Switzerland
1834-1836. AETAT 28-31
Life in exile--Mental crisis--Principles of the
revolution--Young Switzerland--Young Europe--Literary
work--Women friends: Giuditta Sidoli--Madeleine de Mandrot.
During the raid Mazzini's health collapsed. The strain of work and
anxiety might have broken down a stronger man; he had not touched his
bed for a week, and fatigue and cold and the crushing responsibility
brought on fever. There was a false alarm one night, and a patrol
fired; and Mazzini, hurrying up excitedly with his musket, lost
consciousness and did not regain it till the volunteers had recrossed
the frontier. The collapse unstrung him for the time, and perhaps it
was only the letters of the woman he loved, that kept him from a worse
fate. "I have moral convulsions," he writes to her; "there are moments
when I could roll on the ground and bite myself. I have fits of rage
at every human face and voice." When he recovered, he found his
residence in Switzerland threatened. The foreign governments rained
threats on the Federal Diet to make it expel the refugees. The Diet
was easily frightened, but even had it been braver, it could not
tolerate acts contrary to international law, or allow Switzerland to
be a recruiting ground for raids upon a neighbouring power. The Swiss
could not be expected to risk foreign complications for the sake of
men who, from any ordinary standpoint, had abused their hospitality.
After what had happened, it was difficult for the raiders to plead at
once even the traditional right of asylum for political refugees; and
though after a lapse of time a stronger government would have reverted
to the more generous policy, and though some of the cantons were
restive at its continued deference to foreign pressure, it is not easy
to blame the Diet, even at a later date, for its unwillingness to
shelter the raiders.
Many of them were sent at once across the frontier; others succeeded
in hiding themselves. Mazzini was determined not to leave Switzerland.
It was essential to his plans that he should be near Italy, and he
dreaded moving further from the beloved land. He grew fond of
Switzerland, and came to "love the Alps almost as one loves a mother."
England and America were the only other countries open to him, and he
feared that if a Tory government came into power in England, he would
find no shelter even there. "Besides," he said, in words to be
recanted later, "there is no sympathy there, no help, no anything."
For nearly three years he led a more or less hunted life--at Lausanne,
at Berne, at Soleure and Bienne and Grenchen, in the house of a
Protestant pastor at Langnau; sometimes hotly sought by the police,
sometimes with the connivance of the government, but generally a
virtual prisoner in the houses where he found a refuge. For seven
months, at one time, he fled from place to place, living in
apparently untenanted houses, with mats at the windows, never setting
foot outside, except in his fugitive removes by night across the
mountains. Exhausted in body and soul, he had to taste an exile's life
in all its bitterness; "the existence mournful and dull as a stormy
sky or the ashes of a dead fire; the suffering that has no name, that
finds no vent in tears or words, that has no poetry save for the
distant sentimentalist; the suffering that makes a man wan and
hollow-cheeked but kills not, that bows but does not break; while the
weary eyes follow the driven clouds, that the wind wafts away to the
skies of fatherland, beyond the everlasting Alps, those icy cherubim
that guard the gate of the heart's Eden."
There was little interruption to his desolate solitude. Save for
occasional glimpses, he was parted from his old comrades, except the
Ruffinis; and though he found a few sympathetic friends in Switzerland
and caught greedily at their affections, it could not make up for the
loss. He had few books; "I could well live all my life shut up in one
room," he wrote wearily, "if I had all my books at hand, but without
books, or guitar, or view, it is too much." The sedentary life told on
his health, and he obstinately declined the medicines his mother sent
him. Toothache wore him down, though sometimes he welcomed it as a
diversion from his sickness of heart. Money difficulties came, with
their sordid complications. His mother sent what she could spare;
friends helped him with loans. But he could never refuse an exile in
need, and they importuned him, till even he rebelled against their
exigencies. The organisation of Young Italy--such of it as still was
left--and expenses of publishing and postage absorbed most of the
rest, for there were few subscribers to the party funds. He denied
himself all but bare necessities and cigars, even the two small
luxuries he valued--scent and good writing paper. He borrowed what few
books he had. He went short of clothes, and sends his mother lean
inventories of his wardrobe, which she and his old nurse did their
best to replenish. Sometimes he found himself in absolute want, and
writes "with a blush on his face" to the mother who never refused him.
