Dolce Far Niente in Rome

Charlotte promenaded the deck each morning, nodding to the other passengers, pleased at their silence when they recognized her. The woman they saw was tall and matronly now, her bonnet set square on brown hair pulled tight at the sides of an angular face and tucked under at the point of the ears. Sweeping past in her white pleated blouse and black skirts, she exuded impatience.

Arrived in Liverpool, Charlotte sent Matilda on to London, then relaxed at Susan and Sheridan's new country house, Rose Hill Hall, to savor afresh the splendor of English wealth, the grace of deer parks and gardens, the disdain in Susan's elegant friends for the faceless army of lackeys and maids that kept them comfortable. Wherever she moved in the Muspratt circle, the perfection of English service struck her anew. Not even Sallie, for all her loyalty and skill, had ever been so humbly obliging, but then Sallie had long since become much more than the usual maid. Her strong opinions might surprise Charlotte at times, especially her frank distaste for the fawning attention that swirled around fame, but between them had grown a working relationship that far exceeded the ordinary ties between mistress and servant. Charlotte never discounted the solidarity that hard-headed Sallie lent to her life. When she signed herself "Charlotte" in the occasional notes she slipped in Sallie's mirror, when Sallie failed to call her "Miss" Charlotte, neither one misunderstood.

Grace Greenwood was already in London. Charlotte wrote her, giving her detailed suggestions about places to go, people to see--had Grace met old Sam Rogers or Chorley?--plays and concerts she would surely find worth writing about. It was good she had met George Eliot and that George had found her "beautiful."¹ Now she must see Madame Grisi. "So grand an actress, to my mind, has not lived on the lyric stage and, with the exception of Rachel, I don't believe so fine an actress ever lived."²

Resting at Rose Hill, Charlotte made out her schedule for the October trip to Rome and read through the clippings that Susan had saved for her during her years in America. Just last month Sharpe's London Journal had compared her to Rachel. "That earnest and steady glance they both possess hushes at once to silence every trivial thought; then the deep tones, conveying a meaning in each syllable, arouse the elevated instincts of our nature; an awe . . . fills our soul." The American Cushman and the French Rachel had sprung from different backgrounds, but "in vain the Atlantic divides and the countries differ; genius knows no limits and but one language--that of truth and inspiration."³

At any time, the words would have seemed pleasing enough, but now they carried a special flavor. What could be nicer than reading such praise in a national paper at the close of a hard-fought career? "Europe has not tired of Rachel, and both America and Europe are always ready to welcome Miss Cushman--but when years and years are gone by, they will still be remembered--because the impression, on seeing both, is like an event of one's life . . . their genius will live forever."

About that, could she be sure? Were memories so trustworthy?

In August, she and Sallie moved to the Isle of Wight--"the Eden of England," Anna Mowatt had called it, for its mellow soft air, the exquisite play of light and shadows on its flowered lanes and stone cottages. Every morning she directed her carriage up a road along the high cliffs or wandered the quiet streets of Yarmouth village on New Port, past the high gates of Osborne House, where Victoria and Albert now elected to spend much of their days. At sundown, she strolled up the slopes of white daisies that spattered the High Down to taste the clean wind from the sea. This was the life that wealth and leisure made possible. Could she ever believe, after this, that work and hot effort on stage had been better?

By early September she was settled again in London, convinced anew that no better place existed to enjoy the fruit of her labors. She had leisure now to ponder the good life and the English manner of living it. Within days, she bought a spirited saddle horse of her own and, against Sallie's protests, rode out sidesaddle each morning to take the high jumps in Hyde Park or with friends out to Surrey for a brisk morning's dash over the walls and rose-covered hedges.

She wasted no time trying to persuade Mary Eliza or Charlie to join her in some sort of family circle. Comfortable in an old gray dust cap and shawl, Mary Eliza would never adjust to London's "strange ways." The new marble-topped furniture Charlotte bought for her cottage in Brixton she liked well enough, though she gave no sign that she cared one way or the other. It was impossible to fathom this woman, though seeing the age and infirmity that had quickly settled on her, one might have made guesses. Not for years had she voiced any thoughts about herself, but the steady light in her eyes when her troubles weighed heaviest had long since faded. For all her tears late at night during Charlotte's girlhood, her mother had thrived on worry. Charlotte's money had removed all her burdens, but it had left her peevish and empty-handed. Living with Charlie, she was content to grow old, cooking his simple meals, brushing his coat each morning, scolding him weakly when he forgot his umbrella. Like his mother, Charlie had relaxed long ago in routine. Though his insurance job in Chancery Lane offered no challenge, it presented no fears either. If he still took pride in his famous sister, his early excitement in it had cooled.

