The Manzoni Family (11 page)

A year passed in which Mary Clarke was again often away; she and Fauriel wrote many letters to each other; they planned the Italian trip, and here they were at last in Milan together.

Mary Clarke became very friendly with the Manzoni family. She and her mother spent the whole of that winter of 1824 in Milan, and they used to spend the evenings at the Manzoni house. Many years later Mary Clarke remembered those evenings clearly; she described them in a letter to someone who had asked her about them (it was Angelo de Gubernatis, who was writing a study of the relationship between Manzoni and Fauriel). They were happy evenings; the children played blind man's bluff and Enrichetta and Mary Clarke joined in, while Giulia and Mrs Clarke chatted by the fire, with Manzoni, Fauriel, and other friends who called every evening: Grossi, Visconti, Cattaneo, a poet called Giovanni Torti, and Luigi Rossari, who was an Italian teacher. In this letter Mary Clarke presented a different and unusually youthful image of Enrichetta: ‘You would have thought she was the sister of her older children,' Mary Clarke observed. ‘You've been enjoying yourself, little wife,' Manzoni said once to Enrichetta, who was rosy and excited after one of these games of blind man's bluff, putting his arm round her waist, and she agreed. But is was certainly a modest sort of entertainment, playing blind man's bluff with the children through the rooms of the house; the Manzonis did not frequent high society, they never went out in the evenings, and in Milan they had the reputation of being unsociable.

During this visit from Fauriel, the friendship between him and Manzoni changed, and became somehow more simple and natural. Fauriel would chat for a long time with Enrichetta and Giulia, and play with the children. A real affection grew up between him and the children, in the light of which Enrichetta too became his friend, more than she had been in the past. The children called him Tola, a name invented by one of the little ones.

In the spring, the two Clarkes set off for Venice, and Fauriel followed them. From Venice he wrote to Manzoni: ‘We were a bit chilled and weary arriving here, but otherwise fairly well. In spite of its ruined palaces, and pretty unbearable weather with rain and cold, I like this Thousand and One Nights town very much. . . Goodbye for now my dear friend, I hug you all, each and every one of you, again and again, my dear “god-mother”, and your Enrichetta who is so close to my heart. Tell my dear little Giulia I have no one to play skittles with, which is very sad; and I have no one to ride on my shoulders or to call me Tola. Mrs and Miss Clarke talk of nothing but you, of all of you.' Fauriel was working on a collection of Greek folk songs, and there was a very large Greek colony in Venice: with a friend of his and of Manzoni, the Greek Mustoxidi, he went to Trieste, where there was also a Greek colony, parting from the two Clarkes who wanted to tour Italy. Fauriel to Mary Clarke, from Trieste: ‘I am not sorry to have come here: Mustoxidi knows everyone here, and is liked by many people who have welcomed me for his sake. . . I spend all my evenings at the theatre, where they act tragedies and comedies quite well, or no worse than in Milan; I don't enjoy it very much, as you can imagine; but at least the evenings are less tedious to me there than elsewhere, and I can see more people without being obliged to talk. Three or four boxes are available to me, and I can choose to be alone or in company. . . I don't know yet whether I'll set off alone or whether Mustox is coming with me; he is still the best of men, but I do wish he could think of one thing for ten minutes on end, and that he was not so addicted to his pipe. Goodbye, dear life of my heart, I must go out and rush round, think about my departure, and I can't talk to you any longer. Goodbye, say you haven't forgotten me among all the grand things you are seeing; I assure you I love you more than ever.'

Fauriel to Mary Clarke from Venice, where he had paused before returning to Milan (Mary and her mother, meanwhile, were in Rome): 1 can't open my eyes or take a step without seeing something that reminds me that you were here with me, and I have to fight against tears; and I don't always succeed, especially when I am alone in my room. I really don't know why, but I came back to our hotel, though I did take care to find a nook as far as possible from the rooms we had then: but this precaution avails me little, for I keep returning instinctively to those rooms, and I have to turn back on my tracks, with a suffocating sense of the unspeakable pain of your absence. Yesterday, in an unguarded moment, I suddenly found myself standing in the middle of my old room, face to face with a man glued to the table at which he was writing, and looking at me in astonishment; I babbled a few laborious words of apology about my memory. ... I haven't had the courage to go back to the Lido where we once saw the sea in its awful beauty.
Goodbye, my dearest life, I must end this letter, and I can end it only by telling you I love you, and that I love you as much as you can desire, and that I would do so even if you did not love me
[this in Italian, the rest of the letter in French]. Goodbye again, dear friend, my dear, sweet friend; this Italian language does not seem serious enough for a declaration of my love, so I repeat it in the language in which I said it for the first time and for ever. '