Aching fits of home-sickness came on him, "a physical craving for
home, for Italian clouds and winds and sea." "The other day," he
writes to a little girl friend, "I was looking at the Alps in the
distance--beyond them is my country, my poor country that I love so
much, where my father and mother are, and my two sisters, and another
sister who has been dead many years, and the tomb of the best friend
of my youth, who died for liberty, and meadows and hills and beautiful
lakes like your own, and flowers and oranges and a beautiful sky--all
that one needs to make one die happy, and I thought sadly on it all."
He had more pungent thoughts to trouble him. The disastrous raid
demoralised his party. From Italy came news of discouragement and
desertion. The exiles loaded him with the responsibility of the
fiasco; he found himself the centre of a miserable cross-fire of
recrimination, and he repaid the criticism with scorn and suspicion.
The want of response in Italy made him at times very bitter against
his countrymen. "Oh, how cold those Italians are, and how they hunt
for excuses for their apathy. They will not see that they are slaves,
without a name, accursed by God, and mocked among the nations." The
human sweetness in him was half dried up, and a misanthropy, so new
and alien to him, made him querulous and captious. Friends were cold,
or at all events seemed so to his sick mind. He wrote peevishly to the
best of them; probably he talked more peevishly still. The society,
even of those who were dearest, worried and distressed him, and he
preferred to be left alone with a favourite cat. "I am inclined to
love men at a distance," he writes; "contact makes me hate them." The
sorest pain, one that obsessed him and dragged him to the abyss, was
the thought of his suffering friends, suffering because of him, though
for a cause for which he too had given all. It was the Gethsemane of
every true-hearted man, who calls his fellows forth to sacrifice and
battle. The friends of his youth were in exile. Men who had loved him
and whom he had loved, were laying their misery to his charge. The
Ruffinis' home was desolate--one son the victim of his own hand, two
more in exile, the mother, whom of all women he reverenced most,
sitting in loneliness and mourning. Another woman, to whom he had
given his love, but to whom a fugitive exile could not give a home,
was hunted by the Italian police, worn and desperate. "What gives me
pain and very sad moments," he writes to his mother, "is the past and
present and future of the few beings who love me and whom I really
love, you, and the Ruffinis, their mother, my sisters, and Her. If I
could see you all and my few other friends, I will not say happy, for
that we can never be again, but tranquil, quiet, smiling, and united,
I would die that day with rapture." "I wanted to do good," he writes
to a friend, "but I have always done harm to everybody, and the
thought grows and grows till I think I shall go mad. Sometimes I fancy
I am hated by those I love most." Once, at all events, it made him
doubt of all that he had done. "I think over it from morning to night,
and ask pardon of my God for having been a conspirator; not that I in
the least repent the reasons for it, or recant a single one of my
beliefs, which were, and are, and will be a religion to me, but
because I ought to have seen that there are times, when a believer
should only sacrifice himself to his belief. I have sacrificed
everybody."
The black misery settled on him. "I felt alone in the world, except
for my poor mother, and she too was away and unhappy for my sake, and
I stopped in terror at the void. In that wilderness I met Doubt." The
men whom he had sent to a patriot's death, had they died in vain? Was
it all a frightful error, an empty dream born of ambition and pride of
intellect? Was it for some grandiose, impossible chimera, that he had
taken men from quiet useful lives and the simple round of kindliness?
What authority had he still to preach a creed, which meant the
sacrifice of thousands more, the unhappiness of many another mother?