All of which Charlotte took as a mandate to lead her own life. Doing it, she would look to the glitter of English high life, and to no one did she feel any cause to explain. At evening parties, she took careful note of the high fashions on the women about her, the diamond chains in their hair, the décolletage that would have shocked New York or Boston, the homage English society showered upon its titled names. Old Sam Rogers had aged perceptibly. He now passed his life in his chair, lifted in and out of his carriage, wheeled to his table, still the indefatigable host, but even sharper of tongue, more prone to rage if attention strayed from his end of the conversation. Moving near the center of this gay London, Charlotte was not even aware, until one day when Sallie pointed it out, that she had lost all her hoarseness.

The time to head south came in October, when Charlotte left with Matilda and Grace to spend en route a fortnight with a good dressmaker in Paris. Matilda's months in England had brought the color back in her cheeks, but Grace added the real verve to the journey.

Grace remembered well enough that she was the great granddaughter of Jonathan Edwards, but she refused to let her Puritan heritage stand in her way as a writer. At twenty-nine she was a handsome woman with expressive large eyes, a head piled high with curls, and a curiosity that kept her constantly on the lookout for subjects for popular articles. In 1850 her Greenwood Leaves had been a best seller, and her trip through Europe now was meant to pay off in more chatty articles for the American press. Hawthorne liked her, though reading the pieces she had already sent home from England, he tossed her off as a "scribbling female"--partly because Grace took such foolish delight in attracting attention.

At a private reading Charles Kemble gave in London, Grace became so moved that she almost brought down the house. At the end of one piece, she applauded so wildly that she fell into hysterics, then swooned dead away. Kemble looked up from his book. "Ma'am, this won't do," he said sternly. When Grace remained dead on the floor, Kemble repeated, "Ma'am, we are too much used to this sort of thing!" When Grace still gave no response, Kemble cried, "Ma'am, you expose yourself!" At that, Grace bounded up horror-stricken, adjusting her skirts. Hearing the story later, Hawthorne wondered how "she survived it."⁴

With a temperament like that, Grace would not be one to depend on, but she would make a vivid traveler. And more important, she had ideas. Her determination to see Negro slavery abolished had become almost a crusade, and she was equally certain that American housewives deserved greater freedom. "Would I vote if I could?" cried Grace, when asked about woman suffrage. "Yea, verily, at divers times and in divers places . . . casting my vote right and left and from morn to dewy eve."⁵

At the Gare du Nord in Paris, when Harriet Hosmer and her father arrived, Charlotte's first sight of the laughing figure bounding down off the boat train was reassurance enough. She would make this journey pay off for young talent. Back in Watertown, cried Hattie, Lydia Maria Child had wanted to know: "Do you think you can be contented in a foreign land?" To which Hattie had answered, "I can be happy any where, with good health and a bit of marble."⁶ And now, in Europe at last, she felt like crying for joy.

At her dressmaker's, Charlotte stood for her last fittings on the black and lavender moiré dresses she would need in Rome; then she gathered up Harriet and the others for a quick look at the Paris sights and took them all to call on the Brownings at their apartment overlooking the Champs Élysées, one of the noble thoroughfares the master plan for Paris was opening up.

Robert himself opened the door, his face half-hidden in a beard that had turned white since Charlotte last saw him. Talking excitedly, he escorted them all across to the sunny corner where his wife reclined on a sofa, then stood hovering about, interjecting quick comments. Grasping Elizabeth's small hand, Charlotte felt she might have been holding the tiny foot of a bird. At this first meeting with the famous poetess, she stood stiff and humble, remembering Tom Appleton's description of her: "a little concentrated nightingale, living in a bower of curls."⁷ In the presence of this smiling, "fairy-like creature," Charlotte felt suddenly huge and almost monstrously energetic.

