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346 the rising tide of revolution whose lack of light seemed to mock Mazzini’s Romantic dream of turning earth into heaven. Life for Fuller these rainy months was miserable. Even when the rain let up briefly, her nerves were aggravated by an organ-grinder playing “Home, Sweet Home” beneath her window. Meanwhile, in the cold, dark, damp apartment, the landlady’s three small black dogs, fidgety at missing their daily walk, yapped at Fuller’s friends. The grating noise of the organ-grinder, the toxic smell of a cheap cigar from a peddler who insisted she view his cameos, and the reeking odor of the “horrible cabbage, in which the Romans” so “delight,” combined to give Fuller a three-month headache. She felt so unwell that after January she did not send out another dispatch until 29 March.13 58SPersonal and Political Rebellions “Pour, pour, pour again, dark as night,” Fuller lamented near the end of her January 1848 dispatch. Bored with the rain, people came to her parlor to visit, such as Henry Hedge in early March. Hedge, who knew Fuller when she was spending hours dressing—even using a horsehair pad to minimize the disparity in shoulder heights—might have suddenly noticed the difference if, depressed and sick, Fuller was now forgoing efforts to look more attractive. Shocked at her appearance, he later said he thought she had developed a “spinal disease” that made her look “like a humpback.” Both the pain in her spine and nausea brought on by her pregnancy (as well as by migraines, aggravated by the weather), contributed to her feeling of illness.1 A nineteenth-century American woman, even Fuller, would have been unlikely to have explained to a minister friend like Hedge the cause of her miserable condition , particularly since her pregnancy would hardly have been evident yet. As the two parted, Fuller uncharacteristically threw her arms about his neck and “burst into tears.” Afterward Fuller sent him a note, attaching letters of introduction she had written for him. One was to the Princess Belgioioso. In her note to Hedge Fuller confesses that in her “sick moping moods” she fancies she will “never get back” to America; “it seems so far off; you must write a good verse to put on my tomb-stone.”2 Another visitor was Mickiewicz, who had come to Rome in early February. He had taken rooms near hers and had been with her in mid-February during Carnival Week when, through torrential rain, they had watched a “tide of gay masks” parade down the Corso. Fuller noted that the servant girls, now dressed in white muslin and roses instead of drab winter woolen, seemed happy as they threw flowers at the carriages containing richly dressed dukes and princes with their consorts. In her shawl and boa Fuller shivered and inhaled the sepulchral air as she and Mickiewicz viewed the papal procession from her open window and applauded the bravado of the working girls, who seemed not to mind the drenching rain.3 Emerson meanwhile in London had been made uneasy by Fuller’s account of her health in her December letter. Concerned, he wrote suggesting she meet him in Paris, return home with him, and rent a house near his in Concord. On 14 March Fuller replied that though she had hoped to return to Paris, she now did not feel well enough to do so. She noticeably did not mention either Ossoli or the cause of her ill health. When not busy with the civic guard, he apparently spent winter days moping about her flat because Fuller would not agree to marry him. She may have felt it pointless to do so until she knew that she and the baby would survive childbirth. Puerperal fever, after all, had killed Mary Wollstonecraft, whose outof -wedlock sex with Gilbert Imlay Fuller in Woman in the Nineteenth Century had called “repulsive.” Indeed, in the Benjamin Disraeli novel that Fuller liked—one involving a contested marriage in Venice between the Protestant Contarini Fleming and his Roman Catholic cousin Alceste Contarini—Alceste dies in giving birth to a stillborn son.4 Fuller also foresaw that marriage to Ossoli would create problems with Ossoli’s family and with his inheritance. His papal functionary older brother, Giuseppe, who assumed the role of family patriarch after their father’s February death, disapproved of Ossoli’s republican sympathies yet would not have cut him out of the family unless he did something outrageous, like...

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