In his nightly terrors, in his little lonely room, while the wind
howled round, he heard Jacopo Ruffini's voice calling to him. He was
of course verging on insanity, and thoughts of suicide passed through
his mind. His strong moral nature and the influence of two
women--Madame Ruffini and one unknown--saved him. Characteristically,
mental health returned in the shape of a philosophy of life. It was
his theory of Duty, expanded till it penetrated every cranny of the
individual soul. His old enemy, the utilitarian theory, had taken
subtle root in his affections. "I should have thought of them, as of a
blessing from God, to be accepted with thankfulness, not as of
something to be expected and exacted as a right and a reward. Instead
of this, I had made them a condition of fulfilling my duties. I had
not reached the ideal of love, love that has no hope in this life. I
had worshipped not love but the joys of love." And so he put away that
last infirmity of the true man, took to himself not only toil and
danger and opprobrium, but unloved solitude of soul, the desert life
of him who has no friend but God. He, who ached for sympathy and love,
took duty for his hard task-master--duty, "an arid, bare religion,
which does not save my heart a single atom of unhappiness, but still
the only one that can save me from suicide." "There are four lines of
Juvenal," he said, "that sum up all we ought to ask of God, all that
made Rome the mistress and the benefactress of the world:--
'Pray for the soul, that has no fear of death,
That holds life's end among kind nature's gifts,
Brave to endure each pain and labour; nought
Vexes it, nought it covets.'"
"When a man," he writes to a friend, "has once said to himself in all
seriousness of thought and feeling, I believe in liberty and country
and humanity, he is bound to fight for liberty and country and
humanity, fight long as life lasts, fight always, fight with every
weapon, face all from death to ridicule, face hatred and contempt,
work on because it is his duty and for no other reason."
Long indeed before his mental crisis, the light and joy had gone out
of his work. There were times when he felt he had neither strength nor
time nor capacity for it, when his theories became cold, emotionless
abstractions, far other than the passionate beliefs of other days. God
was "a geometrical solution," his own task "a fated mission." All life
seemed drab and purposeless. "There is so much agony in life," he
writes, "that when I see a baby quiet, smiling, at peace, I can only
wish for death for it." Perhaps though such moods were the exception.
"He is almost always good-tempered and sometimes gay," wrote Giovanni
Ruffini. Certainly during these three years he wrote some of his
warmest and humanest pages. At times he was even hopeful of his
immediate political schemes. He was strong in the sense of his
mission. "I know," he said, "there is the future in this life of mine,
little matter if I see it." "We have made," he writes, "the cause of
the people our own, we have voluntarily taken on ourselves the sorrows
of all a generation. We have snatched a spark from the Eternal God,
and placed ourselves between Him and the people; we have taken on
ourselves the part of the emancipator, and God has accepted us."
Alike in hours of insight and of gloom he remained ever constant to
his work. His friends advised him to retire. His father threatened,
his mother entreated. To the latter he "would have yielded, if he
could." He would gladly have withdrawn, at least he thought so, if
anyone else had come forward to take up the work; but this of course
was impossible. He would have liked to fall back on the Manzonian
policy, and devote himself to quiet moral and literary education. But
this seemed an impossible solution in a country, where there was no
freedom of speech or writing. The only way, he thought, to rouse his
countrymen was to give them the example of a life, that no adversity
could turn back, no want of response dishearten, ever labouring and
suffering for their sake and the ideal's. There must be no folding of
the hands, because others were slow to follow.
He set himself to think why the revolutions of the last five years had
failed, why the people, whether in Italy or France or elsewhere, had
been so deaf to the call to liberty. He was always asking himself why
it was that Christianity had succeeded, and why a movement, that had
so much in common with it, the movement for the social and political
redemption of the people, had failed. He found his answer in the fact
that the Revolution had missed the spiritual power, that made
Christianity triumphant. It was the substance of his Marseilles
teaching, but informed with a more mystical, transcendental spirit,
due no doubt to the apocalyptic results of his depression, and partly
too to the influence that Lamennais had over him at this time. The
French Revolution had appealed to men's selfish and personal
interests, their rights, their desire for happiness. It had been a
rebellion against evil, not a mission in search of good. It had had
its use, but now it had done its work. The principle of liberty and
human dignity was accepted everywhere in theory, however much
realisation lagged. The nineteenth century was plagiarising the
eighteenth, and following precedents whose day was past. A new
principle was needed to carry progress one step further, and that
principle must be a spiritual one. "We fell as a political party, we
must rise again as a religious party." The new revolution must find
its strength in "the enthusiasm, which alone begets great things"; it
must appeal to men's sense of duty, it must bid them work not for
themselves but for humanity. Then and not till then, the pettiness and
party feeling and want of earnestness, which had wrecked the movements
of 1831 and his own Italian schemes, would vanish in the light of a
great faith, and that same light would be a beacon, which would draw
the masses after.
