The Complete Works of Stephen Crane (237 page)

At the invitation of the Pope, Louis Napoleon, then president of the French republic, seeing the opportunity for conciliating the religious powers, poured his troops into Rome, and Garibaldi fled, with Anita at his side. The brave wife with her unborn child would not leave her hero, but death took her from him. In a peasant’s hut, a few days later, she died, his arms around her. As for Mazzini, the fall of Rome nearly broke his heart. For days he wandered dazed about the Eternal City, miraculously escaping capture, till his friends got him away.

It was not until April of 1850 that Pius IX. dared to come back to Rome, where a body of French troops long remained, to show how really religious a nation was France. From his accession there had been a papal party in Italy, who, because of the good manners of the gentle ecclesiastic, had wrought themselves up to believe that Italy could be united under
him.
But as early as 1847 d’Azeglio wrote from Rome: “The magic of Pio Nono will not last; he is an angel, but he is surrounded by demons.”

After the events of the 1848 rising, and his appeal (twenty-five pontiffs had made the same appeal before him!) to the foreigner against his own people, the dream of a patriotic pope melted into thin air.

And so Austria came back into Italy, and seemed again complete master there. It would be interesting to be able to analyse the sensibilities of these prince-puppets who were jerked back to their thrones by their master at Vienna. Plenty of Austrian troops came to take care of them. As for the bitter reprisals Italians had to bear, it is almost impossible to read of them. In certain provinces every one found with a weapon was put to death. A man found with a rusty nail was promptly shot. At Brescia a little hunchback was slowly burnt alive. Women, stripped half naked, were flogged in the market-place, with Austrian officers looking on. It was after his visit to Naples in the winter of 1850 that Gladstone wrote, “This is the negation of God erected into a system of government.”

But Italy had now a new champion. When Victor Emmanuel signed his name to the first census in his reign, he jestingly gave his occupation as “Rè Galantuomo,” and this name stuck to him for ever after. A brave monarch Victor Emmanuel proved, whose courage and honesty were tried in many fires.

When arranging negotiations with Radetsky after Novara, he was given to understand that the conditions of peace would be much more favourable if he would abandon the constitution granted by Charles Albert.

“Marshal,” he said, “sooner than subscribe to such conditions, I would lose a hundred crowns. What my father has sworn I will maintain. If you wish a war to the death, be it so! My house knows the road of exile, but not of dishonour.”

The Princes of Piedmont had been always renowned for physical courage and dominating minds. Effeminacy and mendacity are not their foibles. It is hinted by the Countess of Cesaresco, in her
Liberation of Italy
, that sainthood was esteemed the privilege strictly of the women of the family; but then sainthood is not absolutely necessary to a monarch. The Piedmont line had always understood the business of kings, — but none so thoroughly as Victor Emmanuel.

He was unpopular at first; the Mazzinists cried, “Better Italy enslaved than handed over to the son of the traitor, Carlo Alberto!” On the wall of his palace at Turin was written: “It is all up with us; we have a German king and queen” — alluding to the Austrian origin of his mother and of his young queen, Marie Adelaide.

These two — wife and mother — were ruled by clerics, and made his life melancholy when he began a course of ecclesiastical reform. One person in every two hundred and fourteen in Sardinia was an ecclesiastic, and the Church had control of all ecclesiastical jurisdiction and could shelter criminals, among other mediæval privileges. To reform these abuses, the king, in 1849, approached the pope with deferential requests, but the pope absolutely refused to make any changes.

However, the work of reform was firmly pushed on, and a law was passed by which the priestly privileges were sensibly cut down, although the king’s wife and mother wrung their hands, and the religious press shrieked denunciation. At this time Santa Rosa, the Minister of Commerce and Agriculture, died, and the Church refused him the last sacrament, though he was a blameless and devout member of the Roman Church. This hateful act of intolerance reacted on the clergy, as a matter of course, and gave an impetus to church reform.

When, in 1855, Victor Emmanuel was so unfortunate as to lose his wife, his mother, and his brother, within a month, and the nation as a whole mourned with him, his clerical friends embittered his affliction by insisting with venomous frankness that it was the judgment of Heaven that he had brought upon himself for his religious persecutions.

Strength was Victor Emmanuel’s genius: he was not intellectual in any marked degree, but his ministers could work with him and rely upon him. A union between him and Cavour, the two great men of the kingdom, was inevitable. Up to this time Cavour had no general fame except as a journalist, but the king had the insight to recognise his extraordinary powers, and when Santa Rosa died (unshriven) Cavour in his place became Minister of Agriculture and Commerce. “Look out!” said the king to his prime minister, d’Azeglio, when this had come to pass, “Cavour will soon be taking all your portfolios. He will never rest till he is prime minister himself.”

Under the régime of Cavour, railways and telegraph wires lined the kingdom in all directions; he took off foolish tariffs and concluded commercial treaties with England, France, Belgium, and other powers. “Milord Cavour” was a nickname showing the dislike aroused by his English predilections, but through him Piedmont repaired the damage of the war of 1848, and grew steadily in prosperity.

Cavour’s brilliant intellectual powers seem to have been so limitless that it is rather a relief to think of him personally as only a dumpy little man with an overbig head. Although a born aristocrat, and living in the manner becoming one, he was capable of quite demonstrative behaviour. The occasion for this was a dinner given by dAzeglio. Cavour, seated at table, joked the premier about his jealousy of Ratazzi; the premier replied angrily; whereupon the greatest of diplomats arose, seized his plate, lifting it as high as he could, and dashed it to the floor, where it broke into fragments. Then he rushed out of the house, crying:

“He is a beast! He is a beast!”

