FRANCIS MARION CRAWFORD
At the age of twenty-three
her generosity unstinted. She was the most romantic of women, always beautiful, always surrounded by admirers! Her marriage to Thomas Crawford, the sculptor, in 1846 carried her to Rome, a young bride; from this time Rome was her home. The four Crawford children were all more Italian than American. After Uncle Crawford’s death in 1857, my aunt married Luther Terry, an American painter also settled in Rome. There are two children of this marriage, Margaret (Mrs. Winthrop Chanler) and Arthur Terry.
“Every year I break off a bit of my heart and give it away!” my aunt said to me sadly at the end of a season that had brought several near relatives and friends to Rome. That was the fly in her ointment—the brilliant circle at the Odescalchi was inevitably a shifting one—she missed the intimacy of old friends and relatives; this was part of the price of exile. She was a faithful correspondent, writing long letters to her children and sisters, “holding the family together” by her system of “letter exchange.” They all wrote freely and frequently to her, and she was tireless in passing on the letters from one to another.
Her two married Crawford daughters, Annie, Baroness Erich von Rabé and Mimoli, Mrs. Hugh Fraser, came that winter to visit the Odescalchi. Annie was a unique person, witty, brilliant, and extraordinarily gifted. Her brother Marion writes of her at this time, “I saw Annie yesterday, and find her much changed—cordial and affectionate, but nervous and excitable. She has become much thinner, or I should say slimmer, for her figure is really almost absolute perfection. She was here for a few days with her really magnificent children, all affection and smiles, and has now gone back to her wolves and her Poles and her fine trees at Lesnian.” The Crawfords were all artistic like their father and romantic like their mother.
On the ninth of January of this year, 1878, Victor Emmanuel the Liberator died. I saw his strong face for the last time as he lay in state at the Quirinal. The cappella ardente was ablaze with candles, the air was heavy with the smell of incense and flowers. The dead king was dressed in uniform with the crown and scepter at his feet. Two Capuchin monks knelt beside him, telling their beads. From early morning till late night a silent grief-stricken crowd surged though the chapel.
“He received the sacrament! Yes, it was allowed,” a woman of the people murmured in my ear the words with which Rome rang. There had been some who doubted if the Church would permit the supreme unction to be administered. For several days it had been known that while the king lay dying at the Quirinal, across the Tiber at the Vatican, his old adversary, Pope Pius Ninth, had been stricken with mortal illness. With my mother I watched the wonderful funeral cortège pass the American Consulate. There were tears on the roses she threw before the crimson velvet funeral car drawn by six magnificent horses. In the great drama of the Risorgimento she too had played her part. She had, as a girl in her father’s house and as a wife in her husband’s home, received and comforted Italians exiled for Liberty’s sake; she had worked for the cause of Italian liberty with voice and pen. She had labored for Italy, she had rejoiced with her, and now she mourned with “the ransomed land.”
Chief among the mourners was Garibaldi, old and ill, who came up from rocky Caprera, where he had lived for some time rather in the shadow. I saw him pass, lying back in a landau, dressed in the traditional gray felt hat and red blouse. His bronze hair and beard were silver now, but his eyes had still the look of a seer. He never for an instant doubted that Italy would fill that larger destiny of which he dreamed. He saw in the death of Victor Emmanuel the opportunity to raise once more the cry for Italia Irredenta!