of the ornaments of the ceiling of the Palazzo Madama, where the
Parliament assembled, fell close to the King. As it was of great
weight, it would have killed anyone on whom it had fallen. 'Never mind
that,' said the King in Piedmontese dialect to Colonel Menabrea, who
was near him, 'it will not be the last!'

The ministry which held office under the late King resigned; a new
one was formed, in which General Delaunay was President of the
Council, and Gioberti minister without a portfolio. The King was
advised to dissolve the Chamber, which had been elected as a war
parliament, and was ill-constituted to perform the work now required.
General La Marmora had orders to quell the insurrection at Genoa, the
motive of which was not nominally a change of government, but the
continuance of the war at all costs. Its deeper cause lay in the old
irreconcilability of republican Genoa with her Piedmontese masters,
breaking out now afresh under the strain of patriotic disappointment.
Like the 15th of May at Naples, the Genoese revolution was a folly
which can hardly be otherwise described than as a crime; it happened,
however, that in Piedmont there was a King who had not the slightest
intention of turning it into an excuse for a royal hark-back. Austria
and France offered Victor Emmanuel their arms to put down the
revolution, but, declining the not exactly disinterested attention, he
made a wise choice in La Marmora, who accomplished the ungrateful
task with expedition and humanity. An amnesty was granted to all but a
very few participators in the revolt. On the brief black list when it
was submitted to the King was the name of the Marquis Lorenzo Pareto,
who at one time had held the Foreign Office under Charles Albert. As
Colonel of the Genoese National Guard, his responsibility in joining
the insurrection was judged to be particularly heavy; but the King
refused to confirm his exclusion from the amnesty. 'I would not have
it said,' he objected, 'that I was harsh to one of my father's old
ministers.'

The conception of Victor Emmanuel as a bluff, easy-going monarch is
mistaken. Very few princes have had a keener sense of the royal
dignity, or a more deeply-rooted family pride, or, when he thought fit
to resort to it, a more decisive method of preventing people from
taking liberties with him. But he knew that, in nearly all cases,
pardon is the best of a king's prerogatives.

An instance to the point happened when he came to the