from desperate.  No one knew this better than Napoleon.  Before the allied armies lay the mouse-trap of the Quadrilateral, so much easier to get into than to get out of.  The limelight of victory could not hide from those who knew the facts the complete deficiency of organisation and discipline which the war had revealed in the French army.  According to Prince Napoleon, the men considered their head and their generals incapable, and had lost all confidence in them.  Nevertheless they fought well; no troops ever fought better than the French when storming the heights of Solferino, but on the very day after that battle, when the Austrians were miles away in full retreat, an extraordinary, though little known, incident occurred.  On a report spreading from the French outposts that the enemy was upon them, there was an universal sauve qui peut—­officers, men, sick and sound, gendarmes, infantry, cavalry, artillery trains—­in one word, every one made off.  What would be the effect of a single defeat on such an army?

It must always appear strange that none of these things struck Cavour.  He only saw the immense, immeasurable disappointment.  When he rushed to the king’s headquarters near Desenzano, it was to advise him to refuse Lombardy and abdicate, or to continue the war by himself.  Cavour had never loved the king, or done justice to his statesmanlike qualities; a bitter scene took place between them, which Victor Emmanuel closed abruptly.  Afterwards he met Prince Napoleon, who replied to his reproaches, “Mais enfin, do you want us to sacrifice France and our dynasty to you?”

At that juncture it was the king, not the minister, to whom the task of pilot fell.  Cut to the heart as he was, he kept his temper.  He signed the preliminaries “pour ce qui me concerne,” and, as on the morrow of Novara, he prepared to wait.  The terms on which the armistice was granted seemed like a nightmare:  Venice abandoned; Tuscany, Romagna, Modena, to be handed back to their former masters; the Pope to be made honorary president of a confederation in which Austria was to have a place.  Cavour stood before Italy responsible for the war, and when he said to M. Pietri in the presence of Kossuth, “Your Emperor has dishonoured me—­yes, dishonoured!” he meant the words in their most literal sense.  But the white heat of his passion burnt out the dishonour, and Cavour, foiled and furious, was the most popular man in the country.  His grief was so genuine that even his enemies could not call its sincerity in question.  In three days he appeared to have grown ten years older.  His first thought was to go and get killed at Bologna, if, as was expected, there was fighting there.  Then, as always happened with him, he was calmed by the idea of action:  “I will take Solaro de la Margherita by one hand and Mazzini by the other; I will become a conspirator, a revolutionist, but this treaty shall not be carried out.”  When he said this, he had resigned office; he was simply a