For the Beau Sabreur another ending was in store.  Back on Napoleon’s side in 1815, his Austrian allies having given him plenty of reason for suspecting their sincerity, he issued from Rimini, on the 30th of March, the proclamation of an independent Italy from the Alps to Sicily.  There was no popular reply to his call.  Italy, prostrate and impoverished, was unequal to a great resolve.  The Napoleonic legend was not only dead, but buried; Napoleon had literally no friends left in Italy except those of his old soldiers who had managed to get back to their homes, many of them deprived of an arm or a leg, but so toughened that they lived to great ages.  These cherished to their last hour the worship of their Captain, which it was his highest gift to be able to inspire.  ’I have that feeling for him still, that if he were to rise from the dead I should go to him, if I could, wherever he was,’ said the old conscript Emmanuele Gaminara of Genoa, who died at nearly a hundred in a Norfolk village in 1892:  the last, perhaps, of the Italian veterans, and the type of them all.

But a few scattered invalids do not make a nation, and the Italian nation in 1815 had not the least wish to support any one who came in the name of Napoleon.  So Murat failed without even raising a strong current of sympathy.  Beaten by the Austrians at Tolentino on the 3rd of May, he retreated with his shattered army.  In the last desperate moment, he issued the constitution which he ought to have granted years before.  Nothing could be of any avail now; his admirable Queen, the best of all the House of Buonaparte, surrendered Naples to the English admiral; and Murat, harried by a crushing Austrian force, renounced his kingdom on the 30th of May.  After Waterloo, when a price was set on his head in France, he meditated one more forlorn hope; but, deserted by the treachery of his few followers, and driven out of his course by the violence of the waves, he was thrown on the coast of Calabria with only twenty-six men, and was shot by order of Ferdinand of Naples, who especially directed that he should be only allowed half-an-hour for his religious duties after sentence had been delivered by the mock court-martial.  His dauntless courage did not desert him:  he died like a soldier.  It was a better end for an Italian prince than escaping with money-bags to Germany.  Great as were Murat’s faults, an Italian should remember that it was he who first took up arms to the cry which was later to redeem Italy:  independence from Alps to sea; and if he stand on the ill-omened shore of Pizzo, he need not refuse to uncover his head in silence.