The Manzoni Family Read Free Page A

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    It has been thought that Sophie de Condorcet might have been very jealous of Giulia, and for this reason sometimes cold with her.
    Nevertheless, at a moment of great distress Giulia received very real and strong support from Sophie de Condorcet. Carlo Imbonati died suddenly of bilious colic. He had suffered from liver trouble for some time, but nobody had realised the gravity of his illness. Sophie de Condorcet, Cabanis and Fauriel were the first to hasten to the house in Place Vendôme. Giulia was sobbing upon the corpse which she refused to leave. Sophie suggested that Giulia should have the body embalmed and taken to Meulan to the garden of La Maisonnette. No priest was asked to bless the body. In the course of an afternoon Sophie found an embalmer. There was a chapel in the garden of La Maisonnette, but it had long remained unconsecrated. The embalmed body of Carlo Imbonati was placed there, violating all the ecclesiastical laws which forbade burial in unconsecrated ground. Giulia felt bound to Sophie by eternal gratitude.
    Carlo Imbonati had made a will years before in Milan, when he and Giulia were about to leave for France. On his death the will was opened before a lawyer in Milan and communicated to Giulia who had remained in Paris. She already knew its contents, because Imbonati had told her, but she did not know how they were expressed. There were fourteen legacies to relatives and domestic servants; the rest was left to Giulia. ‘Of all my other goods, chattels and estates, investments, accounts and shares, and anything of which I die possessed, I have pronounced and do pronounce my sole heiress Giulia Beccaria Manzoni. . . and this my free and incontrovertible decision stands as a solemn public testimony to the pure and just feelings I owe to and feel for my aforesaid heiress for the constant and virtuous friendship I have professed for her, from which I gain not only complete satisfaction in the years I have spent with her, but an intimate conviction that I owe to her virtue and disinterested attachment that peace of mind and happiness which will go with me to the grave; for which, since I can never find words to express all that I feel in my heart for my aforesaid heiress, I pray Almighty God, Father and Creator of us all, to receive the humble prayers I offer in the fullness of my heart for the greatest good of my aforesaid heiress, and that He will grant that we may bless and adore Him together in all eternity.’
    Carlo Imbonati had died on 15 March 1805; he was fifty-two and Giulia forty-three. The closing words of the will turned her thoughts to God. She had never thought of Him much. The ambience in which she lived was devoid of any religious thinking. She went to see a Protestant minister, Federico Menestraz, whom she had met at the house of an elderly Genevan lady, Carlotta Blondel. She asked him for consolation and advice. He exhorted her to dedicate her life to the sufferings of her fellows. At that time she conceived the idea of becoming a hospital nun. She gave away furniture and household objects, and wrote to Carlo Imbonati’s sisters offering them part of the inheritance left to her in the will. She did not want to go back to the house in Place Vendôme, so she took an apartment in rue Saint-Honoré. In the summer her son arrived. Then they moved to a bigger house in rue Neuve du Luxembourg.

Giulia Beccaria II
    When he was twelve Alessandro left the College of the Somaschi Fathers which he hated. (‘Filthy sheepfold’ he was to call it later.) He was transferred to the Longone College in Milan, which he hated just as much. But he made friends, there; Arese, Pagani, Confalonieri, Visconti. He stayed there until he was sixteen. Then he went to live in the house in Santa Prassede Street, where he was received by the dark melancholy of Don Pietro, the gloom of the maiden aunts, Uncle Monsignore with the beam in his eye, and everything that had bored and depressed