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318 the rising tide of revolution Fuller’s words created a scene her American readers could see, thus helping Greeley sell papers and earning for herself even greater respect as a reporter. “The stream of fire,” she wrote, “advanced slowly with a perpetual surge-like sound of voices; the torches flashed on the animated Italian faces”: “Ascending the Quirinal they made it a mount of light. Bengal fires were thrown up, which cast their red and white light on the noble Greek figures of men and horses that reign over it. The Pope appeared on his balcony: the crowd shouted three vivas; he extended his arms; the crowd fell on their knees and received his benediction; he retired, and the torches were extinguished.” The multitude then, according to Fuller, “dispersed in an instant.”17 It was no doubt an impressive show, but show it was. Fuller feared that the pontiff ’s enthusiasm for reform, his eagerness to do “something solid for the benefit of Man,” would evaporate like the crowd the night of 19 April. On 23 May, her birthday , Fuller wrote Eliza Farrar’s aunt, her New Bedford friend Mary Rotch, “The tendency of the present Pope to Reform . . . draw[s] out the feelings of the people, but it is not sufficient to affect importantly the state of things in Italy.”18 Mazzini’s friends invited Fuller and the Springs to attend an open-air dinner in the Baths of Titus organized to celebrate the restoration of municipal government. It was attended by several returned exiles. With the Colosseum and Triumphal Arches as their backdrops, speakers heralded the pope as a noble founder of a new state. One of them, the son-in-law of the writer Alessandro Manzoni, even suggested that God did not give Italy to the Austrian emperor “that you might destroy her,” a remark Fuller knew would provoke a negative reaction. As it did: the Austrians seized the paper that published the speech. When plans for a dinner for the pope’s fete day were dropped for fear “something too frank should again be said,” Fuller’s suspicion increased that Pope Pius IX was a man more carried along by popular sentiment and current events than he was the master of them. She suspected that he did not have the fortitude to declare war on Austria or concede the pope’s temporal power to a republican form of government. At one of the events Fuller attended with the Springs celebrating the Italian people’s hope that the new liberal pope would restore their ancient liberties, Margaret turned to Rebecca and said sadly, “He is not great enough. He can never carry out the work before him.”19 54STo Marry, or Not to Marry? Fuller thought she “saw the future dawning” in Rome and was excited by what she saw. She felt so well emotionally that she suffered only two headaches during her two-month stay. Still, by late May 1847 she knew she must leave the city, not only because she was committed to the Springs as Eddie’s tutor, but also because her relationship with Ossoli was growing too intense. Though part of her wanted to be daring like George Sand or the Comtesse de Pologne, her Puritan conscience damned her for her daring. Echoing terms she had internalized as a child from Hesitation by Mrs. Ross, who calls “unfit” any (to her) “unnatural” sexual “connexion ,” Fuller will later tell her sister that she “felt very unhappy to leave [Ossoli], but the connexion seemed so every way unfit.” While needing and appreciating Ossoli’s caresses, she also saw how inappropriate the relationship must seem from the perspective of, as Emerson would say, the “thousand-eyed” public. It was not just that she was older than Ossoli—as Sand was older than Chopin and the Comtesse de Pologne was older than the young men who adored her—but that she and Ossoli were products of such different cultures, religions, and social classes that she knew the relationship might seem ridiculous. Moreover, how could she explain having fallen in love with a man who was, as she later said, “ignorant of books,” especially since in Woman in the Nineteenth Century she had stressed the importance of “intellectual communion” in marriage, that “pilgrimage towards a common shrine” ideally undertaken by soul mates?1 Then, of course, on another and deeper level, there was the question of pain. After all she had been through, how could she trust...

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