While Elizabeth and Matilda talked warmly of George Sand, Charlotte noted a strange sensation in herself. Robert's tiny wife spoke with such keen sensibility, her lilting phrases were so exquisite and covered such a broad range that in her presence Charlotte felt suddenly tongue-tied. For once in her life, she was shy and self-conscious.⁸ It was a new discomfort, and she did not fully grasp the quiet doubt it planted in the midst of all the excitement outside.

The day was one of high culmination for France. Since 1848 when a new Napoleon had become President of France, the country had seen its leader's dreams of personal grandeur steadily grow. Today, October 16, 1852, Louis Napoleon was making his triumphal entry into Paris, preliminary to being crowned Emperor. Watching the parade from the Brownings' high balcony, Charlotte drank in the spectacle. The great scene seemed worthy of a classic dramatist, though at times Charlotte, as a good democrat, heard herself muttering about the folly of any country's taking so drastic a political step. But when Louis Napoleon himself came into view, escorted by a great company of mounted riders, their plumed helmets flashing in the sun, she cried out her admiration: "That's fine, I must say!"⁹ She was struck as much for the staging as for the little man's courage. Bareheaded and decked in his medals, Louis rode alone in the center of the procession, ten paces at least from his nearest guard. His delicate tact in riding alone set off great waves of cheers which he acknowledged by bowing to right and to left.

When Elizabeth exclaimed, "For the drama of history we must look to France . . . for the 'points' which thrill you to the bone," Charlotte agreed heartily. Never at home had she brushed so close to national drama, and the feeling now only deepened her joy in deciding to settle permanently in a part of the world where tradition and ceremony flowed so rich in the blood.

Standing beside Elizabeth, Charlotte found the Brownings' small son almost as interesting as the spectacle below. He stood peering down, solemn and quiet, hands gripping the balcony rail. Dressed in a velvet jacket and white drawers edged with embroidery, Pen Browning would have been laughed at in rugged, red-blooded America, but his pale little face and long golden ringlets gave him an almost ethereal charm like his mother's. "He is my Florentine boy," said Elizabeth, fingering his curls, "because he was born in Italy, where the sun is always golden."¹⁰

Hearing those words, Charlotte hungered to press on for Rome. With the Brownings, she had seen for herself the blissful marriage that was making them legendary, and leaving them, she made them promise to contact her when they came down to Italy. During the visit, Elizabeth had formed an impression of Charlotte that was no less definite. "Never was a woman in the world less like an actress," she wrote her sister. "I can't conceive how such a woman would look on a stage, or speak, or gesticulate--she has just the look of a sensible woman, not at all young." The emotional bond between the actress and Miss Hays seemed odd, but "Miss Cushman has an unimpeachable character, and is as much distinguished for her general intelligence as for her professional aptitude--a little more, perhaps."¹¹

Speeding along toward Marseilles, Charlotte felt the old thrill of adventure well up inside. This trip was like none she had taken before; her ends now had nothing to do with fame or fortune. In a matter of hours, the train had left Avignon far behind, and she rushed out to her hotel balcony in Marseilles for a first glimpse of the Mediterranean. In the sun the waves rolled heavily, like blue oil flecked white. Next day, the trip took them along the Riviera's flower-decked cliffs to the fishing village of Nice and then, via the Grand Corniche road that inched up over the hills--with a view clear out to Corsica--to Genoa for an overnight stop and a change to a ship bound for Civita Vecchia. On November 12, Charlotte's "party of jolly bachelors" finished their long jolting ride in a diligence over the hilly Italian roads. Glued to her window when the team stopped to rest, Charlotte glimpsed far ahead and below the city of Rome.

Through the crush of carriages and pedestrians crowding the streets, her diligence rolled past the Spanish Embassy at the foot of a staircase leading up through stalls massed with flowers. At its top, against the Pincian Hill, a towered pink church seemed plastered against the sky. From Number 28 on the Corso, where the English writer and sculptor, Shakspere Wood, had arranged rooms for them, Charlotte caught her first view of the city throbbing below. She knew immediately she had chosen well. To be rich was to be blessed with choices, and she felt no doubt that she had found the best of all possible uses for the riches success had brought. In all the swirl of color and warmth passing beneath her, standing half a world away from Boston, Charlotte felt that coming to Rome was a matter of finding one's home at last.

