The Manzoni Family (9 page)

On 6 July the departure began to seem possible. Giulia to the Canon: ‘Oh God! please, please pray for us and welcome us with true love and charity. I am so exhausted that all I want is to creep into a corner to recover. . . Alessandro is better, but he has so little strength! and his nerves! and his imagination! Oh, please pray for us and
keep all these things in your heart.
' That is to say, the Canon was to say nothing, to anyone, about the sometimes indignant letters he had received from them. ‘It is a relief to know we will definitely have Giuseppino.' The servant they wanted was ready to welcome them. ‘Please be so kind as to see that Giuseppino gets ajar of barley water and Sant Agostino lemon juice so that it is waiting for us when we arrive at Brussu. . . I shall seize the first possible opportunity to set off because we know to our cost that he who hesitates is lost, and I have been hurrying to pack the
valises. 
'

They finally left Paris on 26 July. In spite of the heat, the journey went well. They stayed with the Somis family in Turin for a day. Manzoni went to call on Abbé Lodovico di Breme, whom he had met years before, when they passed through Turin in that distant summer of 1810 when Giulietta was a tiny baby. Lodovico di Breme had had an adventurous and unhappy life. It was said he had had a mistress among the aristocracy — a sister of the marchesa Trivulzi — and that ‘he unintentionally caused her death with a potion, to free himself rather than her of the scandalous consequences of their love', according to Niccolò Tommaseo. He had been one of the group collaborating on the newspaper
II Conciliatore,
which had gone out of production in 1819. Di Breme was now suffering from an incurable disease, and felt his faith in God fading with his life. It seemed that death appeared to Manzoni at every turn at that time. Many years later Tommaseo recounted that last meeting between Manzoni and di Breme: ‘When “il Nostro” [Manzoni] was passing through Turin on his return from Paris, di Breme, already close to his end, sent for him to discuss his doubts on matters of faith, and his squalid appearance with his hair standing on end was fearful to behold.'  Manzoni was deeply distressed. The abbé died in August.

And there they were at last at Brusuglio, at Brusú or Brusú as they usually called it, with the welcome cool of the spacious rooms and the shady trees in the garden. And to think they had intended, not many months ago, to sell this house! It was such a welcoming, restful, hospitable place. Manzoni found all his old friends. Canon Tosi had become more cautious and considerate, and stopped badgering him about the
Morale cattolica.
Immediately after their arrival the philosopher Victor Cousin, a friend of Fauriel, stayed with them; he was going through a difficult spell; chiefly because he too was in poor health, but also because he was being attacked in France for political reasons, and they wanted to deprive him of his teaching post; he too felt better in the peace of the countryside. When Cousin left them, Manzoni gave him a parcel of books he wanted Fauriel to read, among them
Ildegonda,
a novella in verse by Tommaso Grossi. In the letter he enclosed with the parcel, he told Fauriel about the friends he had met again in Italy, Berchet, Visconti, Grossi, and about a new tragedy he was thinking of beginning, about the end of the reign of the Longobardi. Fauriel was slow to reply and they still had not heard from him in the winter, that is, several months after leaving Paris, and all the news they had of him was in a few brief lines from Madame de Condorcet.

That winter Enrichetta realized she was pregnant again. ‘It is my ninth pregnancy,' she wrote to Cousin Carlotta de Blasco. She had not written to her for a long time; the cousin meantime had married a certain Signor Fontana. Enrichetta told her everything; how they had gone to Paris, their eight months there, Alessandro's illness, their return. She described her five children one by one. Now she had to prepare herself for the arrival of the sixth. ‘I assure you this new task is a great distress to me. . . but we must submit to the will of God. '

They spent the winter months in Milan, in the house in via del Morone; this too they had wanted to sell, but now it seemed very dear to them as well. They went back to Brusuglio in the spring. The governess they had brought back from France with them, successor to Mademoiselle de Rancé, was called Perrier. But the air, either in Milan or at Brusuglio, did not suit her, and she left after less than a year.

