Free The Manzoni Family by Natalia Ginzburg Page A

from new contacts, and also because of family circumstances, I must wait for him to resolve to seek you out. . .’
    Manzoni and Enrichetta called on Bishop Grégoire with a letter from Degola, shortly after they arrived in Paris, and received a kindly welcome; they returned a few times but did not find him at home, ‘and for the time being,’ Manzoni wrote to Canon Tosi, ‘we do not think it right to disturb him.’ Bishop Grégoire had been elected a depute and was extraordinarily busy. He was an extreme anti-monarchist: in the past he had thundered against the monarchy: ‘The tree of liberty can prosper only if it is watered by the blood of kings’, and ‘kings are in the moral order what monsters are in the natural order’, and again ‘the destruction of a fierce beast, the end of a plague, the death of a king, are sources of rejoicing to humanity’; and his nomination as a depute had a precise political significance, it was a slap in the face to the monarchy. It was strange to think of the gentle Enrichetta sitting in amiable conversation with a man who had written such bloody words, and just as strange for Manzoni who had a horror of blood, of political hatred and of violent, inflated language; moreover, how could Christian piety and such furious hate be reconciled in the person of the Bishop? Enrichetta and Alessandro must both have been baffled and disturbed by all this, but they must have said to themselves that these were strange, torn and bitter times in which they were living.
    As for Abbé Lamennais, Manzoni took care not to seek him out, and the two men never met, then or at any other time.
    Although he had admired the ‘Essay on Indifference’, Manzoni distrusted Lamennais, who seemed to him a sectarian, factious priest, and after reading a new book of his in Paris, his distrust turned to real aversion. This aversion was, moreover, shared by Abbé Degola, who wrote to Tosi describing Lamennais as ‘a fanatic’ and ’a Sulpician madman’. The parish of Saint-Sulpice was worldly and Jesuit, and was opposed to the Jansenist parish of Saint-Séverin. Bishop Grégoire had been full of praise for the parish of Saint-Séverin, when Enrichetta and Alessandro called on him.
    Manzoni’s health did not improve in Paris. The apartment in Faubourg Saint-Germain was noisy because the windows overlooked the market. The children were often ill, Enrichetta tired. Little Enrico was growing up delicate, late in cutting his teeth and generally slow. Manzoni led a rather solitary life in Paris. There had been an imperceptible cooling-off in relations between his mother and Sophie de Condorcet; Sophie could not recognize her former friend, idle, witty, light-hearted, in the Giulia who now appeared before her, an elderly lady completely absorbed in her grandchildren and her devotions. The friendship with Fauriel remained unbroken, but they did not often go to La Maisonnette, and when they did, they returned home before evening. Manzoni went for long walks about the city with his friend Ignazio Calderari; he always maintained that it suited him to take a lot of exercise, but felt unequal to going out alone; in the winter Calderari left. Now he was homesick for the garden at Brusuglio and the surrounding countryside, and the people he used to see in Italy: Ermes Visconti, Tommaso Grossi, friends with whom he had a different relationship from Fauriel, less passionate, more easy-going, familiar and joking. He wrote to Tommaso Grossi: ‘I can’t wait to be sitting in my study with Grossi at my side reading his new novella. . . how we will chat and improvise as we walk to the little bridge! It’s impossible to work here, I can’t put together a single verse. ‘ He sent cuttings to Uncle Giulio Beccaria, to give to the agent at Brusuglio for grafting; they had given up all idea of selling Brusuglio and the house in via del Morone; there