Immediately, invitations from the other forestieri in town came flooding to Charlotte's door, people newly arrived from England and America who each winter made a little island in Rome where English speech expressed all the delights that art and leisure and entertaining afforded them. Of Rome, the visitors asked little, except to be left alone to entertain each other at lavish dinners and gatherings at salons, with long afternoon horseback rides on the open Campagna, the broad plain outside the walls with its vine-covered ruins, tumbling streams, and the always changing tints and shadows that played over its olive slopes and vineyards. From the moment Charlotte sipped her first taste of red wine at a marble-topped table in a caffe, she knew she had escaped all the dark skies, whether Victorian and Puritan. The word for life here was dolce far niente, sweet idleness. No wonder a thousand painters and sculptors had already laid out their chisels and set up their easels in Rome. In their velvet jackets and rumpled trousers, they seemed more intent on songs and conversations in the smoke-filled caffes than on sales.

Charlotte wondered at the change that had come already to her own precise sense of time. So much life had passed here in this city, so much force had thundered across Rome's seven hills that her American sense of history, with roots that went back less than a century, felt itself being wrenched into something less certain and sharp. Life here was to live, not to shape and constrict into some proper concept, some political notion. Wherever she turned, she saw freedom and grace; even the poverty in the backstreets, the hunger in faces cowering in the shadows seemed picturesque and alive. Rome's fountains said it perfectly. Long ago the city had piped the clear-flowing waters of its hinterland straight into its heart, where its gushing fountains made perpetual music and set a perpetual mood. It was a rare day that did not see some procession, state coaches of crimson and gold and the Guardia Nobile with their white cloaks and glittering helmets en route to some church or St. Peter's. Out on the Campagna, even the poorest peasants seemed unable to strike an ungraceful pose, whether leaning on their hay rakes or standing silent and shrouded in ragged blankets, silhouetted against the sunset.

In forestieri society, the leadership changed periodically, but just now the American sculptor, William Wetmore Story, was its head. In him lay intertwined all the motives that brought art and wealth together in Rome. His studio was a mecca for newcomers and visitors; few came to Rome without some intention of taking home a piece of sculpture or painting--whether an antique fragment or a newly cut piece of carrara. But Story was more than a working artist. The son of Justice Joseph Story, founder of Harvard's law school, he attracted visitors as much for his flawless social name as for his artistry. To aspire to some place in the circle which he dominated was, for most, a clear matter of finding favor with Story personally.

Charlotte found no reason to court Story's favor. She had made her own circle in London; she had never needed anyone's social wing, nor would she incur any debts now. Within days, Story knocked at her door. The man Sallie admitted was a slight, nervous figure, swarthy, with deep-set eyes, yet graced with a wit that sparkled. Charlotte greeted him as a fellow Bostonian, letting the conversation go as he wished. Story had come to make Miss Hosmer an offer. His sculptor friend, the English John Gibson, might be able to help her. Charlotte hesitated, then called in Hattie and her father. When Story saw the daguerreotypes of Hattie's pieces in Watertown, he poured out compliments. Gibson must meet this American girl.

It piqued Charlotte slightly that matters were being so quickly taken out of her hands, but Gibson was, by every report, Rome's finest sculptor. He had been the pupil of Canova himself. In due course Story was back with Gibson's ecstatic word: "Send the young lady to me, whatever I can teach her she shall learn!"¹² When the meeting with Gibson came off at his studio in the Via Fontanella, the little man in dusty smock led them through a garden of orange trees, past a gurgling fountain, to a back room lighted by a high arched window. Smiling, Gibson told Hattie in a little ceremony that he was giving her Canova's own studio. She could begin work whenever she liked; together they could plot a routine.

So, Hattie was settled, and though Charlotte felt glad about it, she was taken aback that Hattie quickly set her own pace in Rome, with or without her. The mothering instinct had come to nothing again, and for all her wish to shepherd and protect and batter down doors, she found in Harriet little real need. The girl would live at the Corso apartment, but she would spend all her days with Gibson, observing his skills, sketching his models, copying Roman and Greek drapery; Charlotte was left to fill her own days as she pleased. Grace was off for "color material," Matilda sat quietly reading or handed around the cups at the tea table, but Charlotte herself could not sit idle. She read all the books and plays that time had never allowed her before. She wrote the long letters she had promised, signing them with her great, swirling signature. She spent whole mornings idly shopping--buying some ivory miniature or bronze that struck her fancy, some tiny gold charm to add to her heavy watch chain--or passing slowly through the endless rooms of paintings and marbles and jeweled treasures in the Vatican galleries.

