For Venice
1861-1866. AETAT 56-61.
Policy after 1860--Disappointment in Italy--Rome and
Venice--Attitude towards the monarchy--Life in England--the
Greco plot--American and Irish politics--Mazzini and
Garibaldi--Overtures from Victor Emmanuel--The war of 1866.
Mazzini's remaining life is one of melancholy pathos. He could not
rest, till Unity was accomplished. Aged and often very ill and
suffering, longing for quiet and literature, he braced his frail body
and unhappy soul to the fret and weariness and disillusioning of
politics. Could one be sure that it profited country or mankind, one
would rest content, knowing that he had chosen the hard path and never
flinched. But it was--at all events in the near results--a grievous
waste. Those splendid faculties were worn, as he would sometimes own
himself, in rolling the stone of Sisyphus. Had he given these years to
the book on religion, that he ever kept in mind, to building up "the
church of the precursors," he might perhaps have done a thing yet
greater than the making of Italy. His political work henceforth was
mostly thrown away; for, as he said, his star was the Dog, and his
business "to bark, generally without being heard." Gloriously right in
his ideals, he marred it all by ignorance of facts. His nearer vision
failed in blinding partisanship, in his obdurate hatred of Louis
Napoleon and suspicion of the Italian statesmen. He could not see that
the royalists were aiming at Unity almost as seriously and more wisely
than himself, that Louis Napoleon wished to be his country's friend,
and that the Emperor's hesitations and backslidings were concessions
to the relentless pressure of Catholic opinion. He could not escape
from his own past, he had a feverish, unreasoned craving for a single
form of action, he could not see that conspiracy and insurrection,
which had their justification and chance of success twenty years ago,
had neither now. It is perhaps never easy for one man to be both
idealist and statesman,--for Mazzini, with his passion and
inflexibility, least of all. He could not leave it to other men to
achieve his ideals in their own way. He had a dangerous belief that he
had "the instinct of the situation," and would never own in politics
that others might have their fragment of the truth. This obstinate
rebellion--covert or open--against the verdict of his countrymen,--was
it the heroism of the one righteous man, or was it, as one of his old
friends called it, "a huge egotistical presumption?" Or was it rather
the noble error of one, who, with his mind fixed on the highest,
scorns the high? Who shall say, who does best service for humanity, he
who seeks the small attainable, or he who 'heaven's success finds or
earth's failure?'
Mazzini knew that he had failed in the near results. He was a
disappointed man. He had indeed the pride that his utopia had come so
near accomplishment. But it had come by another way than that which
he had marked for it, it had fallen very short of what he looked for.
He had idealised his country in his mighty love, till disillusion was
inevitable. "I saw," he wrote, "a great void in Europe, a void of any
community of belief or of faith, and therefore of initiative and
worship of duty and solemn moral principles, of great ideas and potent
action for the classes which produce most and yet which are most
wretched; and I thought that Italy would rise and save Europe, and,
soon as it breathed its own new life, would say to itself and others,
'I will fill that void.'" "Little it matters to me," he wrote to
"Daniel Stern," "that Italy, a territory of so many square leagues,
eats its corn and cabbages cheaper; little I care for Rome, if a great
European initiative is not to issue from it. What I do care for is
that Italy shall be great and good, moral and virtuous, that she comes
to fulfil a mission in the world." So he had dreamed, and woke to find
it but a dream. In bitter exaggeration he reproached his countrymen
for being "less than their fathers and their destinies." In his
favourite phrase, new Italy had found its inspiration not in Dante but
in Macchiavelli. There was no high principle, no true religion, no
sense of freedom's dignity. His criticism was partly a true one. The
feeble statesmen, who succeeded Cavour and Ricasoli, opportunists
almost all, some of them mere tricksters, may well have roused his
anger and contempt. The country had become the hunting-ground of
office-hunters and speculators, who, as Giuditta Sidoli said, "have
made Italy and now are eating it." The antagonism of North and South,
the jealousy of Piedmont, the brigandage, the financial chaos were
symptoms of a dangerous discontent. Few cared for the great moral
hopes, the "living apostolate" of Italy. But Mazzini did not
understand the value of the sane, wholesome patriotism, that had made
Italy in its own way, or see how great the step had been, that had
brought the country political and social freedom. In his absorption in
the political question, he paid at this time small attention to the
social changes that were going on; he never alludes to the great
cooperative movement, that was beginning in Italy in these years.
