If there was sadness in the Sardinian camp, so there was in that of Austria.  The Austrians by no means thought that the game was up for them.  It would be interesting to know by what arguments Napoleon persuaded the young Emperor to renounce the hope of retrieving his disasters, whilst he slowly pulled to pieces some flowers which were on the table before which he and Francis Joseph sat.  When they left the house, the heir to all the Hapsburgs looked pale and sad.  Did he remember the dying counsels of ‘Father’ Radetsky—­not to yield if he was beaten on the Mincio, on the Tagliamento, on the Isonzo, before the gates of Vienna.

When, on the evening of the same day, the Emperor of Austria signed the preliminaries of peace, he said to Prince Napoleon, who took the document to Verona for his signature:  ’I pray God that if you are ever a sovereign He may spare you the hour of grief I have just passed.’  Yet the defeat of Solferino and the loss of Lombardy were the first steps in the transformation of Radetsky’s pupil from a despot, who hourly feared revolution in every land under his sceptre, to a wise and constitutional monarch ruling over a contented Empire.  To some individuals and to some states, misfortune is fortune.

CHAPTER XIII

WHAT UNITY COST

1859-1860

Napoleon III. and Cavour—­The Cession of Savoy and Nice—­Annexations in Central Italy.

Napoleon’s hurried journey to Turin on his way back to France was almost a flight.  Everywhere his reception was cold in the extreme.  He was surprised, he said, at the ingratitude of the Italians.  It was still possible to ask for gratitude, as the services rendered had not been paid for; no one spoke yet of the barter of Savoy and Nice.  But Napoleon, when he said these words to the Governor of Milan, forgot how the Lombards, in June 1848, absolutely refused to take their freedom at the cost of resigning Venice to Austria.  And if Venice was dear to them and to Italy then, how much dearer had she not become since the heroic struggle in which she was the last to yield.  The bones of Manin cried aloud for Venetian liberty from his grave of exile.

Venice was the one absorbing thought of the moment; yet there were clauses in the brief preliminaries of peace more fraught with insidious danger than the abandonment of Venice.  If the rest of Italy became one and free, it needed no prophet to tell that not the might of twenty Austrias could keep Venetia permanently outside the fold.  But if Italy was to remain divided and enslaved, then, indeed, the indignant question went up to heaven, To what end had so much blood been shed?