Each afternoon at one, she pulled on her black riding habit and bowler, ordered a horse brought around, then set off sidesaddle for the Campagna. The rides filled most of her afternoons. Toward four, she slowed her horse to a trot, then picked her way slowly up a pine-tufted hill to gaze out over the scene below. To the far south loomed the rounded blue Alban Hills, away to the east lay Tivoli's white bluffs and fountains, and a little nearer, the muted pink ruins and broken arches of Hadrian's Villa. Over it all, arched the incredible sapphire sky that seemed such a blessing after Boston and rainy England.

Sitting quietly, Charlotte asked herself why such radiant beauty and freedom were not enough. Was leisure a thing one must learn to manage? Did retirement, like a career, demand special talents? In this warm land where life had pulsated for so many centuries, why did she suddenly feel cold and unhappy? Finding no answers, she chided herself for discounting her blessings, then remounted and charged off to Rome.

Evenings she filled with endless dinners. Over somebody's port or madeira, she indulged all her zest for conversation. Rome's political swirls and rumbles were good for an hour, and the Crimea could fill another. Word came to her ears almost nightly that one day--just when no one could say--old Pio Nono, the squat old Pope hiding behind his high Vatican windows, must give up his temporal hold on Rome. But witty talk and long, perfect dinners were hardly enough to fill the emptiness she sensed more and more keenly. She did not forget that work and the pressure of schedules had irked her, but now, suddenly free of all pressures, she was blessed with too many choices, no discomforts, and no sense of purpose at all.

Whenever somebody begged her, she sang at some gathering: Fanny Kemble's sister, Adelaide, was a famed Roman hostess now and had sought her out. She recited the speeches that had spelled her high moments on stage and smiled at the tears she could still cause, delivering some somber ballad. She took an eager delight in leading visitors to the many studios where the artists were all too happy to lay down their tools and talk for an hour. She was even thrilled, one day, when an Italian sculptor begged her to pose. "Ah, Signora," he cried, enraptured at her form, "If you will only cover your face and let me carve your figure, I will make you the most magnificent goddess of beauty the world has ever seen."¹³

But with time on her hands, Charlotte let herself become too much concerned with things she could not control. There was something incorrigible in Hattie. Between long stints at her modeling table, she had taken to horseback rides with a vengeance, even riding alone at night through the dark streets. When the chargé d'affaires in the American consulate offered to protect her on such excursions, Hattie thanked him, then made him the same offer.¹⁴ When her solo rides brought criticism from Romans and Americans alike, Hattie tossed back her curls and cried she was free to do as she pleased--until the Roman police intervened.

Grace Greenwood fared better, though Charlotte found herself no more necessary in Grace's plan. The good journalist, Grace chose to remain in the background observing, determined to dig out the facts about Rome's coming political upheavals--though this was difficult to do, since certain parties had learned that the American Miss Cushman had forwarded money to Mazzini and, as a friend of Miss Cushman, she was suspect herself.¹⁵

About her status among the Italians, Charlotte cared not at all. Closer home, she might have fretted about Story's opinions if she had not already marked him off as a fool for taking such a womanish delight in his social holds on the forestieri. Charlotte boldly ignored his remarks about her and her "emancipated females" at 28 Corso. It was no secret that Story found her singing ridiculous. "The Cushman sings savage ballads," he wrote Lowell, "in a hoarse, manny voice, and requests people recitatively to forget her not. I'm sure I shall not."¹⁶

Partly to busy herself, she began a crusade on behalf of the female artists in Rome, especially Hattie. Doing so, she ran square into Story. Hattie had not bothered to thank him for his help, and now the sculptor felt a positive dislike for the girl. "She is doing very well and shows a capital spirit," he wrote Lowell in Boston. "But it is one thing to copy and another to create. She may or may not have inventive powers as an artist. If she have, will not she be the first woman who ever had?"¹⁷

To prove Story wrong, Charlotte now made it a point to lead her visitors to studios where various women like Hattie were trying to prove their "inventive powers." For a time, the crusade amply channeled her energies. When wealthy Americans asked her advice about places to visit, she took them to Hattie's studio to watch the vigorous girl in the velvet beret pound away like any man with her mallet and chisel, to stroll among the Romanesque figures she had placed on sale. Whether Hattie cared much or not, Charlotte found defending her a pastime made doubly sweet because it gave her a chance to oppose the arrogant Story.

