; perhaps my person is the only obstacle to obtaining
juster terms. I abdicate the crown in favour of my son, Victor
Emmanuel.' And turning to the Duke of Savoy he said: 'There is your
King.'

In the night he left Novara alone for Nice. As he passed through the
Austrian lines, the sentinels were nearly firing upon his carriage;
General Thurn, before whom he was brought, asked for some proof that
he was in fact the 'Count de Barge' in whose name his passport was
made out. A Bersagliere prisoner who recognised the King, at a sign
from him gave the required testimony, and he was allowed to pass. At
Nice he was received by the governor, a son of Santorre di Santa Rosa,
and to him he addressed the last words spoken by him on Italian
ground: 'In whatever time, in whatever place, a regular government
raises the flag of war with Austria, the Austrians will find me among
their enemies as a simple soldier.' Then he continued his journey to
Oporto.

The principal side-issue of the campaign of 1849 was the revolution at
Brescia. Had the original plan been carried out, which was to throw
the Sardinian army into Lombardy (and it is doubtful whether, even
after Radetsky's invasion of Piedmont, it would not have been better
to adhere to it), a corresponding movement on the part of the
inhabitants would have become of the greatest importance. To Brescia,
which was the one Lombard town where the Piedmontese had been received
in 1848 with real effusion, the Sardinian Minister of War despatched
Count Giuseppe Martinengo Cesaresco with arms and ammunition, and
orders to reassume the colonelcy of the National Guard which he held
in the previous year, and to take the general control of the movement
as far as Brescia was concerned. Martinengo succeeded in transporting
the arms through the enemy's country from the Piedmontese frontier to
Iseo, and thence to his native city. When he reached Brescia, he found
that the Austrians had evacuated the town, though they still occupied
the castle which frowns down upon it. This was the 23rd of March:
Novara was fought and lost, Piedmont was powerless to come to the
assistance of the people she had commanded to rise. What was to be
done? Plainly common sense suggested an honourable compromise with the
Austrian commandant, by which he should be allowed to reoccupy the
city on condition that no hair of the citizens' heads was touched.
This is what Bergamo and the other towns did, nor are they to be
blame