Page:Margaret Fuller by Howe, Julia Ward, Ed. (1883).djvu/204

Rh lay awake whole nights, contriving how she might end this painful separation ; but circumstances were too strong for her, and the object so dearly wished for could not be compassed.

In March she visited him again, and found him in health, "and plump, though small.” The baby leaned his head pathetically against her breast, seeming, she thought, to say, "How could you leave me?" He is described as a sensitive and precocious little creature,—affected, Margaret thought, by sympathy with her; “for," she says, “I worked very hard before his birth [at her book on Italy], with the hope that all my spirit might be incarnated in him."

She returned to Rome about the middle of April. The French were already in Italy. Their “web of falsehood” was drawing closer and closer round the devoted city. Margaret was not able to visit her boy again until the siege, soon begun, ended in the down-fall of the Roman Republic.

The government of Rome, at this time, was in the hands of a triumvirate, whose names—Armellini, Mazzini, and Saffi—are appended to the official communications made in answer to the letters of the French Envoy, M. de Lesseps, and of the Commander-in-Chief, General Oudinot. The French side of this correspondence presented, but a series of tergiversations, the truth being simply that the opportunity of reinstating the Roman Pontiff in his temporal domain was too valuable to be allowed to pass, by the adventurer who then, under the name of President, already ruled France by military despotism. In the great game of hazard which he played, the prospective adhesion of the Pope's spiritual subjects was the highest card he could hold. The people who had been