4547. EBB to Isa Blagden
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 27, 82–85.
28. Via del Tritone.
Thursday– [?15] [December 1859] [1]
Ever dearest Isa, I thought your letter was never coming, & began to be uneasy lest you should be ill– Therefore seldom has a letter been much more welcome (—even yours—) in spite of the ‘hiatus’ about Rome very lamentable to me, “valde deflendus–” [2]
Now, Isa, you must make up your mind to come, though I am a Triton, & you blaspheme against the ways of me. Not so bad are they after all,—& when you live with Miss Cushman you will be close to us. [3] Also our stairs are most accessible & ascendible. We live in the upper part of the street. Below the church [4] it is said to be unwholesome– Our rooms are very warm,—and the brazier in my bedroom renders the want of a fireplace there imperceptible. The braziers are excellent things & might be utilized in Florence when stoves & grates are slack in their duty.
I beseech you to take patience with poor old Landor, & pay him another visit when his eyes are not full of sleep after dinner. What if he is a lion that roars! His mane has some royal bristles. He writes to us royally too—much oftener than my Isa does. Therefore I am fain to say a good word for him. By the way, or out of the way .. did you receive Robert’s long letter written on the road to you? [5] I cant make out.
And why, why, why .. (I am thirsty for reasons.) dont you go down to Casa Guidi at once? How much better it would be! Less wind, & more society, are two good reasons, to begin.
Dear,—the Times disgusts me, but every other English paper vexes me, pricks me, riles me, .. so in opening out those resources, you dont suggest a full consolation. The National Defence & rifle movement are maintained by everybody; by all newspapers, by every grade of politicians. If anyone calls it an ignoble movement, he is a rare exception. Arch deacons press it on, and a Lady Mery Thompson [6] (see Galignani) immortalizes her name (to a vowel près [7] ) as leader of the female carbines. All these things revolt me. I cant help it. They are against my nature. The mixture of arrogance & meanness are too much for me indeed.
For Italian politics, whenever I come near a fact, the emperor is justified. If he were not, I would throw him over at the moment. Now, observe, the congress will do much in the way of confirmation, for north Italy; but for the south we may have to wait. Only not long. There have been certain mistakes .. not [8] refer[r]ible to the emperor .. & now the action seems temporarily hampered. But you & I are not wrong in holding our conviction fast that he persists in his Italian idea. I cant tell you all,—only you may rely on this. The difficulties are enormous. It will be cruel if the Italians ended by misconceiving the man, who, if he risked more for them, would risk their very cause.
I do hope that Cavour will represent Italy in the Congress. That will be a great as well as an evident gain.
Antonelli is going off with a suite or society of twenty five—among them a Monsignor Barilli, [9] & the last pasquinade here is, .. “Parte con barili, e tornerá con fiasco”– [10]
We get our Monitore Toscano (no Nazione as yet)—but only through Odo Russell. Our newspapers are therefore siezed on by shipwrecked Tuscans with a natural avidity, & passed from hand to hand! yes, & not merely by Tuscans of course.
Have you heard of the Stones [11] .. Americans? wealthy people? They arrived here with hospitable intentions of all kinds, & suddenly our souls are thrilled with their sudden misery. A child of eight dies after the illness of a few hours—& of diphtheria. Pantaleoni was called in at the very last. He says the disorder is rare here– Still, I confess to you I feel terrified. I did not think it ever occurred in Italy. Ask Dr Grisanowsky if cases are known in Florence? Now mind you ask him. This poor Mr Stone lost his father, mother, sister & brother in the Arctic. [12] He is ’prentice to grief. [13] Robert knew him, & she had left cards on me.
Why dont you call on Mrs Stowe? You ought, Isa. You met her at Casa Guidi, remember. And Florentine hospitalities are due to her for uncle Tom’s sake.
We have both been reading the ‘Bertrams’, a great advance on Mr Trollope’s other novels, it seems to me. [14] The interest is very strong, & there are suggestions of passion & poetry, even, which scarcely I should have expected from him. We subscribe to the Piazza Colonna French library [15] —but it is spare diet. No catalogue,—to begin with! Read Murger’s Sabot Rouge. [16] There’s something ghastly in it—if that’s a recommendation.
Little Pen is consigned for instruction to a Jesuit priest– [17] (What a howling they will make in England!) It sounds worse than it is. He is a young Abbè, & goes for two hours three times a week to the Storys (close by, you know) [18] to give lessons to Edith & my Pen in Latin, & arithmetic. You know Pen was advanced in arithmetic to the point of “always forgetting whether the 6 turned its tail up or down, 9.” Now he has almost learnt the multiplication table (which his mama was never perfect in) & he says it in French. Also he knows three Latin declensions. It was time to begin with the Latin, poor pet. He had the tears in his eyes at first, & thought I “might have taught him,” & then the idea of a “horrible priest” was wormwood to him. (Pen has as many prejudices about priests as if he had been brought up in the sacred precincts of Exeter Hall.) [19] But our Abbè is goodnatured & gentle, & the child is reconciled. You see it was really good for him to learn something without my putting it into his mouth with a spoon. Then I wanted him to set out in Latin on the Italian system of pronunciation, it is so certainly the nearest to the right one. Besides, there’s the advantage of emulation in learning with Edith, notwithstanding the difference of age. Our Abbé compliments Peni on his Italian speaking: “Tutta la delicatezza Toscana,” [20] says he.
