No one in Europe was more dismayed by the news than Cavour, who expected a harvest of embarrassments for Sardinia, and, worst of all, the permanent ill-will of Napoleon.  The first expectation was speedily realised:  floods of official and unofficial invective were poured upon the two countries, which were held responsible for nurturing the plot.  In England the counter-blast upset Lord Palmerston’s Government, and in Piedmont the dynasty itself might have been endangered had not Victor Emmanuel’s sense of personal dignity preserved him from bending to the rod of imperial displeasure.  Cavour was ready even to forestall the cry for precautionary measures; the air was full of wild rumours, and he thought that Victor Emmanuel’s days and his own were threatened, a baseless suspicion, for the most reckless conspirators in those times accounted regicide madness in a free country.  But he believed it, and for this reason, as well as from his entirely sincere abhorrence of political crime, he was quite in earnest in his resolve to go as far as the Statute would let him to keep plotters out of Piedmont.  Napoleon, however, affected to consider the action of the Sardinian Government weak and dilatory, an opinion which he expressed with vehemence to General Delia Rocca, who was sent by the king to congratulate him on his escape.  He hinted that, if his complaints were not attended to, he should seek an alliance with Austria.  All the pride of the Savoy blood rose in the veins of Victor Emmanuel:  “Tell the Emperor,” he wrote to Delia Rocca, “in the terms you think best, that this is not the way to treat a faithful ally; that I have never tolerated violence from any one; that I follow the path of honour, for which I have to answer to God and to my people; that we have carried our head high for 850 years, and that no one will make me bow it; and that, notwithstanding, I desire to be nothing but his friend.”  Cavour instructed Delia Rocca to “commit the indiscretion” of reading the letter to the Emperor word for word.  At the same time he wrote to the Sardinian Minister in Paris “that the king was ready for the last extremity to save the honour and independence of the country, and we with him.”  But extremities were not needful.  Napoleon was always impressed by the true ring of that ancient royalty which was the one thing which he could not purchase.  He wrote a conciliatory letter to Victor Emmanuel:  “It was only between good friends that questions could be treated with frankness.  Let the king do what he could, and not be uneasy.”  The French Foreign Office went on scolding through the Legation at Turin, till Cavour said, with a smile, to Prince de Latour d’Auvergne, “But it is finished; yesterday the king had a letter from the Emperor which ends the whole affair.”