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300 the rising tide of revolution right of ‘scortatory love’” while damning women who did not meet the high—but double—standard of Victorian sexual morality. Most Englishmen feared Sand because they saw her as a threat to the traditional patriarchal family structure.18 Mazzini liked Fuller’s writing and kept in touch with her after she left London. While still in London, she wrote home that an English edition of her Papers on Literature and Art had “been courteously greeted in the London journals” and that Woman in the Nineteenth Century “has been read and prized by many,” including Mazzini. By mid-November she was in Paris carrying letters of introduction from Mazzini to his friends there, including the dissident French priest Lamennais, the Polish patriot and poet Mickiewicz, and the controversial Sand.19 50SMickiewicz Enters Paris was vibrant in December 1846 with middle-class discontent with the “citizen king,” Louis-Philippe, who had come to power in August 1830, as well as with worker enthusiasm for the socialist schemes of Saint-Simon and Fourier. Trudging through the mud coating the sidewalks and clinging tenaciously to the cobblestones of Paris’s narrow streets, Fuller sensed the same glaring disparity between the lives of the rich and the poor as she had seen in London. During a dreary winter of mud and mist, she found that the ladies she saw at balls, lectures, art galleries, and the theater were generally so well dressed that the effect was “of a flower-garden.”1 Casting a shadow over the “graceful vivacity” of these lovely French ladies was, in Fuller’s mind, the mass of the poor whose suffering had not been relieved by the fat bourgeois king, Louis-Philippe. The poor in their tattered clothes made Fuller self-conscious about the luxury of her room in the Hôtel Rougement, just off the boulevard des Italiens near the theaters and exclusive cafés. It is small, she wrote her mother, but “very pretty, with the thick, flowered carpet and marble slabs; the French clock, with Cupid, of course, over the fireplace.”2 In this “city of pleasures” Fuller met people who defied convention in their public politics or private lives and influenced her, as did the radical feminist and socialist Pauline Roland. Roland, who had translated and published Fuller’s “Essay on American Literature” in La revue indépendante, a socialist and literary review Sand helped found, openly opposed marriage, and had conducted a school at Leroux’s Fourierist commune at Boussac near Sand’s country home at Nohant. Roland liked Fuller’s work and urged her to keep submitting to the review after she returned to America.3 Though she had found Roland a woman of interest, she had become “engrossed” with the French actress Rachel (Élisa Félix). Writing to Cary, Fuller confessed that she went to the theater whenever Rachel performed. In her dispatch Fuller says she liked her most in Phèdre, in which the actress expresses “guilty [incestuous] love . . . with a force and terrible naturalness that almost suffocated” Fuller as “beholder.” After Phèdre “had taken the poison, the exhaustion and paralysis of the system—the sad, cold, calm submission to Fate,” the price Phèdre must pay for incestuous love, seemed to Fuller “still more grand.”4 In November she wrote Cary, “there is nothing like [Rachel’s] voice; she speaks the language of the Gods.” Then adds offhandedly, “She has a really bad reputation as woman.” A liberal Frenchman had told Fuller that “M[adam]e Sand has committed what are called errors, but we doubt not the nobleness of her soul, but it is said that the private life of Mlle Rachel has nothing in common with the apparition of the Artist.” “Do not speak of this,” Fuller warns Cary, “in America.”5 Intrigued as she was with the great actress’s “dark side”—her reckless sexual life—Fuller now, since meeting Mazzini, increasingly made it her public mission to alert her U.S. readers to the plight of Europe’s poor. Sitting before a bright wood fire in her cozy Rougement room on Christmas Eve 1846, Fuller wrote in the dim lamplight about her visit that day to the great Roman Catholic cathedral, SaintRoch . There she heard “beautiful music to celebrate the birth of Jesus” yet also saw inscribed on faces in the crowd “the woes and degradation” of which there were “glaring evidences on every side.” When she then spied the gilt...

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