Think of Peni being thrown off his poney on the Pincio the other day. Not hurt in the least. Only I am less at ease when he goes out. The poney is said to have grown over-spirited with oats. “He kicks at black horses,” says Pen.
We hear that people are coming to Rome—but they are chiefly Americans. Did I tell you that I had seen Theodore Parker? He is here for his chest,—& having persisted in going out during the tramontana, has suffered lately, of course. I, who am prudent & have not been out of the door since I arrived, have not suffered from the cold. Scarcely .. that is. Of course one feels what is: but I am very well, for me. Yet there has been considerable cold lately—a good deal of wind.
I have seen Mdme S[ch]wartz. [21] She asked us to her house the evening after her visit here, & I accepted for Robert, not knowing of an engagement which hindered his carrying out my affirmative.
<…> [22]
Dont you think Mr Trollope might simply have desired to “serrer les liens” [23] between you & his wife? How I like him.
Publication: B-IB, pp. 261–265.
Manuscript: Fitzwilliam Museum and Lilly Library.
1. This letter was written between letters 4536 and 4554. By the time of the latter, 29 December 1859, Isa was staying in Casa Guidi. 15 December was the first of the two Thursdays following letter 4536.
2. “A gap greatly to be deplored” (“hiatus valde deflendus”).
4. SS. Angeli Custodi, about half way between Piazza Barberini to the east, near the Brownings’ apartment, and Via del Corso to the west, in the direction of the Tiber. The church was taken down in the twentieth century.
6. Mary Thompson (née Fitzwilliam, 1810–93) was the second daughter of Charles William, 5th Earl Fitzwilliam. In 1831 she married Leonard Thompson (1806–78), of Sheriff Hutton Park, who was Deputy Lieutenant of the North Riding, Yorkshire. An item in the 1 December 1859 issue of Galignani’s Messenger ran as follows: “Lady Mary Thompson … has sent her name as an honorary member of the First West York Rifle Volunteers. We trust that this example will be followed by other ladies” (p. 1). This edition of Galignani’s spelled “Mary” correctly.
7. “To within a vowel.”
8. Underscored three times.
9. Lorenzo Barili (1801–75), Archbishop of Tiana, was Papal Nuncio at Madrid from 1857 to 1868.
10. “Leave with barrels, return with a flask.” “Fiasco” carries the same meaning in Italian that it does in English.
11. Henry Asaph Stone (1814–80), eldest son of Asaph Stone (1786–1854), a New York dry goods merchant, and his wife, Jane (née MacFarlane, 1793–1854), was a Paris banker (see Hawthorne, 14, 877). Henry married at New York in 1836 Mary (née Foulke, 1816–61). They were currently in Rome with their children: Joseph (1840–86) and Emma (1845–1933). Their two other children, Minnie (b. ca. 1851) and Henry, are mentioned by Nathaniel Hawthorne in a letter to his daughter Una, dated 16 May [1860]: “Poor little Minnie Stone died of diphtheria at Rome, last winter. They have also lost their baby [Henry] which was born there” (Hawthorne, 18, 282).
12. On 27 September 1854, Stone’s parents and their youngest daughter, Mary Foulke Stone (1836–54), perished when their ship, the Arctic, en route to New York from England, collided with the Vesta and sank off the coast of Newfoundland (see letter 3551, note 6). There is no record of a Stone son aboard the Arctic. However, Henry Asaph Stone’s younger brother, Wood Gibson Stone (1826–50), also died at sea.
13. Cf. Richard II, I, 3, 271–274.
14. The Bertrams by Anthony Trollope (1815–82) was published in March 1859.
15. “Merle, French bookseller, Piazza Colonna,” listed in Murray’s A Handbook of Rome and its Environs (1858), p. xviii.
16. Le Sabot rouge (1860) by Henry Murger (1822–61), a novelist who wrote about Bohemian life in Paris, including Scènes de la Bohème (1845–49), the basis for Puccini’s opera La Bohème. The story of Le Sabot rouge involves “a farmer called Derizelles, who has been left nothing by his rich wife and is therefore at the mercy of his son Isidore. He uses La Lizon, a voluptuous farm girl, to keep a hold on Isidore, but she turns against him and has to be removed from the scene, an operation which he performs by introducing anthrax-carrying flies into her bedroom which sting her to death” (Robert Baldick, The First Bohemian: The Life of Henry Murger, 1961, pp. 162–163).
20. “All the Tuscan fineness.”
22. The closing of the letter, containing the signature, probably on the flap of the envelope, is missing, except the following written in the margin of the first page.
23. “Strengthen the ties.”
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