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MARCARIA, July 3, Evening. Murray's guide will save me the trouble of telling you what this little and dirty hole of Marcaria is like. The river Oglio runs due south, not far from the village, and cuts the road which from Bozzolo leads to Mantua. It is about seven miles from Castellucchio, a town which, since the peace of Villafranca, marked the Italian frontier in Lower Lombardy.
Acknowledging Manasseh's greeting, he handed him an open letter. The Hungarian took it and read as follows: "Villafranca. Peace has been concluded. The Hungarian battalion is to be disbanded, and its members allowed to return home." This room, too, had its crucifix. It seemed to look down on Manasseh with the same gentle reproof, and to say, "Have I failed you in your hour of trial?"
In the year when bonds of kinship were formed between the Lord Duke Cosimo and the Lord Don Pedro di Toledo, Marquis of Villafranca, at that time Viceroy of Naples, the Lord Duke taking Don Pedro's daughter, Signora Leonora, to wife, preparations were made in Florence for the nuptials, and Tribolo was given the charge of constructing a triumphal arch at the Porta al Prato, through which the bride, coming from Poggio, was to enter; which arch he made a thing of beauty, very ornate with columns, pilasters, architraves, great cornices, and pediments.
All the same he commanded the Marshal of his bands to have the trumpet sounded, and to start for Pignerol, where he would follow when he had eaten a mouthful. Meantime the French were marching forward in haste, and were about a mile and a half from Villafranca, when, coming out of a little wood, they met the scouts sent by the lord Prospero to find them.
Everybody thought it was going through all right, when suddenly Napoleon, from a place called Villafranca, wired that the deal was off. That floored Cavour. He was down and out. He couldn't realize ten cents on the dollar on his securities. If he had been like your man, Thayer would have had to bring his book to an end with that chapter. He would have left the reader plunged in gloom.
Garibaldi's good sense and honesty of purpose led him to give in to the King's judgment. Victor Emmanuel took the right view of the course to be pursued in this matter, just as he had taken the right view of the course to be pursued at the moment of the Peace of Villafranca. In the one case he showed himself wiser than Cavour, and in the other wiser than Garibaldi.
Before news had come of the peace of Villafranca he was constantly in dread that Prussia would go to war on behalf of Austria: "We have prepared too soon and too thoroughly, the weight of the burden we have taken on ourselves is drawing us down the incline. We shall not be even an Austrian reserve; we shall simply sacrifice ourselves for Austria and take away the war from her."
Especially the landscape looks sad and shabby about the little village of Villafranca, where, in 1864, the dejected prospect seemed incapable of a smile even in spring; as if it had lost all hope and cheerfulness since the peace was made which confirmed Venetia to the alien. It said as plainly as real estate could express the national sentiment, "Come si fa?
There were only two more states to be freed, only Venetia and the papal state of Rome, and a "United Italy" would indeed be "free from the Alps to the Adriatic." Then the unexpected happened. The dramatic pledge was not to be kept. Venetia was not to be liberated. The Peace of Villafranca was signed. Austria relinquished Lombardy, but was permitted to retain Venice.
The treaty of Villafranca which followed Solferino proved a bitter deception: Venetia was not secured, Venice remained enthralled. Nevertheless the Milanese was conquered from the foe, and then Tuscany and the duchies of Parma and Modena voted for annexation. So, at all events, the nucleus of the Italian star was formed; the country had begun to build itself up afresh around victorious Piedmont.
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