The Manzoni Family Read Free

about thirty. She was dark-haired and olive-skinned. She had led a very eventful life. Her husband, the Marquis de Condorcet, philosopher and mathematician, was a Girondin; when the Girondins fell in 1792, he was pursued and threatened with arrest; he hid in a peasant house; his wife would come to see him dressed as a peasant, and meanwhile she had sued for divorce in order to save their confiscated goods. Then Condorcet tried to escape, was captured, and poisoned himself with stramonium, which he got from a doctor friend, Pierre Cabanis. To support her daughter, her sister and an old governess, the widowed Sophie went to the prisons every day to paint portraits of people condemned to the guillotine. She retrieved part of the confiscated property. One day she met Claude Fauriel walking in the Jardin des Plantes; they shared a love of botany. She took him from Madame de Staël, with whom he had a relationship at that time. But Madame de Staël and Fauriel remained friends.
    Fauriel was a philologist. He was born in modest circumstances in a village in the Cévennes, Saint-Etienne. He studied at Tournon. In 1793 he was made lieutenant in an infantry battalion. During the Directorate he retired to Saint-Etienne and studied Greek, Latin and Turkish. He was a friend of Fouché and on his return to Paris he became his secretary and inspector of police. As a police official he was extremely attentive to the needs of those about him, sympathetic to their misfortunes and swift to help. He resigned when he was about to make a successful career, for he had no ambition and no wish to attain too high a rank. Sainte-Beuve called him a perpetual resigner. He loved botany, nature and especially the countryside on the banks of the Loire, and the places around his village. He loved to wander through the country in the early morning gathering plant specimens. Again in the words of Sainte-Beuve, he always loved to return to the origins of things: he liked ‘the sources of rivers, the birth of civilizations’, art and poetry in their primitive forms and, when he was botanizing, he concentrated on mosses in particular. He was very handsome and popular with the ladies: Stendhal said he was the handsomest man in Paris. He was tall and dark, with very full lips, strongly marked features, and sad, pensive eyes. He had a strong sense of friendship. He would become passionately interested in the topics his friends were studying and take them up in his turn. He was a good listener and everyone confided in him. He had many friends; Cabanis, Madame de Staël, Benjamin Constant, and later, Manzoni. He was an extraordinary translator. A vain man, he loved to hear his works praised, especially the translations. Sophie de Condorcet lived with him for twenty years, but she would not marry him, because he was not noble and belonged to a class inferior to her. It would have been a mésalliance. The Revolution had taken place, and Sophie de Condorcet was in many ways a person without prejudices, but the idea was deeply rooted in her mind that it would be humiliating to marry a man of humble origins. Many years later when Sophie died, Fauriel was rejected and scorned by her relatives, with whom he had lived for so long on the most intimate terms. They broke off all connection with him.
    Sophie de Condorcet’s manners were polite and easy, and yet controlled and proud. Giulia admired her but went in awe of her, for the other woman’s manner was distant and protective. Giulia displayed her affection for Sophie impulsively, and received courteous but cold responses. She was hurt and confided in Fauriel: ‘It is a cruel thing for love to be unrequited, but it is no less a torment to feel loved against your wishes: this is precisely the situation between me and that unique and gracious lady for whom I have and always will have the liveliest affection, and friendship between us must be reciprocal, or I can not and will not sue for