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devoted almost entirely to comedy. Dan still enjoyed grand opera greatly, and went on attending performances at the Academy of Music. 19
    The second half of the nineteenth century came in with expectations of technological, industrial, and political beneficence. For Assemblyman Sickles, it was a matter of making larger borrowings, and to pay them back he exempted himself from standing for reelection to the assembly and set to work again as a lawyer. A great deal of his correspondence received and sent would be concerned with balancing the settlement of one promissory note against the extension of another. Not all those who lent him money were indulgent. 20 Fanny White, on the other hand, was less desperate for cash than Dan, and was able in 1851 to buy a property at 119 Mercer Street and run it as one of the city’s most prosperous, reputable, and well-appointed brothels. Her personal tax record of 1851 lists, along with herself, a certain Bagioli as the payer of taxes on the property. So was the father of the now-adolescent Teresa also involved with Fanny White, or had Dan used Bagioli’s name as a cover when helping White? There was a sniff of the tribal about Fanny’s brothel, anyhow, since she had bought her house from a lawyer of Dan’s, John Graham. These transactions were themselves an index of the dense, fibrous quality of relations between Tammany and New York’s vigorous unofficial life. George Templeton Strong, the New York lawyer and diarist, whose reminiscences are to his age as significant as those of Samuel Pepys to the Jacobean era, would say that Dan was blackmailing Antonio Bagioli, but there is no evidence of it, and Bagioli’s surviving letters to Dan were always unresentful and warm. 21
    In the early 1850s, Teresa Bagioli was a beautiful young woman being trained for the role of wife and cultivated hostess at the Manhattanville Convent of the Sacred Heart, the school for the daughters of theCatholic elite of New York. Her complexion was transparent, and her soul also; she was blithe, an affectionate friend to her younger sister, Blanchy, and a good if sometimes naive conversationalist. Her openness and lack of malice, the lack of the vanity and self-indulgence that might have gone with beauty, earned her a wide circle of friends. One observer wrote, “Beautiful, brilliant, and highly educated, she mingled with the most garrulous simplicity of manner a firmness which, without sacrifice of feminine grace, exempted her from many foibles which spring from weak nerves.”
    Though attracted to men by way of the sensuality she had inherited from Grandfather Da Ponte, she expected to enjoy the years of maidenly socializing that lay ahead of most of her fellow students and intimate friends before marriage. Their names and the innocuous, enthusiastic, chatty letters Teresa wrote to them evoke a dewy, privileged American wholesomeness: Jane McCarren of Westchester, Molly Coggin, Mary Hill, Sarah Shevell, Ann Hendrickson, Eliza and Sarah Sanford, and a special friend of unknown surname, Florence. Many of these letters would survive. 22
    But Teresa was besotted with Dan Sickles, who visited the Bagioli house regularly. Although Antonio had for a time done so well as a voice teacher that he had maintained a “country seat” at Hastings-on-Hudson, he too was a man doomed to economic uncertainty, and now he was back in the demi-squalor of town. George Templeton Strong implied that at one stage Dan’s frequent visits to the Bagioli household, at 34 East Fifteenth Street, were entirely predatory, and that, again, he was blackmailing Antonio. It was the sort of accusation Dan’s repute induced such folk as Strong to make. Unless Dan was extremely perverse and Teresa thoroughly alienated from her parents—and there is no sign that she was—an atmosphere of threat would not have encouraged her infatuation with this mature lawyer and politician who did her the notable honor in all conversation of considering her