‘Dear Fauriel, I prefer to send a very short, sad letter than to let slip another opportunity of writing to you. We've been in the country for a few days and mean to stay all summer,' Manzoni wrote to Fauriel. It was Spring 1821, the dark days of the proceedings against the Carbonária. ‘Mother, as usual, is
not-ill
rather than well. Enrichetta is in the seventh month of a difficult pregnancy, which gives hope of a happy outcome, to be achieved by a lot of patience and rest. As for me, it would be better to say nothing. I can get by when I can work: this gets me through four or five hours in the morning, and then I am too tired to think for the rest of the day; but for some time I've all too often had days of enforced idleness, because I simply cannot get my head working, and these are often rather gloomy days. I must bow my head and let the storm pass over; it's true it could happen that we must pass on, before the storm. In these
black
days, I pick up a book, read a couple of pages, put it down and take another, which meets with the same fate. . . When will we meet again, dear Fauriel? Addio. If you write to me, it will indeed be a charitable office.' The word ‘black' is underlined, and evidently refers to the political situation.

In April that year Manzoni began to write a novel. The title was
Fermo e Lucia.
Then he abandoned it to finish the tragedy about the end of the Longobardi:
Adelchi.
Meanwhile he was reading historical novels: he got his antiquarian friend Gaetano Cattaneo to look for them: ‘
The Abbot,
or
The Monastery,
or
The Astrologer (sic):
something for pity's sake.' These were three novels by Walter Scott. He gave Cattaneo no peace with his constant requests for books. ‘Here I am as usual, pestering you like a baker for bread. I would like the Dictionary of the French Academy. . . Here I am again. I would like the
Crusades
of Michaud, in the original or in translation, it doesn't matter.' He apologized for never going to see him: ‘Remember a poor convulsive can't go and see his friends when he'd like to, and please continue to love your grateful friend.'

In July of that same year 1821, in the
Gazzetta di Milano
appeared the news of the death of Napoleon. He had died two months before, on 5 May. Manzoni spent three days writing the ode which was to become famous. ‘Ei fu. Siccome immobile, / dato il mortal sospiro. . .' These verses were written while Enrichetta sat at the piano and played non-stop any piece of music that came into her head, at his request.

In August a baby girl was born, and was called Clara. Enrichetta became seriously ill with puerperal fever. She nearly died but they managed to save her.

‘I told you my tragedy
Adelchi
was finished, apart from some revising I still have to do, so I must add that I'm not at all pleased with it, and if in this brief life some tragedies had to be sacrificed, then this one of mine ought certainly to be suppressed,' Manzoni wrote to Fauriel, who had written at last. Fauriel's letter was brief, and was brief ‘particularly on those matters I should like to hear you discuss more fully', that is, the work on which the lazy and never-satisfied Fauriel was engaged. Manzoni, by contrast, wrote pages and pages to him. ‘How often have I, even more than usual, cursed the distance that separates us. . .' ‘How I reproach myself with not having made you talk more when I was lucky enough to be near you, with not having had the impudence of the customs officer to search in your portfolio.' ‘I can't finish without saying something of a matter which has sadly preoccupied us and caused us to spend days I would rather forget. You know from Madame de Condorcet that my Enrichetta has been so ill as to cause us anxiety. Slowly but surely she is now recovering. Never have I felt so keenly the uncertainty, danger, and even terror which underlies even the most peaceful happiness. As for me, I am better than when I last wrote to you: I work, and my nerves leave me more or less in peace the rest of the time. '

The next year Enrichetta was pregnant again. A young Scot turned up at Brusuglio, recommended by Fauriel, and was taken on as a tutor. In the summer there was a tremendous hailstorm at Brusuglio that devastated fields, vines and mulberries. ‘This disaster came straight from Heaven,' Giulia wrote to Sophie de Condorcet, ‘so that we cannot and must not complain about it; by the same token we should be resigned to all the rest; but the problem is that your friendship is strong and generous, and mine tearful, which make it almost a duty for you to sustain and console me.' Sophie de Condorcet was gravely ill, but they did not know; and consolation and support would never again come to Giulia from that quarter. The children had scarlet fever, Giulia a very painful whitlow, and my Enrichetta, wrote Manzoni to Fauriel, ‘without staying in bed, is always indisposed, and her sight is pitifully weak, which grieves us very much; but we are led to hope, indeed we are assured, that this new weakness is the result of her pregnancy and the birth will cure it.' Regarding his novel, he wrote, he was half-way through the second volume; regarding the
Adelchi,
he had delivered it to the printer. Fauriel was translating the
Adelchi
into French, and they had decided, he and Manzoni, that the French edition should appear at the same time as the Italian; so the Italian publisher had to delay the appearance of the book until the French edition was also ready. ‘Believe me, it will be a happy moment for both of us when we can write to each other without always having the tedious
Adelchi
as a burdensome third party between us. '

The news reached them that Sophie de Condorcet was poorly, yet she seemed to be already on the road to recovery. On 12 September Manzoni wrote congratulating Fauriel on her recovery. But she had died four days before.