He was still, in spite of disappointment and the scepticism of his
friends, convinced that Europe was ripe for revolution, if only one
country showed the way. He was equally convinced that Italy would be
that country. France, he thought, had disqualified herself by her
adherence to the traditions of her Revolution. The strong dislike of
France, which marked him all through life, was now especially
prominent, and he declared that popular progress throughout Europe
depended on emancipation from her political and literary influence.
Why he appropriated for Italy the revolutionary hegemony, he would
have found it difficult to give a convincing reason. At bottom,
probably, with the sublime prophetic confidence that went hand in hand
with all his searchings of heart and absence of personal ambition, he
claimed the primacy for his country, because he hoped to inform her
with his own principles.
His Italian programme remained almost unaltered. He was indeed
prepared, though regretfully, to support a royalist movement, if it
declared for Italian Unity. But he would not countenance a royalist
programme with any lesser goal. He still believed in the Republic,
both for Italy's own sake and for the example it would give to other
democracies. And he still believed in insurrection as the only
possible road to reformation in a country, where there were no
constitutional liberties to make constitutional progress possible.
Gioberti urged to him in vain that unsuccessful insurrections only
discouraged the patriots and intensified the oppression. Mazzini,
though he promised that he would not again encourage an
insurrectionary movement, unless it started inside the country and
independently of the exiles, argued that insurrection was the only
means to rouse the masses. It mattered little if the first risings
failed; they would keep alive the spirit, that one day would lead to
victory. His hopes of the early triumph of the revolution grew slowly
fainter; he began to see that time, perhaps a generation, was needed
to quicken the inertia, that ages of despotism had instilled. But
every effort brought them nearer to the goal; every slackening made it
more remote. He would not believe that sacrifice and struggle could go
unrewarded, or quiet waiting spring from ought but cowardice. He
still, though fitfully--for want of money and the need of secrecy and
his own deepening gloom hampered him at every turn--went on with his
preparations. The sixth number of _Young Italy_ appeared in July 1834;
this was its last issue, but he persevered in the thankless work of
organisation, carrying on a voluminous correspondence, raking in
sympathisers from every quarter, sending agents to Italy, who brought
back the same monotonous tale of discouragement and unreadiness.
He found time meanwhile to interest himself in Swiss politics, and
tried to organise a party to do for Switzerland, what Young Italy had
been doing for his own country. Many of the Swiss naturally resented
the intrusion of a stranger. Mazzini brushed away the objection,
though he would perhaps have been the first to criticise a foreigner,
who had preached to the Italians, as he preached to the Swiss.
Switzerland, he urged, played so important a part in the European
polity, that no one could be indifferent to its destiny. At this time,
certainly, Swiss politics offered abundant scope for a reformer. The
Federal Pact of 1815 had undone Napoleon's comparatively liberal
constitution. The cantons were connected by the loosest of ties; many
of them were governed by small oligarchies; class privileges depressed
the artisans and peasants. The return of the Jesuits stirred a bitter
religious struggle, which from time to time threatened to blaze into
civil war. A vigorous reform movement had indeed recently swept away
the worst abuses inside some of the cantons; but, nothing had been
done to strengthen the bonds between them, and the narrow cantonal
life threatened to smother the country in a "mud-death." It was
impossible for Switzerland to assert her independence or maintain her
traditions, when she had no central authority worthy of the name. To
Mazzini it meant too the absence of any real national life, the
adhesion to a policy of neutrality, which prevented the one republican
state of Europe from throwing its weight into the European balance.
Mazzini's ideal for Switzerland was to include it with the Tyrol and
Savoy in a federation of republics, and substitute for the settlement
of 1815 a true federal authority, representing and responsible to the
whole people and not to the separate cantons. He founded a "Young
Switzerland" society, and published a paper, _La Jeune Suisse_, which
appeared twice a week in French and German, till after a year's
existence (the usual life of Mazzini's journalistic ventures) the Diet
suppressed it and decreed Mazzini's perpetual banishment. In some of
its articles Mazzini appears at his best,--more tolerant, less
dogmatic and theoretical. The movement does not seem to have found any
great measure of success, though it attracted a certain number of the
finer spirits among the younger men and Protestant clergy. But,
whatever may have been the immediate fruits of Mazzini's work, at all
events his ideas triumphed. The Swiss constitution of 1848 embodied
their essentials, and it is worth noting that Druey, one of its two
draughtsmen, was his personal friend.
