him since you could propose my beloved Carlo as a model to him, you can measure the immense love I bear him by the immense love and sacred, incurable grief I feel for Carlo. Oh! do not tell me yet to seek distraction or consolation, you cannot imagine how I aspire to set these tears in the eternity which has already begun for me since it has closed upon him. Oh Monti, do write to me, so that I may write to you.'

Giving up the plan of going to Geneva to become a hospital nun — which, in any case, she had never seriously intended to do — Giulia devoted herself to her son. She was a practical person with her feet on the ground. She had learned to organize her own life with great good sense. She thought her son's exalted love for her could be a heavy encumbrance on their daily life, wearing and painful for both of them, and that in the long run they would tire of being alone together. Her son must marry as soon as possible, and have a family and children, so that she would have a firm, clearly defined role and, surveying this new landscape, peopled and cheerful, she would grow old in wisdom and happiness. But it was essential to choose the right person, one who would intuitively know her place between the two of them. So she must look around, either in France or in Italy. Imbonati had left her, among all the other things, a large property at Brusuglio, near Milan. It would be a good thing to go and see it. Mother and son set out. Here is a letter to Fauriel from Genoa: ‘I was lying in bed this morning, thinking how long we had been waiting to hear from you, when I heard my mother shout: Alessandro, a letter from Fauriel; I jumped out of bed, ran into her room, and we savoured your dear letter together. I cannot tell you the pleasure I get from the growing hope that I will be your friend, and this hope is also the joy of my mother, who keeps saying: Oh, if only you could become necessary to that divine Fauriel! Don't be angry, the epithet slipped from my pen.' Immediately after that, still in Genoa, he received a letter from Milan saying that Don Pietro Manzoni was very ill; ‘I set off at once,' he wrote to Fauriel, ‘my good mother accompanied me; but on my arrival they told me I was not to have the consolation of seeing my father, for the very day on which I heard of his illness was his last.' He did not go to see his dead father; he did not stop in Milan; ‘Peace and honour to his ashes,' he wrote to Fauriel. He and Giulia spent a few days at Brusuglio, then went to Turin for a month. Don Pietro Manzoni had made a will: he left his possessions to Alessandro, and begged him ‘not to forget the maxims and principles' in which he had sought to bring him up. ‘To my lady wife I leave two diamond pendants as a token of my esteem and remembrance of her.'

There are several portraits of the young Alessandro Manzoni which vary greatly although they were painted within quite a short space of years. In one his hair is arranged in tight little symmetrical waves, his nose is pointed, and he has a judicious look. In another he has a thick, dishevelled mane and cloudy eyes and looks like Ugo Foscolo. In another he has a big nose and sulky mouth. In yet another he has hollow cheeks, a penetrating gaze, and crisply curling whiskers.

There is one portrait of the young Enrichetta Blondel in her bridal veil. She has a round, childlike face with gentle, unformed features. She was born in 1791 at Casirate d'Adda in the province of Bergamo. Her father was called Francesco Blondel, her mother Maria Mariton; he was Swiss, she came from Languedoc. They were Calvinists. They had eight children, four boys and four girls, and Enrichetta was the third. All the children had been baptised Catholics, because the father wanted them to be the same as everyone else. The mother had made no objection, although she hated the Catholic religion and brought her children up in the Protestant faith. The father was of a gentle disposition, the mother severe and authoritarian. He had made money out of a silk-farm. He traded in silk and had many mills. Early in the century they bought the Imbonati house in Marino Street in Milan. They were related to the Carlotta Blondel who in Paris, after the death of Carlo Imbonati, had sent Giulia to Pastor Menestraz.

Enrichetta was small, fair and graceful, with fair eyelashes. She had modest, submissive ways and said little. To Giulia she seemed the ideal daughter-in-law she had long imagined. She seemed quite perfect, created to slip gently and harmoniously into their little world. She was considered during a second trip to Italy, after two or three other matrimonial plans had come to nothing. One was with a certain ‘angelica Luigina', whom they had known to be already promised, and another with a French girl, daughter of friends of Fauriel called De Tracy, who had thought they were not sufficiently aristocratic.

In October 1807, shortly after meeting Enrichetta, Manzoni wrote to Fauriel from a friend's house at Belvedere sul Lago: ‘I have something to tell you in confidence; I have seen in Milan the girl I told you about; I thought she was very charming; my mother who has also spoken to her and at greater length, thinks she has an excellent heart; she thinks only of her home and the happiness of her parents who adore her; in short, she is full of family feelings (and I'll say in your ear that she's the only one here with such feelings). For me there is another advantage, and a very real one in this country, at least for me: she is not an aristocrat, and you know Parini's poem. Moreover, she is a Protestant; in fact, she's a treasure, and it seems to me before long there will be three of us wanting your company; as yet, however, nothing is settled, and she herself knows nothing of it. I think, when it happens, it will be my duty to inform the worthy man whose alliance I was hoping to obtain, so please tell me what you think about it. For the moment it must be kept completely secret. . . My mother has just interrupted to tell me to say that the little girl I speak of speaks French all the time, is sixteen, and is simple and unpretentious. So now you know it all.'

And in another letter when the marriage was about to take place:

‘So I can tell you that my bride is sixteen, has a sweet nature, upright feelings, the greatest affection for her parents and apparently some little for me. . . She shows such love mingled with respect for my mother you would think she was her own daughter; and indeed she always calls her ‘Mama'. No doubt you will think I have been rather hasty, but as soon as I really got to know her, it seemed pointless to delay. Her family commands respect for the harmony that prevails among them, and for their modesty, goodness and every estimable sentiment. In short, I am certain that this will bring happiness for me, and for my mother, without which there could be none for me. '

Enrichetta and Alessandro were married in Milan in February 1808 in a Calvinist church. He would have needed a dispensation for a Catholic wedding, since she was of a different faith despite her baptism. But he was in a hurry and neglected to ask for the dispensation. He wrote to Fauriel that the priests had refused to celebrate his marriage because of the difference of religion. This delighted all the Blondel family. Giulia did not attend the ceremony because she was indisposed. There was no wedding breakfast. A Swiss pastor blessed the couple in the house in Marino Street which had once belonged to the Imbonatis. Immediately after Manzoni hurried to his mother's bedside. The marriage was bitterly criticized in the town, for it was generally thought scandalous that a nobleman, related to ‘monsignores', should marry a Protestant.

‘I have spent two months between pain and pleasure,' Manzoni wrote to Fauriel in the spring. ‘My mother has had a terrible sore throat, which has recurred three times; however, she now seems free of it. Meanwhile, I have got married, which speeded my mother's recovery, as it has filled, indeed
flooded
her heart with happiness. We are all three as happy as can be; this angel was created just for us; she shares all my tastes, and I don't think there is one important matter on which her opinions differ from mine.'

But Giulia, albeit happy, was in a black mood; she was excessively irritated that the town should speak ill of them. In a corner of her estate at Brusuglio she had already had a
tempietto
built the year before and had arranged for Carlo Imbonati's body to be brought there from France, and this too had been considered scandalous. She could not wait to leave
ce vilain Italie;
she longed for Paris and her friends who understood her. She often went to Brusuglio to linger at the little tomb; also to supervise the work begun a year before; on the estate there was a farm which was to be transformed into a spacious, comfortable house in which they would enjoy living. But all this failed to soothe her.