SD2495. Charlotte Williams-Wynn to Julia M. Sterling
Published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 29, 301 (in part).
Hotel des Diablerets [Ormont-Dessus, Switzerland]
begun August 7, 1861
My dearest Julia,
I flatter myself you will be rather startled at my somewhat infernal date! We have taken a prodigious spring upwards, not downwards, since I last wrote, so I must tell you how it came about. … Among the people here are some Americans, who are interesting to me, from having been with Mrs. Browning to the last at Florence. They tell me Cavour’s death really killed her—that she was weakly before, but the shock was so great that for a fortnight after she never left her bed. She was not even acquainted with him, but had the most entire faith in his wisdom, and looked upon his death as the destruction of the new Italy! [1] I am told that among her papers were beautiful letters upon Italy to the different statesmen, showing how closely her whole heart and mind were entwined in the country. Her last note had these words: “I am broken and bruised in the presence of this great calamity, and keep my bed though the whole of Florence is rejoicing at the all but official recognition of the kingdom of Italy. But there is a crape around the flag. May God save Italy without His angels.” Such a singular expression, as applied to Cavour.
Text: Memorials of Charlotte Williams-Wynn, ed. Harriot H. Lindesay (London, 1877), pp. 284–290.
1. The following extract from a [ca. 1877] note of Mr. Browning’s to Harriot H. Lindesay is, with his kind permission, inserted here, to correct and supplement the above account:—“The news of the death of Cavour was announced abruptly and foolishly by a perfect stranger,—who called at the house in my absence, immediately on our arrival from Rome,—to a servant, as ‘a matter that might interest Mrs. Browning’—who had hardly reached her room after a fatiguing journey and in a state of exhaustion: and this communicated at once with Italian passion and its accompaniments of cry and gesture, had undoubtedly much such an effect as is attributed to it by your sister’s informants. But the death of Cavour was never apprehended by my wife as ‘the destruction of the new Italy’—simply as the ‘great calamity’ which her own words declare: on the contrary, she was made happy by the assurance of a friend that Ricasoli had said—to himself, I think—‘my object is precisely the same as Cavour’s; we have only differed a little as to certain not very important points of policy in the attaining it.’ ‘As I knew,—as I knew!’ she replied joyously.”
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