Italy and Switzerland together were not enough to occupy his energies.
Two months after the collapse of the Savoy raid, seventeen of the
exiles, Italians, Germans, Poles, signed a "pact of Young Europe,"
which was intended to be an alliance on Mazzinian principles of the
republicans of the three countries. When one remembers that its vast
scheme of transformation was the work of a few young exiles, it reads
like pure rhodomontade. Mazzini himself recognised afterwards that the
plan was too embracing to lead to practical results. But at the time
he seems to have expected a good deal from it. It was to be a kind of
"college of intellects," which would watch and give information on
the popular and nationalist movements of the Continent, and at the
same time be an organised propagandism with its machinery of agents
"and countless other means." One thing in particular he hoped from it,
that it would assist towards "the emancipation from France," and
encourage another country, Italy of course by preference, to initiate
the new age of religion and the republic. As a matter of fact, nothing
seems to have been done beyond the despatch of a few agents to France
and Spain, and an attempt to organise meetings in England. But it
loomed large in the public eye, and did something to teach democracy
that its interests are international.
Meanwhile, in addition to his political correspondence and journalism,
he found time for literary writing. It was partly in the vain hope of
earning a little money for himself and his political work. "I think
over schemes day and night, as every man in want does." It was partly
too to encourage "a religious and poetic sentiment" in Italy, and
combat the dominant scepticism and materialism. For literary fame he
cared nothing. Friends, who wished him to retire from political work,
advised him to "honour Italy with his pen." "Excuse me," he answered,
"but this has no meaning for me. I don't know what or where Italy is.
We must try to regenerate and create her, and honour her afterwards."
His articles on _Byron and Goethe_ and _The Philosophy of Music_ date
from this period. He collected materials for the edition of Foscolo's
works, which was so near his heart now as at a later time. He wished
to edit a collection of translated dramas, and wrote introductions to
Werner's _Der vierundzwanzigste Februar_ and De Vigny's _Chatterton_.
"No other critic," says a recent Italian writer, "has written at such
length or so profoundly on Werner as did Mazzini." The essay was
published later at Brussels with Agostino Ruffini's translation,--the
only instalment of the projected series. He planned a _Foreign
Review_, to be published at Genoa, but an indiscreet friend betrayed
his editorship, and the censorship promptly withdrew its sanction.
Another scheme for a _Review of European Literature_, to be issued in
the freer air of Lugano, broke down, apparently for want of funds.
Another venture, which had a brief life, was the _Italiano_, a
literary and scientific magazine, which appeared at Paris for a few
months in 1836, to which he and Tommaseo and some of the best Italian
writers of the day contributed, and where Guerrazzi published the
first chapters of his _Siege of Florence_. Mazzini, who drafted the
prospectus, seems to have been especially anxious to include novels
and poetry. "It must be remembered," he writes, "that fancy and the
affections make up at least four-fifths of man. Poetry is not the gift
and privilege of a few, the masses are full of a living and speaking
poetry." He urged too that women's questions should have adequate
attention.
* * * * *
It is to this period chiefly that belong the only love-episodes of
Mazzini's life. He had a lofty conception of womanhood. "Love and
respect woman," he once wrote. "Look to her not only for comfort, but
for strength and inspiration and the doubling of your intellectual and
moral powers. Blot out from your mind any idea of superiority; you
have none. There is no inequality between man and woman; but as often
is the case between two men, only different tendencies and special
vocations. Woman and man are the two notes, without which the human
chord cannot be struck." "Marriage," he wrote to a young wife many
years afterwards, "is sacred, because it is one of the most potent
means of accomplishing life's mission. It gives the almost superhuman
strength that comes of love, the supreme comfort that makes sacrifice
a joy, the dew that tempers the scorching heat upon the flower." But
"now, as a rule," he says, "we do not love. Love, the most holy thing
that God has given to man, has become a febrile need, a brutish
instinct; the family is perverted into a denial of all vocation and
social duty; male and female have cancelled man and woman." He himself
was a man, not likely to be easily in love. His work absorbed his
vital force, and he had no pity for men who forgot public work in
domestic happiness. And though his unsoiled purity and gentleness,
together with the sympathy that allowed him to understand women as few
men can do, won him the devotion and affection of many women,
especially Englishwomen, the sentiment, on his side at least, was,
save in two cases, one of "intense friendship" only.
