The Austrians fully expected a rising in Lombardy in the middle of March, and that they were not without serious fears as to its consequences is proved by the preparations which they quietly made to abandon Milan, if necessary.  The Court travelling-carriages were got ready, and the younger princes were sent away.  Carbonarism had been introduced into Lombardy the year before by two Romagnols, Count Laderchi and Pietro Maroncelli.  It was their propaganda that put the Austrian Government on the alert, and was the cause of the Imperial decree which denounced the society as a subversive conspiracy, aiming at the destruction of all constituted authority, and pointed to death and confiscation of property as the penalty for joining it.  There was the additional clause, destined to bear terrible fruit, which declared accomplices, punishable with life-imprisonment, all who knew of the existence of lodges (Vendite, as they were called) or the names of associates, without informing the police.  In the autumn of 1820, Maroncelli and many others, including Silvio Pellico, the young Piedmontese poet, were arrested as Carbonari, while the arrest of the so-called accomplices began with Count Giovanni Arrivabene of Mantua, who had no connection with the society, but was charged with having heard from Pellico that he was a member.  Pellico and his companions were still lying untried in the horrible Venetian prisons, called, from their leaden roofs, the ‘Piombi,’ when the events of 1821 gave rise to a wholesale batch of new arrests.  As soon as they knew of a movement in Piedmont, the Lombard patriots prepared to co-operate in it; that they were actually able to do nothing, was because it broke out prematurely, and also, to some extent, because their head, Count Confalonieri, was incapacitated by severe illness.  But though their activity profited not at all to the cause, it was fatal to themselves.  The Austrian Government had, as has been stated, a correct general notion of what was going on, but at the beginning it almost entirely lacked proofs which could inculpate individuals.  In the matter of arrests, however, there was one sovereign rule which all the despotic Governments in Italy could and did follow in every emergency:  it was to lay hands on the most intelligent, distinguished and upright members of the community.  This plan never failed; these were the patriots, the conspirators of those days.  The second thing which the Austrians made a rule of doing, was to extort from the prisoners some incautious word, some shadow of an assent or admission which would place them on the track of other compromised persons, and furnish them with such scraps of evidence as they deemed sufficient, in order to proceed against those already in their power.  In their secret examination of prisoners, they had reduced the system of provocative interrogation to a science.  They made use of every subterfuge, and, above all, of fabricated confessions fathered on friends of the prisoner, to extract the exclamation, the nod of the head, the confused answer, which served their purpose.  The prisoners, men of good faith, and inexperienced in the arts of deception, were but children in their hands, and scarcely one of them was not doomed to be the involuntary cause of some other person’s ruin—­generally that of a dear and intimate friend.