Victor Emmanuel was not popular.  The indifference to danger which he had shown conspicuously during the war would have awakened enthusiasm in most countries, but in Piedmont it was so thoroughly taken for granted that the Princes of the House of Savoy did not know fear, that it was looked on as an ordinary fact.  The Austrian origin of the Duchess of Savoy formed a peg on which to hang unfriendly theories.  It is impossible not to compassionate the poor young wife who now found herself Queen of a people which hated her race, after having lived since her marriage the most dreary of lives at the dismallest court in Europe.  At first, as a bride, she seemed to have a desire to break through the frozen etiquette which surrounded her; it is told how she once begged and prayed her husband to take her for a walk under the Porticoes of Turin, which she had looked at only from the outside.  The young couple enjoyed their airing, but when it reached Charles Albert’s ears, he ordered his son to be immediately placed under military arrest.  The chilling formalism which invaded even the private life of these royal personages, shutting the door to ’good comradeship’ even between husband and wife, may have had much to do with driving Victor Emmanuel from the side of the Princess, whom, nevertheless, he loved and venerated, to unworthy pleasures, the habit of indulgence in which is far easier to contract than to cure.

[Illustration:  VICTOR IMMANUEL]

The King’s address at this time was not conciliatory, and, indeed, it never lost a bluntness which later harmonised well enough with the reputation he gained for soldierly integrity, but which then passed for aristocratic haughtiness.  His personal friends were said to belong to the aristocratic or even the reactionary party.  In the perplexities which encompassed him, he could not reckon on the encouragement of any consensus of good opinion or confidence.  He was simply an unknown man, against whom there was a good deal of prejudice.

Radetsky did not refuse to treat with Charles Albert, as has been sometimes said, but the intolerably onerous terms first proposed by him showed that he wished to force the abdication which Charles Albert had always contemplated in the event of new reverses of fortune.  Radetsky was favourably disposed to the young Duke of Savoy, as far as his personal feeling was concerned, a fact which was made out in certain quarters to be almost a crime to be marked to the account of Victor Emmanuel.  The Field-Marshal did not forget that he was the son-in-law of the Austrian Archduke Ranieri; it is probable, if not proved, that he expected to find him pliable; but Radetsky, besides being a politician of the purest blood-and-iron type, was an old soldier with not a bad heart, and some of his sympathy is to be ascribed to a veteran’s natural admiration for a daring young officer.