He had two or three boyish passions, one for an English girl who lived
near his home at Genoa, another for a Genoese, Adele Zoagli, who
afterwards became the mother of the patriot-poet Mameli. When he went
into exile, the only women who had a place in his heart were his own
mother and Madame Ruffini. His affection for his mother was very
serious and deep, more masculine and less sentimental than in the
common course of Italian filial love. Perhaps after his boyhood she
did not influence him in details, and intellectually there was some
lack of sympathy between them. But her strong pride in him, that made
her "thank God day and night for having given her that son," her faith
in his political, though not in his religious beliefs, the love that
watched year after year over the son she saw not, the courage that
made her bear long years of parting rather than ask him to deny his
call, made the most lasting human inspiration of his life. In time of
deep trouble a man will turn to his mother and his God, and he looked
to her, as to one whose love would never change, to whom he could pour
out, not indeed his spiritual misery, but all the little material
worries which a man tells only to his mother and his wife, certain
that her sympathy would never fail. His love for Madame Ruffini was of
another kind. She was a very noble woman, with intense and unconcealed
sympathies, wise with the experience of age and motherhood and sorrow;
and Mazzini was not the only one in the circle of friends at Genoa,
who loved her with the reverential affection, that an elderly woman of
saintly life and understanding will call forth from young men. It was
she, whose own deep religious faith had saved him in youth from his
short episode of scepticism. Another woman would have reproached him
with Jacopo's death; to her the common memory of one so dear only fed
the affection, that many memories and the same intense religious,
almost mystical, beliefs had already made so strong. He calls her
"mother, friend, and all that is more sacred," "the purest, whitest,
holiest soul he had ever met on earth." As far as we can tell, it was
from no fault of his that their friendship closed afterwards in
misunderstanding and silence.
His devotion to these two women had a deeper and more lasting
influence on him than any lover's passion. There was, however, at
least one other, whom he loved in another way, one to whom he gave his
troth and whom he would have married, had an exile's life allowed it.
Giuditta Sidoli was the daughter of a noble Lombard family, where she
had been brought up in a school of patriotism. Her brother, Carlo
Bellerio, was a follower of Young Italy, and was banished for his
faith. She had been married, when a mere girl, to Giovanni Sidoli, a
wealthy Reggian, a patriot and an exile too; and he swore her on his
death-bed to be true to the cause to which he had given his life. She
was one year older than Mazzini, a quiet-moving, gracious woman,
almost beautiful, with a gentle, blonde Venetian face, warm, golden
hair, and dark, thoughtful eyes; sober and unemotional in her manner,
but with deep springs of enthusiasm and devotion. Mazzini first met
her, a five years' widow, at Marseilles and afterwards in Switzerland;
their liking and common interests soon deepened into love, and he was
engaged to her before he left France. A few months before the Savoy
Expedition, her yearning for her children, who were left at Reggio,
drove her to Florence in the hope that with or without the
Government's consent she might see them. Thanks to the Tuscan police,
who opened and copied Mazzini's letters to her, we have some fragments
of their correspondence. "There are words in your letter," he writes,
"which make me still thrill with joy. In these last days I have
learnt the strength of my love. I have covered your lock with kisses.
Oh, that I could sleep for once with my head resting on your knees."
To a common friend he writes, probably a little later, "I love her
more than she thinks, much more than she loves me. I dream of her day
and night, and it becomes more and more a fixed idea with me; and yet
I know with absolute certainty I shall never live with her, not even
if Italy were free."