Mary Clarke to Fauriel, from Rome; he had now rejoined the Manzonis at Brusuglio (Bruzuglio, he and Mary called it) and was to spend the summer there: ‘I am pleased to think you are at Bruzuglio and happier than in your letter, though you love me much more when you like the people about you less, and Manzoni and Cousin are a threat to me, while Musky [Mus-toxidi] made you gloomy. . . . Goodbye then, my dear Dicky [she often called him this], I shall write to you sometimes poste restante, for they will think it strange that I write to you so often, and I prefer your friends to suspect nothing, because Signora Manzoni will think it wasn't very nice of me not to have told her about our relationship, and I don't want you to tell her about it, if I see her this autumn,
I
will tell her. Goodbye, my angel, write to me and be good and write masterpieces and judge them to be so, and be talkative, which is healthier; it hurt me more than I can say to go four months in Milan without really speaking; goodbye, my angel. 
'
 So she had been ill at ease in Milan among the Manzonis who did not know about her amorous relationship with Fauriel; and yet it seems impossible that they should not have guessed it.

From Brusuglio, Fauriel to Mary Clarke: ‘You know the friends I am with, so I need not tell you the welcome I got; I felt I was finding not just friends but something sweeter still: the children talked about me all the time, sometimes they dreamed of me, and whenever a carriage made a noise around midnight, they thought it was the stage-coach. They were delighted with the shells I brought them, and I hastened to explain that you had helped me gather them, so that I should not usurp your share in their gratitude. So much for the children. As for the grown-ups, they were no less delighted with the news they had had from you. . . Believe me, we have talked about you such a lot: and if I had no other reasons to love such excellent friends, I would have to love them for the affection they bear you. That is why I could not help being indiscreet with them about you: what they may have suspected about my feelings toward you, they now know completely and without a shadow of doubt. I told them I love you, that I love you with all my heart; I told them our plans for the future, without concealing the doubts I feel about my capacity to engender a happiness that I desire more than my own.' So perhaps Mary Clarke and Fauriel were thinking of getting married, but they never did.

Fauriel spent a peaceful summer at Brusuglio; he wrote the preface to the
Greek Songs;
he intended to join Mary and her mother in Florence in the autumn, and meanwhile he and Mary regularly exchanged long letters. The two Clarkes had been in Naples, and were now back in Rome; they were tremendously keen on Italy; Mary loved the Italians, but not the poor
(le has peuple)
whom she thought fierce and brutal: They ill-treated horses. She had read Alfieri's
Memorie
with enthusiasm. She enjoyed being in Rome, but in the family boarding-house where they were staying the cooking was dreadful (‘they cook like pigs') and she and her mother moved to Tivoli for the fresh air and better food: ‘I need to cosset my stomach which is somewhat recalcitrant, although I'm a bit better after a week of complete rest during which I have amused myself painting, which has been like mother's milk to babes.' Talking of babies, she recalled freeing one from its swaddling-clothes on the outskirts of Naples: ‘Poor creature! it was howling fit to burst and it was only two weeks old, and the weather was scorching; when we adults could hardly bear our loose clothing, the wretched little thing was all bundled up in swaddling clothes, tightly bound, almost hidden from sight; as soon as we released it, it smiled and was quite happy. A young English painter Fm mad about told me he had freed at least a hundred in the three years he's been in Italy.' At one moment she and her mother were without money, and she wrote urgently to Fauriel asking him to send them some of his or ask Manzoni to lend some: but then their money arrived from England. ‘Long live money!' she wrote. ‘It's the key to everything: that's why I would like to be able to earn some and why I am so avaricious.' Her health improved at Tivoli, after the heat of the Roman summer: ‘It isn't hot here, in fact it's almost cold in the evening, but there is no shade; fortunately Mama has found a painter's wife who is bored too and they keep each other company, otherwise I couldn't wait to set off again, and I've been cursing my life and especially the hateful box in which it pleased God to imprison me, because if I were a man, I ask you, would it be necessary for Mama and myself to be chained together? Ah, if I were asked: Would you rather be a woman or a galley-slave? I would say at once: Hurrah for the galley! ... I am like a great eagle in a little cage, but enough, I must resign myself. ‘ She often asked how Manzoni's novel was going, and she wanted to translate it into French; she knew that Fauriel had discussed it in Paris with another possible translator called Trognon, and she wanted to have the book as soon as it was printed to translate it at once, leaving Trognon empty-handed: ‘If Signor Manzoni's first volume is printed, bring it with you,
possession is nine points in the law
[in English in original]: and if I had it before that beastly Frenchman, I would perhaps finish it first and then we'd see. You must realize, dear Dicky, I love money, and that's why I want to translate the book well or ill;
my
own dear sweetie, do write to me, pray do'
[English in original]. However, in the end neither she nor Trognon translated the book.

