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62SDeceit and Treachery All indeed would not end well for Fuller or the Roman republicans. Even as she prepared to leave for her March visit to Rieti, Fuller was twining with her duplicitous words a net of lies about herself from which there would be no exit. For under the Roman Republic, Fuller had to obtain from the Office of Public Security a document that was in effect a passport. One biographer says she gave her name as Margherita Ossoli and her place of birth as Rome, implying that Ossoli was her maiden name and that she and Ossoli were blood kin. This lie suggests either that Ossoli and Fuller were not yet officially married or—and more likely—that Ossoli wanted to hide from the public his marriage to a heterodox who was also a radical republican. On the document Fuller also claimed to be twenty-nine years old, when in fact she would be thirty-nine in May 1849.1 While she was deceiving the Italians, the French were setting a trap for the Roman republicans. Fuller intuited this, noting in her Roman journal on 17 March: “It appears that the Roman ambassadors have not been received in Paris, [and] that the French government will not be friendly to the Italian republics.” Ten days later she noted other ominous signs that the Roman Republic would be short lived. On 12 March 1849, Charles Albert had again led the Piedmontese in an attack on the Austrians; on 23 March he was decisively defeated at Novara, after which he abdicated in favor of his son, Victor Emmanuel II, and fled to Spain. Genoa, which had refused to join in Victor Emmanuel’s proposed capitulating armistice with Austria, in the meantime was besieged and bombed by Sardinian troops. With a reactionary ministry in power in Piedmont, Fuller laments that “Genoa, Piedmont are all submissive, the press is muzzled, the clubs shut up.” In Florence a similar conservative reaction had set in. From Rieti in early April she wrote Ossoli that she is “disgusted” even with the Epoca, which she says “has become a reactionary’s paper.” With only Mazzini’s paper to counter conservative propaganda now, Fuller thinks the republican cause doomed, especially since France is now “sending her troops [to Rome] to restore the pope.” About France’s betrayal, Fuller says, “she can sink no lower.”2 But the French republicans could and would sink lower, systematically weaving their own net of lies with which to deceive naive Romantic republicans like Mazzini and thereby hasten the fall of Rome. Louis Napoleon, a former liberal and Carbonaro who had once fought tyranny in the Papal States, announced that he was sending an expeditionary force to stabilize the region. This was in fact a calculated effort to get himself promoted from “prince” president to emperor (for which he needed the pope’s blessing), for his military expedition was really planning to attack and defeat the Italian republicans. Like the Greek Sinon who in Virgil ’s Aeneid sidled up to the Trojans with his gift of a giant wooden horse, General Deceit and Treachery 379 380 apocalyptic dreams and fall of rome Nicolas Charles Victor Oudinot, whom Louis Napoleon had put in charge of this expedition, was to pretend to be a friend of the republicans while secretly implementing Louis Napoleon’s plan to enter Rome and establish there French military power. Oudinot was to buy time to allow the French to send enough reinforcements to accomplish this ambitious mission.3 While this was transpiring, Fuller was heading in a carriage to Rieti, where she arrived on 27 March. That she did not trust their landlord Giovanni to keep Nino’s existence a secret, Giovanni’s sisters meddled in her affairs, and the rooms she was renting from him were brutally cold: all these negative factors had made Fuller decide to move Nino to a place she thought would be better. She would rent an upstairs bedroom in the home of Nino’s wet nurse, Chiara, and her husband, Niccola.4 When Fuller arrived that rainy March day at their house, she found Nino in good health, although she did wonder why he had grown so fat while not growing in length in the three months she had not seen him. She also began to wonder about the people from whom she now rented. She was resting on the third day of her stay after having bathed Nino when she heard a drunken...

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