Up to a point they doubtless loved; but, especially when one remembers
Mazzini's emotional epistolary style of this time, one is tempted to
question whether their love had very much passion in it. It was the
tender, strong affection of two absolutely good and kindred souls, and
with neighbourhood it might have ripened into more. But long
separation cooled it, and neither was inconsolable. To Giuditta
probably at bottom her children were dearer than her lover, and
Mazzini felt this. She seems to have made no effort to join him
afterwards in England; she went to Parma to be near her children and
importune the ducal brute, who forbade her access to them, at last
going to Reggio in his despite and apparently seeing them for a
moment. Mazzini for his part was wrapped up in his work and the
struggle with exacting poverty. In England he hardly corresponds with
her, partly because his letters might have brought fresh persecution
on her, but partly, one is forced to conclude, because there was no
lover's ardour to find out a way. But he still considered himself as
in honour bound to her, and in a sense no doubt he loved her still. He
writes in the summer of 1838, "Giuditta loves me, I love her, and have
promised to love her," but he speaks as if he feared a rupture rather
for its effects on her than on himself. Two years later he writes as
if his love were dead. But, if love was dead, friendship, and a very
strong and true one, remained to the end. It is probable that they
never ceased entirely to correspond. In the fifties, when she was
living in the Valle dei Salici, near Turin, a grey-haired woman, with
all the gracious gentleness and culture of her earlier days, Mazzini
would come to see her in his secret visits to Piedmont, and she was
still the tolerant but ardent believer in his policy. When she was on
her death-bed, a year before he died himself, he wrote "as an old
friend" to "one of the best spirits he had ever met."
In a sense Giuditta had a rival. During his Swiss wanderings, the
daughter of de Mandrot, a friendly _avocat_ at Lausanne, whom he had
met casually,[8] became strongly attracted to him. And what was at
first a woman's pity and a disciple's adoration, changed to passionate
love. She was a girl of some sixteen years, of rich, emotional nature
and spiritual yearnings, that echoed to his own. When he went to
London, and she saw no more of him and heard of his uncared-for
loneliness, her hopeless love and pity worked on her, till she pined
into melancholy and illness, and her friends begged him to return and
save her by his presence. What response he made to her love, it is not
easy to say. If one may judge from the meagre references in his
letters, he felt at first no more than affectionate gratitude for the
rich gift he could not take. But later, as he learnt more of her
constancy and unhappiness, and his love for Giuditta wore away, and he
ached for a woman's loving hand, his affection ripened into something
that was probably nearer passionate love than anything he felt before
or after. Not that his permanent, reasoning self was disloyal to
Giuditta. "Am I free?" he writes to a friend, who would gladly have
seen him and the girl united; "before society and men, who recognise
only actual bonds, I am; but before my own heart and God, who watches
over promises, I am not." Sometimes indeed he balanced the results to
the two women, and was tempted for the moment to think that "the
imperious duty" of saving the one from death or life-long misery might
justify the breaking of his promise to Giuditta. But he knew that it
would be a cruel blow to the woman to whom he had pledged himself; he
felt he would gladly escape from an attachment, which stained his
loyalty to her; and his common sense told him that his gloomy
companionship and the privations of an exile's life would never make a
young girl permanently happy. And so he never seriously faltered in
crushing down the rising love within him or trying to crush it out in
her. He steadily declines to admit more than a brother-and-sisterly
relationship; he prays she may forget him and begs his friends to do
their best to kill her love by painting him in his defects; he refuses
to correspond with her, and though at last at the earnest prayer of
her friends he promises to come, if he can find the money, it was only
to save her from the pining that was bringing her to her grave. But
though he put her aside as a beautiful and impossible dream, he could
not stop the yearning. "Do you think," he writes, "that I easily give
up having near me one like her, a creature of God, young, pure,
religious, enthusiastic, into whose heart I could pour all the world
of feelings and dreams and beliefs and love that is in me?" He finds
his comfort in the thought that theirs is "a mystical, spiritual
union," that she will meet and make him happy in another world. In
this world he never saw her again, and it seems that her passion soon
fretted her frail life away. Love of wife and love of family were not
for him, and bitterly he felt it. "He, who through fatality of
circumstances," he wrote long after, "cannot live the serene life of
family, has a void in his heart, that nothing fills; and I who write
these pages, well I know it."
FOOTNOTE:
[8] Her niece, Mademoiselle Dora Melegari, tells me that her aunt's
real name was not Madeleine, as given in the _Lettres Intimes_; what
it was, Mademoiselle Melegari does not at present feel justified in
disclosing.