Cavour was recalled.  The Bill was presented again to the Senate with some slight modifications.  One religious order was spared by Rattazzi, rather against the will of Cavour, who described it as “absolutely useless,” because the king particularly wished to save it, the nuns having been favourites of his mother.  To Cavour, Victor Emmanuel’s resistance had seemed simply a fit of superstitious folly; he did not sufficiently realise how distasteful the whole affair must be to a man like the king, who said to General Durando when he was starting for the Crimea, “You are fortunate, General, in going to fight the Russians, while I stay here to fight monks and nuns.”  In its amended form the Bill passed on May 29.  Cavour had triumphed completely, but he came out of the struggle physically and mentally exhausted; “a struggle,” he wrote to his Geneva friends, “carried on in Parliament, in the drawing-rooms, at the court as in the street, and rendered more painful by a crowd of distressing events.”  As usual he sought refreshment in the fields of Leri, and when, after a brief rest, he returned to Turin, the furious passions which had surged round this domestic duel were beginning to cool as the eyes of the nation became more and more fixed on the conflict in the East and its significance to Italy.

We can proceed now with the story of Cavour’s work in the memorable year which opened so gloomily with a truce that appeared to leave felix Austria mistress of the situation.  Without firing a shot, that Power could consider herself the chief gainer by the war.  Napoleon III., anxious for peace, welcomed her mediation, and in England, though peace was unpopular, and Austrian selfishness during the war had not been admired, Lord Palmerston was handicapped by the idea which just then occupied his mind, that Austria chiefly stood in the way of what, as an Englishman, he most feared in European politics, a Franco-Russian alliance.  He divined the probability, almost the inevitability, of such an alliance at a date when most persons would have thought it an absurd fiction.  Thus, in January 1856, both the French and English Governments were in a phase of opinion which promised nothing to Italian aspirations.  The question was, Would it be possible for one capable brain to bend them to its purposes’?  In the first instance, Cavour believed that it would not.  He did not mean to represent his country at the Congress of Paris, nor did he hope that any good would come out of it for Italy.  He wished, however, that Sardinia should figure, if not to her advantage, at any rate with dignity and decorum, and he turned, as he was wont to do when he wanted a “perfect knight,” to the rivale, Massimo d’Azeglio.  Both men had the little private joke of calling one another by this name in their familiar letters, which shows how free they were from any real jealousy.  D’Azeglio was ready to accept what had the prospect of being a most thankless office, but on one condition—­that