The Manzoni Family (6 page)

Meanwhile Manzoni was writing to Fauriel: ‘As for me, I shall continue in the sweet habit of speaking to you of what is nearest my heart, at the risk of being tedious. And so I will tell you that above all I have been occupied with the most important thing in life according to the religious notions that God sent to me in Paris, and the more I advance, the more my heart finds contentment and my mind delight. Dear Fauriel, allow me to hope that you will do the same. It is true that I fear for you those terrible words:
Abscondisti haec a sapientibus et prudentibus et revelasti ea parvulis
[Thou hidest these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes]; but no, I do not fear them, for the goodness and humility of your heart is as great as your intellect and understanding. Forgive the sermon this
parvulas
takes the liberty of addressing to you. Apart from this, I am up to my eyes in agricultural plans. . . the cottons have been sent off for this year, apart from the nankin, from which I shall collect a little seed. . . And now the errands with which I mean to trouble you. I should like some trefoil, for myself and for a friend. . . Make haste then, and buy me nine pounds of trefoil and give it to Fayolle [a Parisian publisher], to whom I have written to send them on to us by a coachman. . . '

In the winter Enrichetta was pregnant again. Her father had a paralytic attack. Relations with her mother and relatives were still rather cold. She wrote to Abbé Degola that winter: ‘Your prayers go straight to God: pray that, by His grace, I may by my behaviour and my words edify my parents and contribute in some way to their sanctification. ‘ And she wrote to Canon Tosi: ‘God bless you, my dear Father, and please give me your holy blessing in your turn, which I receive as coming from God Himself who has made you so good and so necessary to the souls He has entrusted to you. ‘ She signed the letter: ‘Enrichetta Manzoni, Catholic by Divine Mercy. '

Enrichetta's existence revolved around four main preoccupations: marriage, motherhood, illness, religion. She never had many distractions or friendships; she sometimes wrote to Rosa Somis in Turin, or to Carlotta de Blasco, a cousin of Giulia's maternal uncle; she recounted the small minutiae of domestic life, the illnesses of local ladies, her ailments in pregnancy, blood-letting, and the progress of her babies. When she wanted to confide in someone, she wrote to Abbé Degola. Canon Tosi was dear to her, but Degola always remained her real spiritual guide. But all three led an austere life without much in the way of amusements at Brusuglio, in the big house buried among the trees.

‘We await your arrival with eager confidence,'  Manzoni wrote to Fauriel. He had promised to come to Italy. But he did not come, and they heard nothing from him for many months. At last a letter arrived. ‘A letter from you, who are ever more dear to me,' Manzoni wrote, ‘would always cause me great excitement, but it so happened that the excitement was increased in an extraordinary way; I was in my room and I heard shouts in the hall of “Fauriel, Fauriel”; I rushed out like a madman, and saw only my mother and my wife, whose faces showed me at once that I had made a ridiculous mistake; only then did I have time to reflect upon the absurdity of thinking I might see you here in this season, without hearing a word about your coming, etc. But if anything could console me in my
disappointment,
it was your letter. How it made up for your silence! Every line is precious to me. . . and what about your marvellous project on Dante?' Fauriel was thinking of writing a book on Dante, and wanted to dedicate it to Manzoni (the book appeared posthumously many years later).

In the winter of 1810 the Manzonis took a rented house in Milan, in via San Vito del Carrobbio. But they still spent a great part of the year at Brusuglio. In September 1811 a second baby girl was born at Brusuglio, called Vittoria Luigia Maria; she was born prematurely and lived for only one day. Manzoni wrote to Degola: ‘I am writing to tell you of the happy issue of Enrichetta's troubles which happened yesterday when a millstone was removed from her. In the end her pains yesterday were quite atrocious but brief, and led happily to her delivery, with no need of intervention.' These words sound strange and brutal in speaking of a baby girl who received a name and lived a day. Manzoni wrote an epitaph to be inscribed on her tomb:
immature nata illieo praecepta - coelum assecuta
[Untimely born, summoned at once, she sped to heaven]. It was the first of the many funeral epitaphs he would be called upon to write in his life. Sophie de Condorcet wrote to Giulia: ‘Dear friend, I feel the warmest sympathy for all that you have gone through with Enrichetta. Her good health at the birth is a great consolation for the loss of that poor little creature that was not aware of its existence. Delicate as Enrichetta is, it is a great thing if her confinements do not cause you too much anxiety. As she grows older and stronger, and with a little rest, it should be possible for her to give a brother to the delightful Giulia.' This letter is melancholy, and full of affection for her distant friends; and she seems to have lost her proud, haughty ways; she had been very ill with
une
goutte
á la tête,
and Fauriel had been ill too with
une
fièvre
pernicieuse;
the friends in Italy heard about it only when it was all over. ‘I have difficulty in writing. I have suffered so much for five months! Goodbye, dear friends, I hug and love you all, each in a different way, but each with a true love which hates this absence. . . I assure you that, as I lay in my bed twenty days out of every month, it broke my heart to receive no news of you, and I would say to myself, I love them more than ever. . . and will always do so.'

