ted 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 downfall 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 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