One male artist, however, impressed her differently. By early 1853, Charlotte had heard much praise for William Page, an American portraitist who had been a pupil of Samuel Morse. Admiring his work in America, Emerson said his figures seemed so real they would "bleed." Now in Rome, Page was creating a tremendous following. With such a talent at hand, and an American talent at that, Charlotte determined to commission a portrait. At daily sittings for Page, she developed a growing interest in this burningly talented--if sorely troubled--painter. In Page, she found perfect proof of her old admonition: artists and happy marriage seldom go hand in hand. Watching the man fret and erase, then suddenly dash down something inspired, she came to enjoy his wide-ranging talk, his instructions about altering the pose to something more like herself than a model. Lowell had written a poem about the ordeal of sitting to William Page. "He wishes me to look (d'ye see?) as 'twere profoundly thinking, that he may paint me, not as if I were a bale of cloth or a log of wood, but rather as a poet and an author; So, while he shifts from chair to chair, considering my attitude, I take my pen (at his request) and thus display my gratitude."¹⁸

After weeks of sittings, Page delivered the finished picture.¹⁹ This was certainly no prettified likeness from a Thomas Sully. Page had painted her life-size and real, a heavy-jawed, unsmiling woman clearly aged thirty-six, wearing a dark everyday jacket, a studded white shirt and striped bow tie, her hair brushed down smooth to the sides. The face looked pleasant enough, she supposed, though Page had scarcely bothered to suggest any grace or feminine charm. Yet for all its honesty, she liked it, and in her eyes it only took on added merit when it soon became celebrated.

When Charlotte held open house to show off her Page portrait, even Story liked it--as art. "The finest portrait I think I ever saw,"²⁰ he wrote Lowell. When the Brownings, newly arrived from Paris, dropped by, they were ecstatic. Robert had never seen "such modern art, certainly,"²¹ and Elizabeth called it "something wonderful--soul and body together."²² Writing Mrs. Jameson, Elizabeth was not surprised at the furor it was creating. "Did Titian ever produce anything like it?" the other American painters in Rome were asking.

Happy with her picture, Charlotte and her "emancipated females" pursued other interests this easy spring of 1853. Grace would remember the time as "the golden year" of her life, days she filled making notes for articles and visiting the Vatican sculpture galleries. "The Apollo (Belvedere) I should like to see every day of my life . . . to lift a curtain, and gaze on that transcendent image of life and light . . . the energy and joy of existence with which it so abounds."²³ Hattie was almost lyrically happy working at Gibson's elbow. "I would not live anywhere else but in Rome, if you would give me the Gates of Paradise and all the Apostles thrown in." America was a glorious country, "but this is a better place for an artist."²⁴

In most respects, Charlotte felt the same. But it was not many weeks into the spring before she knew that part of her own disquiet stemmed from something she saw in Matilda. More and more, Matilda had withdrawn into a quiet shell, obviously at odds with the bounding energy around her. Charlotte could understand most of the feeling. It was an obvious fact to them all that, among them, Matilda was the weakest talent, the vaguest personality, the one least likely to achieve anything. The defeat was sad to watch, but Charlotte saw nothing positive to do about it. As the days passed, with Matilda perpetually glum and sour, Charlotte grew more and more troubled.

As winter warmed into spring and dinner parties gave way to picnics on the Campagna, Charlotte only felt more unhappy. She led her group to Naples for Holy Week and declared, with the others, that Sorrento was surely one of the loveliest places on earth; "a young festive queen, rose-crowned," Grace called it, "gently caressed and sung to by the capricious sea."²⁵ But returning to Rome, Charlotte knew she had problems. Was Matilda's unhappiness a vengeful dislike of Charlotte's other friends?

