ting
the country, shaking the constitution and obscuring the royal name for
good faith. There was not a moment to lose; similar intrigues had led
the House of Bourbon and the House of Stuart to their destruction. Let
the king take heed while there was time! It was long before Victor
Emmanuel quite forgave his old friend, but the warning voice was not
raised in vain.

Cavour was recalled. The Bill was presented again to the Senate with
some slight modifications. One religious order was spared by Rattazzi,
rather against the will of Cavour, who described it as "absolutely
useless," because the king particularly wished to save it, the nuns
having been favourites of his mother. To Cavour, Victor Emmanuel's
resistance had seemed simply a fit of superstitious folly; he did not
sufficiently realise how distasteful the whole affair must be to a man
like the king, who said to General Durando when he was starting
for the Crimea, "You are fortunate, General, in going to fight the
Russians, while I stay here to fight monks and nuns." In its amended
form the Bill passed on May 29. Cavour had triumphed completely, but
he came out of the struggle physically and mentally exhausted; "a
struggle," he wrote to his Geneva friends, "carried on in Parliament,
in the drawing-rooms, at the court as in the street, and rendered
more painful by a crowd of distressing events." As usual he sought
refreshment in the fields of Leri, and when, after a brief rest, he
returned to Turin, the furious passions which had surged round this
domestic duel were beginning to cool as the eyes of the nation became
more and more fixed on the conflict in the East and its significance
to Italy.

We can proceed now with the story of Cavour's work in the memorable
year which opened so gloomily with a truce that appeared to leave
_felix Austria_ mistress of the situation. Without firing a shot, that
Power could consider herself the chief gainer by the war. Napoleon
III., anxious for peace, welcomed her mediation, and in England,
though peace was unpopular, and Austrian selfishness during the war
had not been admired, Lord Palmerston was handicapped by the idea
which just then occupied his mind, that Austria chiefly stood in the
way of what, as an Englishman, he most feared in European politics,
a Franco-Russian alliance. He divined the probability, almost the
inevitability, of such an alliance at a date when most persons would
have thought it an absurd fiction. Thus,