The Manzoni Family by Natalia Ginzburg Page A

Tuscany, either because they wanted to go with Fauriel, or because, as Manzoni wrote to Fauriel, ‘mon ennuyeux fatras’, my tedious scribbling, in other words the novel, was occupying him a great deal, and he felt he could neither abandon it at that point, nor take it with him.
    In summer 1823, Fanny, the Manzonis’ French maid, went to Paris to the help of her sick mother. She took a letter to Fauriel. ‘My dear, and ever dearer friend, here is an unexpected messenger, but misfortunes make travellers almost as much as boredom’, Manzoni wrote to Fauriel. The Adelchi had meanwhile appeared in France, in Fauriel’s translation and with an introduction by him. ‘Oh, my friend! what have you done? what have you said?’ wrote Manzoni. ‘I am quite confused; I do not speak of the pleasure it has given me to see my sketchy thought so well rendered, or rather developed and perfected by your style: I anticipated this pleasure. But once again, what have you said of your poor author! You make me blush, and I hardly dare raise my head. Let’s speak of something else, and above all of this journey conceived so joyfully but constantly delayed. My dear friend, we cannot possibly leave here before the winter. The inconveniences arising from the work on our house in Milan have taken up the time which should have been spent on preparations essential for a large family. . . At the same time we have had preoccupations in which inconveniences were certainly the least painful of our problems.’ Clara, the last but one of the children, had died. ‘Pietro, Cristina and Sofia have had measles which proved to be quite a long, painful illness for them, but from which they have happily recovered. I cannot say the same of our poor dear little Clara, who was just two years old; after seeing her suffer for a long time, we lost her. And so we found ourselves close to the time when we had hoped to begin that blessed journey. We have been obliged to put the plan off again until next spring, and even then with some doubts arising from a host of possible and predictable obstacles, and also, when all’s said and done, from our tendency to give in to them too easily.’ Then he talks of the fatras, the novel: All I can say is that I have tried to achieve a precise knowledge of the time and place in which I have set my story, and to depict it faithfully. There is no shortage of material: everything that shows men in a wretched light is there in abundance: confident ignorance, pretentious folly, bare-faced corruption, were, alas, among others of the same kind perhaps the most striking characteristics of the period. Fortunately there were also men and traits which did honour to the human race, characters endowed with strong virtue, outstanding in proportion to the obstacles and opposition they encountered, and by their resistance, or sometimes their submission to conventional ideas. I’ve put in peasants, nobles, monks, nuns, priests, magistrates, scholars, war, famine. . . [here the page is torn and the phrase is illegible], which means it’s quite a book!’
    In 1823 Canon Tosi was appointed bishop at Pavia, so he left them. ‘I need hardly repeat how warmly you are remembered in our family,’ Manzoni wrote to him, ‘. . . I would not have presumed to ask you to write to me sometimes in the little spare time that will remain to you; but since you have deigned to promise to do so, I remember your promise with the sincerest gratitude. Meanwhile, the hope of seeing you again, after a long interval, is one of the thoughts I turn to in those moments when physical and mental labours make me feel the need of some living, tranquil consolation.’ Canon, now Bishop, Tosi displayed some anxiety about the work on which Manzoni was engaged. He wrote: ‘I cannot refrain from an urgent personal plea that you curb this tendency to throw yourself so whole-heartedly into all the writing