On 17 September another baby girl was born, and was called Vittoria. Enrichetta's sight did not improve after the birth; the hope had proved illusory. The doctors advised a change of air. They planned to go to Tuscany. Meanwhile they had heard of the death of Sophie de Condorcet: they thought they might persuade Fauriel to join them in Tuscany. But Alessandro could not interrupt his work on his novel and the project was abandoned. They did not write to Fauriel immediately. Instead Visconti wrote to him in October: ‘Grossi and the Manzoni family ask me to send you their love. Manzoni wanted to write to you, but after the loss of Madame de Condorcet didn't know how to touch upon a matter too painful to you, as to him and to all his family. In sending you my sincere condolences, I think I should tell you that, after this sad news, Manzoni cannot regard as definitive the final date fixed by you for the publication of the
Adelchi
for the twentieth of this month. But he is waiting for you to fix a later date. '

The
Adelchi
was published in Italy in November. It was dedicated to Enrichetta with these words, in which there is a strange commemorative and funereal note:

‘To his beloved and revered wife Enrichetta Luigia Blondel / who together with conjugal love and maternal wisdom / was able to preserve a virginal soul / the author dedicates this
Adelchi I
regretting that he has no more splendid and lasting monument / to which to commit her dear name and the memory of such virtues.'

‘Giulietta is drawing a little head for you,' wrote Grandmother Giulia to Madame de Condorcet. It was summer 1822; Sophie de Condorcet would be dead a few weeks later. ‘Pietro is studying French. They are all well and drink tea from the little Easter tea-cups [perhaps a gift from Sophie de Condorcet]. At last I've had a letter from you, my dear friend . . . ' This was Giulia's last letter to Sophie, and the drawing was sent with it. It was found by Jules Mohl and Cabanis' daughter among Fauriel's papers when he died many years later. There was also a portrait in miniature of a little girl which Cabanis' daughter thought must be Giulietta. Portrait and drawing were sent back to the Manzonis.

In 1822 Giulietta was fourteen, almost the age at which her mother had married, and her awareness of this made her grownup, sensible and motherly towards her brothers and sisters. She led a sober, disciplined life, without much in the way of amusements and without many friends of her own age; she did not go to school but was taught at home by a governess; after Mademoiselle Perrier, who went back to France because the climate did not suit her, a governess called Mademoiselle Burdet was sent by Abbé Billiet. Long summers at Brusuglio, long foggy winters in Milan. At home, whether at Brusuglio or Milan, there were always plenty of visitors, friends of her father. It would have been a monotonous existence without the comings and goings of visitors, her noisy brothers and sisters and the bustle of the servants. It would have been a peaceful life without her mother's poor health, her father's nerves, and the illnesses of the many little siblings.

That summer of 1822, Tommaso Grossi was writing a poem, ‘The Lombardians at the First Crusade'. Manzoni was writing the second volume of his novel. Ermes Visconti had finished a very lengthy essay
On Beauty;
he sent it to Fauriel: ‘I am just writing a few lines, my dear Sir, to tell you I have at last sent off the manuscript of
On Beauty
by the mail-coach, addressed to you. . When
la petite caisse
containing the manuscript arrived, Fauriel had other things to think of: Sophie de Condorcet had died. Knowing the essay was on its way, he had planned to have it translated into French by
cette angélique créature que nous n'avons plus,
that is by Sophie; some time later he glanced at the great bundle of paper, spoke to Cousin about it, and they both set about trying to find another translator. Fauriel was a generous, patient man, always ready to listen even when most absorbed in his own affairs; always ready to collaborate with others, and place his time and intelligence at their service.