In the winter of 1812 Enrichetta's father died of an apoplectic fit. He had resumed relations with his daughter, but they would not see Manzoni. ‘I haven't seen him once since my return to Italy,' Manzoni wrote to Fauriel, ‘and though it's true neither he nor I was to blame, it continues to distress me. He died mourned by all, especially the poor; he died after making a fortune, always deservedly maintaining his general reputation not only for total probity, but for great delicacy and generosity; all of which should give you some idea of the quality of his mind and at the same time of his moral qualities.' They used the money Enrichetta inherited from her father to buy a house in via del Morone, ‘a town house with garden' as it was called in the deed of purchase; it cost a hundred and six thousand lire.

A brother for the ‘delightful Giulia', that is little Giulietta, was born in July 1813 at Palazzo Beccaria, where the Manzonis were the guests of Giulio Beccaria, the half-brother of grandmother Giulia, whom she had sought out on her return to Italy and whom she loved dearly. They had moved out of the house in via San Vito and the new house was not ready. Grandmother Giulia wrote to her uncle Michele de Blasco on 24 July: ‘On the 21st, at seven in the morning, our dear, beloved Enrichetta presented me with a fine little boy right on my birthday and in the very house where I was born; her pains did not last many hours, she is very well and is breast-feeding this handsome, bonny, splendid boy. You can imagine our joy.' She does not say the new baby had been named Pier Luigi, but was to be called Pietro: this was Alessandro's choice, in memory of the gloomy, elderly man whom he remembered with remorse and whom he had not seen on his death-bed; Grandmother Giulia did not call this first grandson Pietro, but almost always Pedrino, or ‘el Pedrin'.

Imbonati's corpse was no longer in the park at Brusuglio; Canon Tosi had told Giulia it would be well to dispose of it elsewhere, so it was taken to the neighbouring cemetery, and as there was no room there it was buried along the perimeter wall by the roadside.

In the winter Manzoni wrote to Fauriel after a long silence: ‘Madame de Condorcet has been informed by Mother of the birth of a baby boy who, after causing my Enrichetta a lot of trouble in pregnancy, now rewards her and consoles us almost every moment of the day by his good health, placid cheerfulness and
goodness.
Enrichetta is feeding him herself and is very well. He was born weak and sickly by a mother in the same state, but little by little both have gained strength, so that Enrichetta (apart from a few little problems she is never free from) is an excellent nurse and my little Pietro is one of the bonniest babies you could wish to see. Giulietta is well and profits by the education we try to give her, of which dear Enrichetta has special charge. As for me, I am here with my family, the trees and my verses. [He was writing the
Sacred Hymns.]
We have bought a house with a big garden of about a tenth of an acre, in which I immediately planted some
liquidambar,
sophoras, thujas and firs which, if I live long enough, will come up through the window one day looking for me. I have written another two Hymns, and mean to write a lot more. . . When things are quieter, I will send them to you for your opinion, which is always the most authoritative for me. . . Does it not seem strange that I talk about such things in the midst of all this tumult? But you know that it is one of the advantages of poets,
among so many showered on them by Heaven,
always to find a moment to talk of their own verses. '

