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But now Crispi and other pro-German authors of the Triple Alliance had passed away; and that compact, founded on passing passion against France rather than community of interest or sentiment with the Central Empires, had sensibly weakened.
Crispi, who saw in the measure the longed-for opportunity of action in league with England, ordered the fleet to follow that of England, and prepared the mobilization of an army corps to coöperate by land.
The high position which I owe to your Majesty's favor is based on, and has as its indestructible core, your Majesty's Brandenburg liegeman and Prussian officer, and therefore I am rendered happy by your Majesty's satisfaction, without which every popularity would be valueless to me. * Besides many telegrams and addresses from home and abroad, I received very gracious greetings and congratulations on the twenty-third from their Majesties of Saxony and Wurtemburg, from his Royal Highness the Regent of Bavaria, the Grand-Dukes of Weimar, Baden, and Mecklenburg, and other rulers, and from his Majesty the King of Italy and Minister Crispi.
I asked him to use his means of intelligence at the Vatican, which was always sure, and so well informed that Cardinal Hohenlohe told me one day that Crispi knew better what was passing at the Vatican than the cardinals did. On inquiry he discovered that my news was true, and for the first time he understood the full meaning of the combination against him.
The leading chiefs of groups among the politicians were afraid of him on account of his strength, and the court had the most cordial hatred of him, partly because he had never tried to conciliate it or to conceal his distrust of it, and partly because Signora Crispi was an object of aversion to all the society of Rome.
A curious series of events also served to discredit the party of progress in the constitutional States. Italian politics during the ascendancy of Depretis, Mancini, and Crispi became on the one side a mere scramble for power, on the other a nervous edging away from the gulf of bankruptcy ever yawning in front.
One of Crispi's oldest and most constant friends told me of a visit he once made to his house with General , one of the Mille of Marsala, when, as they left the house, the general said mournfully, "Poor Crispi, he has not a friend in the world." "Nonsense, he has thousands," replied the other. "No," returned the general, "if he had one he would kill that woman."
He gave the latest gossip, handling it lightly, inexorably, as one more symptom of an inveterate disease, linking the men of the past with the men of the present, spattering all with the same mud, till Italian Liberalism, from Cavour to Crispi, sat shivering and ugly stripped of all those pleas and glories wherewith she had once stepped forth adorned upon the page of history.
But, on examining the dusty cartoons of the old book-stall, the police discovered nothing except a prodigious quantity of grotesque verses directed against the Piedmontese and the French, against the Germans and the Triple Alliance, against the Italian republicans and the ministers, against Cavour and Signor Crispi, against the University of Rome and the Inquisition, against the monks and the capitalists!
And yet one thinks of it at other times as one vast graveyard; so thick it is with the ashes and the bones of men! The Pope and Crispi! waves, both of them, on a sea of life that gave them birth, "with equal mind"; and that with equal mind will sweep them both to its own goal not theirs. He smiled at his own eloquence, and returned to his cigarette.