The parliament which represented Piedmont, Lombardy, Parma, Modena, and Romagna, met on April 2, 1860.  The frontier lines of six states were effaced.  The man who had so largely contributed to this great result stood there to defend his honour, almost his life.  Guerrazzi compared him to the Earl of Clarendon—­“hard towards the king, truculent to Parliament, who thought in his pride that he could do everything.”  Cavour retorted:  perhaps if Clarendon had been able to show in defence of his conduct many million Englishmen delivered from foreign yoke, several counties added to his master’s possessions, Parliament would not have been so pitiless, or Charles II. so ungrateful to the most faithful of his servants.  The deputy Guerrazzi, he continued, had read him a lesson in history; it should have been given entire.  And he then drew a picture, splendid in its scathing irony, of the unscrupulous alliance of men without principle, of all shades of opinion, only united in self-interest, demagogues, courtiers, reactionists, papists, puritans, without traditions, without ideas, at one in impudent egotism, and in nothing else, who formed the cabal which ruined Clarendon.  Every one understood that he was painting his own enemies inside the Chamber and out.

In spite of protests and regrets, the treaty was sanctioned by a larger majority than had been reckoned on.  When it came to the point, not a large number of voters was ready to take the tremendous leap in the dark which, among other consequences, must have condemned Cavour, if not to the fate of Stafford, at least to obscurity for the rest of his life.  But the ministry came out of the contest, to use Cavour’s own words, extraordinarily weakened.  “On me and on my colleagues,” he had said, “he all the obloquy of the act!” He was to regain his power, and even his popularity, but time itself cannot wholly obliterate the spot upon his name.  He knew it well himself.  A writer in the Quarterly Review, soon after his death, related that latterly people avoided alluding to Savoy and Nice before him; the subject caused him such evident pain.  The same writer makes a very interesting statement which, although there is no other authority for it, must be assumed to rest on accurate information:  he says that Cavour hoped, to the last, some day to get the two provinces back.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Mr. John Murray has courteously informed me that the writer of the article was the late Sir A.H.  Layard.]

CHAPTER XI

THE SICILIAN EXPEDITION

In March 1860 Cavour did not foresee what would be the next step—­he only felt that it would not be long delayed.  Italy, he told the Chamber, was not sound or safe; Italy had still great wounds in her body.  “Look beyond the Mincio, look beyond Tuscany, and say if Italy is out of danger!” He interpreted the transaction with Napoleon in the sense that, whatever happened henceforward, he was