This quarrel, which sounds like an act from a nursery drama, led to a change in the cabinet, with Cavour left out. But a little later on dAzeglio resigned, and Cavour was prime minister.

A marvellous stroke of statesmanship on behalf of his country was Cavour’s intervention in the Crimean War in 1855, — three years after Louis Napoleon’s
coup d’état.
It seemed an act of folly to send fifteen thousand troops from the little Italian state — which had no standing among European powers — to help England and France. The undertaking seemed to Sardinians an act of insanity; Cavour’s colleagues were violently against him. But the king stood by him; so the troops were sent and the ministers resigned.

Never was an action more fully justified. At the close of the Crimean War Sardinia had two powerful allies — France and England; and for the first time she was admitted on terms of equality among the “Powers.” A significant thing had been said, too, in 1855: “What can I do for Italy?” asked the Emperor Napoleon of Cavour. Cavour was not slow to tell him what could be done; he was convinced that he must look for aid to the vanity and ambition of Napoleon III.

No diplomatic pressure of his, however, availed. During the next two years the attitude of Austria became constantly more unendurable, but still Napoleon would make no move.

It proved to be the most unlikely of events that brought about a consummation of the wishes of Cavour.

On the evening of January 14,
1858, a
carriage drove through the Paris streets on its way to the opera. With the appearance of its two occupants all the world is familiar; the wonderful Spanish eyes of the lady, the exquisite lines of her figure — who has not seen them pictured? The smallish man with her had been described by the Crown Prince of Prussia as having “strangely immobile features and almost extinguished eyes.” His huge moustache had exaggeratedly long waxed ends, and his chin was covered with an “imperial.’’

The terrible crash of Orsini’s bombs, thrown underneath their carriage, failed to carry out the conspirators’ purpose. The emperor had a slight wound on the nose, and the empress felt a blow on the eye. That was all, except that her silks and laces were spattered with blood from the wounded outside the carriage. They continued their drive and saw the opera to its finish before they were told of the tragedy that had befallen. Eight people had been killed and one hundred and fifty-six wounded by the explosion.

The Empress Eugenie, it is said, showed the greatest composure over the event, but this was not true of her husband. Probably no man of modern times had had so many attempts made on his life as Louis Napoleon, and always, before, he made light of them; but this last one, resulting in such cruel slaughter, completely unnerved him. He now lived in a tremor, dreading the vengeance of still others of the revolutionary ex-friends of his youth; but he dared not relax the despotic grip with which he ruled his land. How could he placate them? He wore a cuirass under his coat; he had wires netted over the chimneys of the Tuileries, so that bombs should not burst on his hearth; a swarm of detectives were around him wherever he went, and always the question asked itself in his mind: What should he do to take off the curse of fear from his life? —

Cavour, Victor Emmanuel, the whole of Italy, were filled with rage and disgust at the news of Orsini’s attempt. Orsini — an Italian! That must be the end of all their hopes of help from France! But in the summer of 1848 Cavour was summoned to the emperor at Plombières, and during two days there the agreement was formulated by which France and Italy united against Austria. This was Louis Napoleon’s solution of his problem — to help Italy at least sufficiently to annul the hate of every assassin on the peninsula. According to the Prince Regent of Prussia, he chose “la guerre” instead of “le poignard.”

No written record was made of the bargain between Napoleon and Cavour; but we know that it gave Savoy and Nice to France, and made one innocent royal victim, the young Princess Clotilde, Victor Emmanuel’s daughter, who was there betrothed by proxy to Prince Jerome Napoleon.

It was at Plombières that Napoleon with some naïveté said to Cavour: “Do you know, there are but three
men
in all Europe: one is myself, the second is you, and the third is one whose name I will not mention.” Napoleon was not alone in his high estimate of Cavour. In Turin they said: “We have a ministry, a parliament, a constitution; all
that
spells Cavour.”

At his reception on New Year’s Day, 1859, Napoleon astounded every one by greeting the Austrian ambassador with these words: “I regret that our relations with your government are not so good as they have been hitherto.” This ostentatious expression was equal to publication in a journal. Immediate war was looked for by every one. Piedmont, France, and Austria openly made bellicose preparations.

Although on the 18th of January,
1859, a
formal treaty was made, by which France was bound to support Piedmont if attacked by Austria, Napoleon hesitated and tried to back out of his agreement. It will never be known by what tortuous system of diplomacy Cavour compelled Austria herself to declare war, but it was done, April 27.

Cavour’s intrigues during these days were dazzlingly complicated; he had to deal on one hand with his imperial ally, and on the other with shady revolutionary elements — and to keep his right hand in  ignorance of what his left hand did. He summoned Garibaldi to Turin; Garibaldi, in his loose red shirt and sombrero, with its plume, with his tumultuous hair and beard, struck dismay to the heart of the servant who opened the door. He refused to admit him, but finally agreed to consult his master. “Let him come in,” said Cavour. “It is probably some poor devil who has a petition to make to me.” This was the first meeting of the statesman and the warrior. When told of the French alliance, Garibaldi exclaimed: “Mind what you are about! Never forget that the aid of foreign armies must be, in some way or other, dearly paid for!” But his adherence was whole-heartedly given to Victor Emmanuel, and at the end of the short campaign Italy rang with his name.