.

The Austrians crossed the frontier with the consent of the King.
Charles Felix's opinion of Austria has been already given; another
time he said: 'Austria is a sort of bird-lime which, if you get it on
your fingers, you can never rub off.' If anything was needed to
increase his loathing for the revolution, it was the necessity in
which it placed him, as he thought, of calling in this unloved ally.
But Charles Felix was not the man to hesitate. Not caring a straw for
the privilege of wearing a crown himself, his belief in the divine
right of kings, and the obligation to defend it, amounted to
monomania. The Austrian offer was therefore accepted. On her part
Austria declined the obliging proposal of the Czar of a loan of
100,000 men. She felt that she could do the work unaided, nor was she
mistaken.

On the 8th of April the Constitutionalist troops which marched towards
Novara, sanguine that the loyal regiments there quartered would end by
joining them, were met by an armed resistance, in which the
newly-arrived Austrians assisted. Their defeat was complete, and it
was the signal of the downfall of the revolution. The leaders retired
from Turin to Alessandria, and thence to Genoa, that had risen last
and was last to submit. Thus most of them escaped by sea, which was
fortunate, as Charles Felix had the will to establish a White Terror,
and was only prevented by the circumstance that nearly all the
proposed victims were outside his kingdom. Capital sentences were sent
after them by the folio: there was hardly a noble family which had not
one of its members condemned to death. When his brother, Victor
Emmanuel, recommended mercy, he told him that he was entirely ready
to give him back the crown, but that, while he reigned, he should
reign after his own ideas. He seems to have had thoughts of hanging
the Prince of Carignano, and for a long time he seriously meant to
devise the kingdom to his son, the infant Prince Victor. Thus a new
set of obstacles arose between Charles Albert and the throne.

Of the personal friends of that ill-starred Prince all escaped. One of
them, the noble-minded Count Santorre di Santa Rosa, died fighting for
liberty in Greece. In the miseries of exile and poverty he had never
lost faith in his country, but fearlessly maintained that 'the
emancipation of Italy was an event of the nineteenth century.' To
another, Giacinta di Collegno, it was reserved to receive the dying
breath of Charles Alber