In the autumn Fauriel went to Florence, where the two Clarkes were waiting for him; as he set off, he told the Manzonis to come and join him, or he would fly back to them; but the Manzonis went on postponing their trip to Tuscany; and Fauriel did not fly back to them, in fact after a short letter in December, they did not hear from him for several months. Pietro answered that short letter: ‘ I am pleased to tell you we are all well; my dear mother is taking walks which do her a lot of good. My sisters Giulia, Cristina and Sofia and my brother Enrico send you all their love; Vittorina calls
Tola
and then answers at once “he don to Florence” - she gets sweeter every day, can recite the verse about all the animals, sings and runs all round the house like a big girl.' Enrichetta also added a few lines: ‘We cannot get used to your absence. . . We are always talking seriously of the plan of joining you in the spring as long as we don't meet with any obstacles. . .'

‘Oh, our dear Tola, why did you leave us?' Enrichetta wrote again two months later. ‘My children often bewail your absence, gratefully remembering your kindness and regretting that they can no longer try your patience. . . I wanted to write to Miss Clarke for news of you, and to ask her if you are so absorbed in her as to forget, it seems, your friends in Milan; I cannot altogether forgive her for taking you from us. . . she was not wrong. . . but we are not wrong to lament your absence. Giulia was supposed to write to you, but could never find the courage; Pietro is a scatter-brain; even Alessandro does not write, though he always means to do so, and it is, I imagine, for the same reasons as you do not write; Mama is full of good intentions. . . and I see I am the boldest, since I have dared to write.' ‘Enrichetta says I never carry out my intentions,' added Giulia, the grandmother, ‘the truth is that for more than twenty-five years my intention has been to love you all my life, and I carry it out every moment of my life, but you make me pay dearly for it with all the anxiety you cause us! Here is the whole family who love you dearly and who are consumed with longing because of your silence. Oh, dear friend of us all, what are you doing? where are you? you can't possibly have forgotten us? it cannot be! then what is our
Tolla
doing, whom not even Vittorina forgets? ... I beseech you to write to us. . . Goodbye, dear friend - your room remains just as it was, but in vain, it is empty. '

For Manzoni, the chief purpose of this famous trip to Tuscany, which kept being postponed, was to temper his style, for he thought it was there that the true Italian language was spoken; yet he never found the right time to go, perhaps fearing that, if he went too soon before the novel had really taken shape, the sudden encounter with a different idiom might be too much of a shock and strangle the novel at birth. But he certainly thought a great deal about the streets of Florence where that idiom was spoken, and where Fauriel was now walking. ‘My son's book is very behind-hand, he still hasn't finished writing, revising and re-revising the 2nd volume,' Grandmother Giulia wrote again to Fauriel in the spring. ‘So he will be occupied the whole summer, when I hope he will bring it all to a speedy close in the solitude of Brusú. Wherever he goes, the speech of the
Mercato Vecchio
is always on his mind, but that is really the only problem and I think he would find a few months in Tuscany in the autumn sufficient to resolve it. . . but we'll talk about it when it's convenient, meanwhile he afflicts our ears with all his “Tuscanisms”.'