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404 apocalyptic dreams and fall of rome For these many reasons, her friends contended, Fuller should go to Le Havre and travel by packet. Yet nothing now could change her mind. Fuller chose to go home on the Elizabeth with a full understanding of its dangers. She also knew that, in having given birth to a baby without having written home specifics about a marriage , she had, as she says in a 10 May letter to William Story, “acted with great carelessness”—“carelessness” being, as she was well aware, the “one fault” her father “often mentioned, as the source, the very fountain” of all her “others.”37 It was thus as if Fuller were courting a dark destiny she had felt since early childhood that fate had preordained for her. On 2 May she explained in a letter to Cass how she could have lived happily “always” in Italy. But “destiny,” she says, did not permit it.38 Though Fuller thought it to be destiny’s design that she return home after her years of wandering, the “unpropitious weather” seemed determined to hinder her departure, for heavy rain delayed the loading of the cargo of marble and rags. Fuller was so anxious about the trip and so sad at leaving Italy that she seemed, she told William Story in her 10 May letter, “paralyzed.” And in a letter to her mother dated four days later, she fatalistically notes that should they never meet “on earth again,” then “think of your daughter as one who always wished at least to do her duty, and who always cherished you.” She asks her mother to give her love to her sister, aunts, cousin, and brothers, but “first my eldest, and faithful friend, Eugene, God bless him.” She hopes she and her mother will meet again, “but if God decrees otherwise,—here and hereafter, My dearest Mother,” then signed her letter—“Your loving child, Margaret.”39 Fuller’s anxiety had been fed by a prophecy that Ossoli had been told by a fortuneteller when he was small, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning recalled the account, a prophecy “talked of jestingly” on that last night in Florence when the Brownings had come to say good-bye, “that [Ossoli] should shun the sea, for that it would be fatal to him.” That night Fuller had thus given as a parting gift—from her child to theirs—a Bible inscribed with: “In memory of Angelo Eugene Ossoli.”40 65SA Wayward Pilgrim Journeys Home Before she boarded the Elizabeth on 17 May in Leghorn, Fuller received a last packet from home containing separate letters from Marcus and Rebecca Spring, as well as one from Emerson, offering unbidden, even cruel, words of advice. Writing from Rose Cottage on 14 April, Rebecca hedges in her letter as she tells Fuller “my most important thing. . . . And that is that much as we should love to see you and strange as it may seem, we, as well as all your friends who have spoken to us about it, believe it will be undesirable for you to return at present.” After all, Fuller’s writing would be more valuable telling about events in Italy. Moreover, “your friend (whom with much pleasure we now learn from Hicks is your old friend Giovanni) would not—and could not—be so happy here as in his own beautiful Italy.” “It is,” then, says Rebecca, “because we love you” that “we say—stay!—It is because we believe it best for you—and in thus advising you, you have a proof of the true friendship and affection of Rebecca.” Marcus was abrupt. All her friends, even “Wm Channing,” with whom “we had a good long talk about your affairs,” argue “in favor of your remaining abroad.” Listing a dozen reasons why everyone thinks this best for her, Marcus tells Fuller that she could be a kind of “outside barbarian,” continuing to send news of Europe home to America. Marcus stresses how glad they were to learn that she and the Marquis Ossoli “had married,” glad that “now it all turns out right,” after all. Playing on Fuller’s vision in Woman in the Nineteenth Century of “the purity of love, in a true marriage,” he ends his epistle with a cunning benediction: “I cordially wish you both a long life of constantly increasing & deepening love, which I believe must result from the true marriage. Marcus” (original emphasis).1 Even her beloved Emerson, whom she had asked to stretch...

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