Page:Margaret Fuller by Howe, Julia Ward, Ed. (1883).djvu/205

190 ignorant enough to elect Louis Napoleon, were easily led to justify his outrageous expedition to Rome. In Margaret's manifold disappointments, Mazzini always remained her ideal of a patriot, and, as she says, of a prince. To her, he stands alone in Italy, "on a sunny height, far above the stature of other men.' He came to her lodgings in Rome, and was in appearance more divine than ever, after all his new, strange sufferings." He had then just been made a Roman citizen, and would in all probability have been made President, had the Republic continued to exist. He talked long with Margaret, and, she says, was not sanguine as to the outcome of the difficulties of the moment.

The city once invested, military hospitals became a necessity. The Princess Belgiojoso, a Milanese by birth, and in her day a social and political notability, undertook to organize these establishments, and obtained, by personal solicitation, the funds necessary to begin her work. On the 30th of April, 1849, she wrote the following letter to Margaret:—

",—You are named Superintendent of the Hospital of the Fate Bene Fratelli. Go there at twelve, if the alarm-bell has not rung before. When you arrive there, you will receive all the women coming for the wounded, and give them your directions, so that you are sure to have a number of them, night and day.

"May God help us!

“."