A great deal of work was required in the new house, and there were expenses for the property at Brusuglio; the Imbonati inheritance had diminished, and they had financial worries. Besides, they had to pay very heavy taxes; money was demanded from the citizens to pay for the defeats Napoleon had suffered in battle. Many had died in Russia and in the fighting on the Elbe. For some time disorder had reigned in Milan and throughout Lombardy; there was violence in the streets, theft and looting. On 19 April in that year, 1814, a petition was signed for the convocation of the Electoral Colleges, to be presented to the Senate; among the hundred and twenty-seven signatories was Manzoni, Alessandro, landowner. On 20 April occurred the murder of Giuseppe Prina, the finance minister hated by the people for his subservience to the French; he had imposed tremendous taxes in response to the demands of Napoleon. Manzoni wrote to Fauriel, in a letter addressed to Paris to be delivered by his cousin Giacomo Beccaria: ‘My cousin will tell you about the revolution that has taken place here. It was unanimous, and I must say wise and pure, although it was unhappily stained by an assassination which those involved in the rebellion (that is, the major and better part of the population) had no share in; nothing could be further from their nature. It was the work of people who took advantage of the popular movement and turned it against a man who was the object of public hate, the finance minister, who was slain in spite of the efforts of many to snatch him from their hands. You will know in any case that the people are always a better jury than judge; but decent people were saddened by this deed. As it happens, our house is very close to the one where he was living, so that for hours we could hear the shouts of the people searching for him, which kept my mother and wife in a state of cruel anxiety, as they feared the people might not stop at that. And indeed, some men of baser motives tried to take advantage of the momentary anarchy and prolong it, but the civil guard were able to check it with courage, wisdom and diligence worthy of the highest praise. '

Among the many who had fought to snatch Prina from the fury of the crowd was Ugo Foscolo, and Manzoni must have known it. In his heart he must have compared the physical courage of Foscolo (who fought with great bravery) with his own fear at any shouting or violence and bloodshed. He must have shared the ‘cruel anxiety' experienced by his mother and wife, to an even greater degree. Those moments were deeply distressing to him, either because a man was murdered only a few steps from his house, or because he had not the strength to go and defend him.

Foscolo and Manzoni respected but did not like each other. They were too different. In 1806, when he was in Paris, Foscolo had called on Manzoni whom he already knew. He had read the verses ‘On the Death of Carlo Imbonati' and he admired him. He expected an enthusiastic welcome, but was received coldly either by Alessandro or by Giulia, for no obvious reason; perhaps Giulia's nerves were bad that day. On his return to Italy, Foscolo expressed his admiration for Manzoni's poem in a note to the
Sepolcri.
But he had been upset by that cold reception and many years later he still remembered it with displeasure.

'We are all longing to leave tor the country, Giulia wrote to her uncle Michele de Blasco in the summer,'. . . But all our houses have been chock-full of soldiers. . . at Brusuglio we had forty soldiers; I got them to move out, because we need to go there for the sake of our health, especially Enrichetta who had been ordered to take baths; in fact, all things being equal, we are going tomorrow. It is so hot here; Milan is full, because it's swarming with soldiers. They are about to create a square, demolishing the house of the former finance minister; I mention it because it's so close to us. . . Giulietta sends you a hug, as Pedrino will do one day, I'm sure. On his birthday and mine, the 21st July, I surprised his mother by giving us a portrait of this lovely baby boy.' They spent some months in the winter at Lecco, at II Caleotto: ‘Our poor house had been full of soldiers for a year,' Giulia wrote again to her uncle de Blasco in Milan, ‘so we've had to remove all the mattresses in the house, and replace everything, including the kitchen utensils. . . We were happy there, but we had to come back here very soon, because they wanted to billet men in our own rooms, and we really haven't one that you could call a spare room.' Meanwhile Abbé Zinammi had died, an old friend of the family, administrator and friend of Imbonati while he lived; he had been ‘stricken by the universal fate', wrote Giulia, giving details of his death; he fell into a lethargy, ‘consulted a doctor, was bled in the neck, and finally died on the fifth day. . . Oh, you can see that such happenings are not cheering, but deeply thought-provoking; God grant our thoughts be profitable, that we may trust in the mercy of the Lord, and not indulge in vain melancholy. Apart from this, Giulietta is well; Pedrino is well and walking on his own like a footman; Alessandro is a bit tired by business matters; I have a cold, and am confined to the house because the streets are so bad; Enrichetta, who is ever more dear to me, and who was so well at Lecco, is now suffering her old troubles all the time. . .' ‘I must tell you, dear friend, that I have been leading a very sedentary life for more than two months, and have even been obliged to stay in bed for some time; in the last two or three days I have felt some relief from my pains, but I am still living more or less in enforced idleness because any occupation upsets me,' Enrichetta wrote to her cousin Carlotta. She was pregnant again; in July Maria Cristina was born.