The French ministers, bombarded with reproaches by friends and foes, and most uneasy lest their troops in Italy should be destroyed before they could send reinforcements, did disown Oudinot’s march on Rome, and Ferdinand de Lesseps was despatched nominally ’to arrange matters in a pacific sense,’ but actually to gain time.

In a sitting in the French Assembly, a member of the opposition said to the President of the Council:  ’You are going to reinstate the Pope!’ ‘No, no,’ ejaculated Odilon Barrot.  ’You are going to do the same as Austria,’ cried Lamoriciere.  ’We should be culpable if we did,’ was the answer.  Lesseps’ instructions, very vague, for the rest, were given to him in this spirit.  That Lesseps acted in good faith has been generally admitted, and was always believed by Mazzini.  It was to the interest of the French Government to choose a tool who did not see how far he was a tool.  But if Lesseps had no suspicions, if he had not strong suspicions of the real object of his employers, then he was already at this date a man singularly easy to deceive.

The French envoy was commissioned to treat, not with the Triumvirate, but with the Roman Assembly:  a piece of insolence which the former would have done well to reply to by sending him about his business.  Lesseps, however, thought that he would gain by speaking in person to Mazzini, and in order that the interview should remain a secret, he decided to go to him alone in the dead of the night and unannounced.  Having made the needful inquiries, he proceeded to the palace of the Consulta, the doors of which seem to have been left open all night; there were guards, but they were asleep, and the French diplomatist traversed the long suite of splendid apartments, opening one into the other without corridors.  At last he reached the simply-furnished room where, upon an iron bedstead, Mazzini slept.  Lesseps watched him sleeping, fascinated by the beauty of his magnificent head as it lay in repose.  He still looked very young, though there was hardly a state in Europe where he was not proscribed.  When Lesseps had gazed his full, he called ‘Mazzini, Mazzini!’ The Triumvir awoke, sat up and asked if he had come to assassinate him?  Lesseps told him his name, and a long conversation followed.  One thing, at least, that Lesseps said in this interview was strictly true, namely, that Mazzini must not count on the French republican soldiers objecting to fire on republicans:  ’The French soldier would burn down the cottage of his mother if ordered by his superiors to do so.’  The discipline of a great army is proof against politics.

Lesseps was himself in much fear of being assassinated.  He believed that his footsteps were dogged by three individuals, one of whom was an ex-French convict.  He complained to Mazzini, who said that he could do nothing, which probably shows that he gave no credence to the story.  Then Lesseps had recourse to Ciceruacchio, ’a man of the people who had great influence on the population, and who had organised the revolution.’  The tribune seems to have quieted his fears and guaranteed his safety.