His revocation of the charter had necessarily separated him from Gamba and the advanced liberals.  He knew that the hunchback, ever scornful of expediency, charged him with disloyalty to the people; but such charges could no longer wound.  The events following the Duke’s birthday had served to crystallise the schemes of the little liberal group, and they now formed a campaign of active opposition to the government, attacking it by means of pamphlets and lampoons, and by such public speaking as the police allowed.  The new professors of the University, ardently in sympathy with the constitutional movement, used their lectures as means of political teaching, and the old stronghold of dogma became the centre of destructive criticism.  But as yet these ideas formed but a single live point in the general numbness.

Two years passed in this way.  North of the Alps, all Europe was convulsed, while Italy was still but a sleeper who tosses in his sleep.  In the two Sicilies, the arrogance and perfidy of the government gave a few martyrs to the cause, and in Bologna there was a brief revolutionary outbreak; but for the most part the Italian states were sinking into inanition.  Venice, by recalling her fleet from Greece, let fall the dominion of the sea.  Twenty years earlier Genoa had basely yielded Corsica to France.  The Pope condemned the French for their outrages on religion, and his subjects murdered Basseville, the agent of the new republic.  The sympathies and impulses of the various states were as contradictory as they were ineffectual.

Meanwhile, in France, Europe was trying to solve at a stroke the problems of a thousand years.  All the repressed passions which civilisation had sought, however imperfectly, to curb, stalked abroad destructive as flood and fire.  The great generation of the Encyclopaedists had passed away, and the teachings of Rousseau had prevailed over those of Montesquieu and Voltaire.  The sober sense of the economists was swept aside by the sound and fury of the demagogues, and France was become a very Babel of tongues.  The old malady of words had swept over the world like a pestilence.

To the little Italian courts, still dozing in fancied security under the wing of Bourbon and Hapsburg suzerains, these rumours were borne by the wild flight of emigres—­dead leaves loosened by the first blast of the storm.  Month by month they poured across the Alps in ever-increasing numbers, bringing confused contradictory tales of anarchy and outrage.  Among those whom chance thus carried to Pianura were certain familiars of the Duke’s earlier life—­the Count Alfieri and his royal mistress, flying from Paris, and arriving breathless with the tale of their private injuries.  To the poet of revolt this sudden realisation of his doctrines seemed in fact a purely personal outrage.  It was as though a man writing an epic poem on an earthquake should suddenly find himself engulphed.  To Alfieri the downfall of the French monarchy and the triumph