A little while after, Cavour received a private communication from Paris containing Orsini’s last letter, and inviting him to publish it in the Official Gazette.  It was only then that it began to dawn on him what had been the real effect of the attempt, and of Orsini’s trial, on the mind of the Emperor.  Cavour had none of the fellow-feeling with conspirators that lurked in Napoleon’s brain, and the idea seemed to him absurd that a man should be strongly moved by the pleading of his would-be assassin.  Among the royal families of Europe, Orsini’s influence was at once understood, but it was thought to have its source in fear.  It was remarked how, when the sentence of death was passed, the condemned man, turning to his counsel, whispered the words of Tasso—­

  Risorgero, nemico ognor piu crudo,
  Cenere anco sepolto e spirto ignudo.

“The Italian dagger,” wrote the Prince Regent of Prussia, “has become a fixed idea with Napoleon.”  Yet it was not only, and perhaps not chiefly, the fear of being assassinated that inclined Napoleon to listen to Orsini’s dying prayer, “Free my country, and the blessings of twenty-five million Italians will go with you!” His own part in the revolutionary movement of 1831 has been shown to have been no boyish freak but serious work, into which he entered with the sole enthusiasm of his life.  “I feel for the first time that I live!” he wrote when on the march towards Rome.  The Romagna was the hotbed of the Carbonari; all his friends belonged to the Society, and it must always be held probable that he belonged to it also.  At any rate the memory of those days lent dramatic force to the last appeal of the man who was more willing to go to the scaffold than he was to send him there.

If this view is correct, it follows that when Napoleon talked about an Austrian alliance to enforce his demand for restrictive measures in Piedmont, it was a groundless threat, such as he was always in the habit of using.  A month after Orsini’s execution, the project of an alliance between France and Sardinia, and of the marriage of the king’s daughter with Prince Napoleon, reached Cavour in a mysterious manner, and it is still unknown if it was sent with the Emperor’s knowledge, or by some one who had secretly ascertained what he was thinking about.  Cavour showed the draft to the king, but he did not place much credence in it.  Nevertheless, to keep Napoleon’s attention fixed on Italy, he caused him to be informally assured that if the worst came to the worst, Sardinia would go to war with Austria by herself; the situation was already so strained that almost anything would be preferable to its prolongation.  Cavour had just induced the Chamber to sanction a new loan for forty million francs, which suggested that, if others were apt to use empty threats, he was not.  In June Dr. Conneau, who was travelling “for his amusement,” stopped at Turin, where he saw both the king and Cavour.  Under the seal of absolute