This population, accustomed to war, was necessarily constantly under arms to defend itself, or to unite with that one of the two powers whose rivalry could alone assure its independence.  Thus, military disposition was its strength; its weakness lay in having half its possessions in Italy, half in France.  The whole of Savoy is French in language, descent, and manners; and at any great commotion Savoy must detach itself from Italy, and fall on this side of its own accord.  The Alps are too essential a frontier to two people to belong to only one; for if their south side looks to Italy, their north looks to France.  The snow, the sun, and the torrents have thus willed this division of the Alps between two nations.  Policy does not long prevail against nature, and the house of Savoy was not sufficiently powerful to preserve the neutrality of the valleys of the Alps and the roads of Italy; and though it increase in power in Italy, yet it must be worsted in a struggle against France.  The court of Turin was doubly allied to the house of France by the marriage of the Comte d’Artois and the Comte de Provence, brothers of Louis XVI., with two princesses of the house of Savoy.  The clergy had more influence at this court than at any other in Italy; and hated instinctively all revolutions, because they threatened its political influence.  From religious feeling—­from family feeling—­from political feeling, Savoy was destined to become the first scene of conspiracy against the French Revolution.

IX.

There was yet another in the north, and that was Sweden; but there it was neither a superstitious attachment to Catholicism, nor family feeling, nor even national interest, that excited the hostility of a king against the Revolution; it was a more noble sentiment—­the disinterested glory of combating for the cause of kings; and, above all, for a queen whose beauty and whose misfortunes had won the heart of Gustavus III., in which blazed the last spark of that chivalrous feeling that vowed to avenge the cause of ladies, to assist the oppressed, and succour the right.  Extinguished in the south, it burnt, for the last time, in the north, and in the breast of a king.  Gustavus III. had in his policy something of the adventurous genius of Charles XII., for the Sweden of the race of Wasa is the land of heroes.  Heroism, when disproportioned to genius and its resources, resembles folly:  there was a mixture of heroism and folly in the projects of Gustavus against France; and yet this folly was noble, as its cause—­and great, as his own courage.  Fortune had accustomed Gustavus to desperate and bold enterprises; and success had taught him to believe nothing impossible.  Twice he had made a revolution in his kingdom, twice he had striven single-handed against the gigantic power of Russia, and had he been seconded by Prussia, Austria, and Turkey, Russia would have found a rampart against her in the north.  The first time, abandoned by