And this is what Manin prevented.  The cry was still for resistance; for the first time bitter words were spoken against the man who had served his country so well.  But he, who had never sacrificed one iota to popularity, did not swerve.  His great influence prevailed.  The capitulation was arranged on the 22nd, and signed on the 24th of July.  Manin had calculated correctly; on that day there was literally nothing left to eat in Venice.

In the last sad hours that Manin spent in Venice all the love of his people, clouded for an instant, burst forth anew.  Not, indeed, in shouts and acclamations, but in tears and sobs; ’Our poor father, how much he has suffered!’ they were heard saying.  He embarked on a French vessel bound for Marseilles, poor, worn out and exiled for ever from the city which he had guided for eighteen months; if, indeed, no spark of his spirit animated the dust which it was the first care of liberated Venice to welcome home.  The Austrians broke up his doorstep on which, according to a Venetian custom, his name was engraved.  Another martyr, Ugo Bassi, had kissed the stone, exclaiming: 

‘Next to God and Italy—­before the Pope—­Manin!’ The people gathered up the broken fragments and kept them as relics, even as in their hearts they kept his memory, till the arrival of that day of redemption which, in the darkest hour, he foretold.

CHAPTER IX

‘J’ATTENDS MON ASTRE’

1849-1850

The House of Savoy—­A King who keeps his Word—­Sufferings of the
Lombards—­Charles Albert’s Death.

Circumstances more gloomy than those under which Victor Emmanuel II. ascended the throne of his ancestors it would be hard to imagine.

An army twice beaten, a bankrupt exchequer, a triumphant invader waiting to dictate terms; this was but the beginning of the inventory of the royal inheritance.  The internal condition of the kingdom, even apart from the financial ruin which had succeeded to the handsome surplus of two years before, was full of embarrassments of the gravest kind.  There was a party representing the darkest-dyed clericalism and reaction whose machinations had not been absent in the disaster of Novara.  Who was it that disseminated among the troops engaged in the battle broadsides printed with the words:  ’Soldiers, for whom do you think you are fighting?  The King is betrayed; at Turin they have proclaimed the republic’?  There were other broadsides in which Austria was called the supporter of thrones and altars.  The dreadful indiscipline witnessed towards the end of, and after the conflict was due more to the demoralising doctrines that had been introduced into the army than to the insubordination of panic.  There was another party strengthened by the recent misfortunes and recruited by exiles from all parts of Italy, which was democratic to the verge of republicanism in Piedmont and over that verge at Genoa, where a revolution broke out before the new King’s reign was a week old.  Constitutional government stood between the fires of these two parties, both fanned by Austrian bellows, the first openly, the second in secret.