ing through the
Legation at Turin, till Cavour said, with a smile, to Prince de Latour
d'Auvergne, "But it is finished; yesterday the king had a letter from
the Emperor which ends the whole affair."

A little while after, Cavour received a private communication from
Paris containing Orsini's last letter, and inviting him to publish it
in the _Official Gazette_. It was only then that it began to dawn on
him what had been the real effect of the attempt, and of Orsini's
trial, on the mind of the Emperor. Cavour had none of the
fellow-feeling with conspirators that lurked in Napoleon's brain, and
the idea seemed to him absurd that a man should be strongly moved by
the pleading of his would-be assassin. Among the royal families of
Europe, Orsini's influence was at once understood, but it was thought
to have its source in fear. It was remarked how, when the sentence of
death was passed, the condemned man, turning to his counsel, whispered
the words of Tasso--

Risorgero, nemico ognor piu crudo,
Cenere anco sepolto e spirto ignudo.

"The Italian dagger," wrote the Prince Regent of Prussia, "has become
a fixed idea with Napoleon." Yet it was not only, and perhaps not
chiefly, the fear of being assassinated that inclined Napoleon to
listen to Orsini's dying prayer, "Free my country, and the blessings
of twenty-five million Italians will go with you!" His own part in the
revolutionary movement of 1831 has been shown to have been no boyish
freak but serious work, into which he entered with the sole enthusiasm
of his life. "I feel for the first time that I live!" he wrote when on
the march towards Rome. The Romagna was the hotbed of the Carbonari;
all his friends belonged to the Society, and it must always be held
probable that he belonged to it also. At any rate the memory of those
days lent dramatic force to the last appeal of the man who was more
willing to go to the scaffold than he was to send him there.

If this view is correct, it follows that when Napoleon talked about an
Austrian alliance to enforce his demand for restrictive measures in
Piedmont, it was a groundless threat, such as he was always in the
habit of using. A month after Orsini's execution, the project of an
alliance between France and Sardinia, and of the marriage of the
king's daughter with Prince Napoleon, reached Cavour in a mysterious
manner, and it is still unknown if it was sent with the Emperor's
knowledge, or by some one who had secretly ascer