In a female ménage, some ill will had been inevitable perhaps, yet pondering the matter, Charlotte recognized in herself a feeling she had not expected in paradise. In her heart, she knew she was utterly bored. Did that explain Matilda's sad eyes? Perhaps--but before long Charlotte realized something more disturbing. Her resentment flaring, she asked herself how Matilda and the willful Hattie could have dared to form an attachment between themselves that included no place for her. How could they so lightly dismiss her friendship? Worse still, how could they so coldly discount the generosity she had brought them in open hands?

Hurt, feeling sore and unwanted, she realized one night that she could not live like this. Her idle hands hungered again for a workshop. Inactivity in all this silly, tinseled boredom with nothing to occupy her mind but injured pride was folly. In her suffering, her old hoarseness suddenly gripped her. For days she wandered aimless and wretched about the apartment, grieving that nobody seemed to care, whispering when she must, sitting morose by the window, too dismayed to make any plans. She knew she must leave Rome, yet to do so would force a showdown with Matilda and forfeit, perhaps, a bond she had long valued. Between a husband and wife, a marriage contract made many things easier, but between herself and Matilda what ties still held? Without explaining, she simply announced one night that she had decided to return to the stage. If Matilda was ready to leave, Sallie could pack in a few hours. If the announcement surprised Matilda, nothing in her face betrayed her. She nodded quickly to Sallie.

En route north, they stopped in Florence a day or so to visit the Brownings. The bouquet Charlotte sent to Casa Guidi, their airy apartment facing the Pitti Palace, brought a quick reply from Elizabeth. "You are too good. Your flowers are miracles of beauty. Can you come on Wednesday and will you? And if in the meanwhile you will accept us tonight as we are with nobody to help make the fire burn--then will you come tonight too?"²⁶

Seeing Elizabeth again, her small figure drooped in a large antique chair, her curls spilling out from under her lace cap, seeing Robert darting about as always, his talk a veritable shower of pictures and vivid stories, Charlotte felt suddenly happy again. Rome was far behind her and London lay just ahead. She mentioned the fact that she was still interested in Chorley's play Duchess Eleanour and might bring it out in London sometime. Later, Elizabeth turned the talk to spiritualism and her firm belief that friendly spirits were abroad in the land: their dear novelist friend, Isabella Blagden, had had all sorts of proof from the spirits; several had moved her hand to write "messages." Charlotte listened attentively, though with little more conviction than the doubt she saw in Robert's face.

Later, Isa Blagden, an exotic little woman with blue-black hair and jet eyes, invited them out to her villa high on a hill overlooking the Arno. Here Charlotte found the entire Florentine colony of English and Americans assembled to do her honor. Bulwer-Lytton and Frances Trollope and her son Anthony stood talking beside one window, and Hiram Powers, the American sculptor, and his beautiful daughters stood grouped around Isa herself. When Isa persuaded a tall English girl to sing for them, Charlotte accepted a gold chair by the fireplace, filled this warm afternoon with flowers. After the girl had finished, someone begged Charlotte to sing. It had been weeks since she had trusted her voice, and she hesitated a moment. But soon she turned to the girl: "Since you have sung so exquisitely to please me, I will sing horribly to please you."²⁷ Then laughing, she seated herself at the keys and half-talked her way through "The Sands o' Dee."

But pleasures like these were too gentle now to interest her. Discussing Chorley's play with Elizabeth had merely convinced her the more that happiness was action. Charlotte knew that returning to work, she was in a sense returning to life. On July 5, 1853, she was back in London.

She stopped a while with Mary Eliza and Charlie in Brixton, then moved on with Sallie to Malvern. Tired from the journey across Europe, Matilda had chosen to remain in London, and Charlotte gave scant thought to the matter until one morning a stiff little note arrived from her friend. Matilda had decided to go back to Rome--to Hattie, of course. In Charlotte, a grief welled up that was more loneliness than sadness. The foolish Matilda could do as she pleased. No vow held her, once she wanted to leave. Soon another letter brought a stab to Charlotte's heart. Word from Philadelphia reported that Conrad Clarke was reaping success at the Arch Street Theatre. He and his wife were valued members of the regular stock company. So much for the griefs of the heart.

However close the rupture with Matilda came to breaking "my heart, if not my head"--as she later wrote Grace--she knew by the time she left Malvern for London that "there was something higher and grander" than grief. Squaring her shoulders, she knew again that work, her "old religion of labour," could "sunder the rock meant to crush me."²⁸