Success followed success, and this to the popular imagination is the all-and-all of war.  Milan was freed, though the battle of Magenta was not unlike a drawn one; Lombardy was won, though the fight for the heights of Solferino could hardly have resulted as it did if the Austrians had not blundered into keeping a large part of their forces inactive.  Would the same fortune be with the allies to the end?  Cavour does not appear to have asked the question.  He watched the war with no misgivings.  It was to him a supreme satisfaction that the Sardinian army, which he had worked so hard to prepare, did Italy credit.  He took a personal pride in the romantic exploits of the volunteers, though for political reasons he carefully concealed that he had been the first to think of placing them in the field.  He made an indefatigable minister of war (having taken the office when La Marmora went to the front).  The work was heavy; the problem of finding even bread enough for the allied armies was not a simple one.  On one occasion the French Commissariat asked for a hundred thousand rations to make sure of receiving fifty thousand; the officer in charge was surprised to see one hundred and twenty thousand punctually arrive on the day named.  Cavour’s thoughts were not, however, only with the troops in Lombardy.  The whole country was in a ferment, and instead of accelerating events the question now was to keep pace with them.

When Ferdinand II died, and a young king, the son of a princess of the House of Savoy, ascended the throne, Cavour invited him to join in the war with Austria.  The invitation has been blamed as insincere and unpatriotic, but the best Neapolitans seconded it.  Poerio said he was willing to go back to prison if King Francis would send his army to help Piedmont.  Faithful to his primary object of expelling the Austrians, Cavour would have taken for an ally any one who had troops to give.  Moreover, an alliance between Naples and Sardinia meant the final shelving of a scheme which had caused him anxiety, off and on, for many years:  that of a Muratist restoration.  Though he had always recognised that, were it accepted by the Neapolitans themselves, it would be impossible for him to oppose it, he understood that to place a Murat on the throne of Naples would be to move in the old vicious circle by substituting one foreign influence for another.  There is no doubt that the idea was attractive to Napoleon.  One of his first cares after he became Emperor had been to find an accomplished Neapolitan tutor for the young sons of Prince Murat.  About the time of the Paris Congress emissaries were actively working on behalf of the French pretender in the kingdom of Naples.  The propaganda was in abeyance during the war, because Russia made it a condition of her neutrality that the king of Naples should be let alone, but the simple fact that Napoleon had undertaken to liberate Italy was a splendid advertisement of the claims of his cousin.  These considerations tended to make Cavour hold out his hand to the young Bourbon king.  There is much evidence to show that the first impulse of Francis was to take it, but the counter influences around him were too strong.  When he refused, he sealed his own doom, though the time for the crisis was not yet come.