In the night he left Novara alone for Nice.  As he passed through the Austrian lines, the sentinels were nearly firing upon his carriage; General Thurn, before whom he was brought, asked for some proof that he was in fact the ‘Count de Barge’ in whose name his passport was made out.  A Bersagliere prisoner who recognised the King, at a sign from him gave the required testimony, and he was allowed to pass.  At Nice he was received by the governor, a son of Santorre di Santa Rosa, and to him he addressed the last words spoken by him on Italian ground:  ’In whatever time, in whatever place, a regular government raises the flag of war with Austria, the Austrians will find me among their enemies as a simple soldier.’  Then he continued his journey to Oporto.

The principal side-issue of the campaign of 1849 was the revolution at Brescia.  Had the original plan been carried out, which was to throw the Sardinian army into Lombardy (and it is doubtful whether, even after Radetsky’s invasion of Piedmont, it would not have been better to adhere to it), a corresponding movement on the part of the inhabitants would have become of the greatest importance.  To Brescia, which was the one Lombard town where the Piedmontese had been received in 1848 with real effusion, the Sardinian Minister of War despatched Count Giuseppe Martinengo Cesaresco with arms and ammunition, and orders to reassume the colonelcy of the National Guard which he held in the previous year, and to take the general control of the movement as far as Brescia was concerned.  Martinengo succeeded in transporting the arms through the enemy’s country from the Piedmontese frontier to Iseo, and thence to his native city.  When he reached Brescia, he found that the Austrians had evacuated the town, though they still occupied the castle which frowns down upon it.  This was the 23rd of March:  Novara was fought and lost, Piedmont was powerless to come to the assistance of the people she had commanded to rise.  What was to be done?  Plainly common sense suggested an honourable compromise with the Austrian commandant, by which he should be allowed to reoccupy the city on condition that no hair of the citizens’ heads was touched.  This is what Bergamo and the other towns did, nor are they to be blamed.

Not so Brescia.  Here, where love of liberty was an hereditary instinct from the long connection of Brescia with free Venice, where hatred of the stranger, planted by the ruthless soldiery of Gaston de Foix, had but gone on maturing through three centuries, where the historical title of ‘Valiant,’ coming down from a remote antiquity, was still no fable; here, with a single mind, the inhabitants resolved upon as desperate a resistance as was ever offered by one little town to a great army.

The Austrian bombardment was begun by the Irish General, Nugent-Lavall, who, dying in the midst of it, left all his fortune to the heroic city which he was attacking.  The Austrians, flushed with their victory over Charles Albert’s army of 80,000, were seized with rage at the sight of their power defied by a town of less than half that number of souls.  But with that rage was mingled, even in the mind of Haynau, an admiration not to be repressed.