But beyond all this, Unity was not complete, and its completion was
the one thing necessary. The triumph of nationality, the cause of
morality and religion, alike in Italy and Europe, depended, he
believed, on the winning of Rome and Venice. "I have to kill myself
with work," he wrote, "for Venice, for Rome, for the republic, in
order to make the instrument." The winning of Rome meant the downfall
of the Papacy, the triumph of liberty of conscience, the dawn of a new
religion. The winning of Venetia meant the break-up of the Austrian
Empire, and a great reconstruction of Central and Eastern Europe, in
which Italy would prove her mission as the "guide of oppressed
nationalities." "Providence," he said, "has written that the function
of initiative is a necessary condition of the life of Italy. We cannot
live without a European life; if we free ourselves, we must free
others. We must be great or perish." For Rome he was willing to wait.
Wiser than Garibaldi, he saw that any attempt to win it by force meant
war at once with France and Austria, and he knew that that meant ruin.
His Roman policy was at bottom that of the Piedmontese statesmen,--to
secure the withdrawal of the French by the force of public opinion.
He urged that there should be "a temperate but weighty remonstrance"
from parliament, backed by half a million Italian signatures. He
prompted petitions in England to ask the government to use its
influence in the same direction,--a spur that Lord John Russell hardly
needed. But he rightly saw that Venice must take precedence. Italy, he
thought, was strong enough to fight Austria alone, and he made
extravagant calculations as to their relative military strength. Only
there must be no French alliance, no more paltering with the false
prophet of nationality. Cavour and his successors, except for brief
backslidings, were at one with him in the resolve never to call in
again the dangerous help of France. But he would not believe this, and
he hoped both to make the French alliance impossible and force the
government into war with Austria, by fomenting a rising in Venetia or
encouraging volunteers under Garibaldi to attack it. Italy's allies
must be the nationalities of the East, which had a common interest
with her in breaking up the Austrian Empire,--an idea which he shared
with the King and Cavour and others of the Italian statesmen. If
Venetia and the Balkan countries rose, Hungary would follow, and "war
with Austria would dissolve the Empire in twenty days." With Austria,
Turkey would go too, for the two despotisms, he held, must stand or
fall together. The Polish rising of 1863 made him still more
impatient. His love of "poor, sacred Poland" was strong as in the days
of Young Europe. Forgetting that a resuscitated Poland was bound to
add its weight to the Catholic and anti-Italian coalition, he
reproached his countrymen for their indifference to the people, which
had sent its sons to fight for Italy; and he tried to charter a
steamer to take a cargo of arms to a Lithuanian port. He industriously
encouraged the pro-Polish movement in England, and talked of
organising a Hyde Park meeting.
At home, he was still for some years yet willing to suspend any open
republican agitation. He indeed attacked the government with
increasing acerbity; he fretted at its delays, he was irritated by the
libels of the royalist press. But though he held the monarchy to be
the source of all the trouble, he would not openly declare against it.
He kept up a secret republican propagandism in view of future
possibilities, but so long as there was any hope that the monarchy
would go to Venice and Rome, he would not harass it by a barren
agitation. He knew in fact, that, so long as that hope remained, the
"ice-wall" of popular timidity made the republic impossible, and he
was angrily attacked by the intransigents for his saner view. He was
anxious for the present even to postpone any agitation for reform,
though he pleaded insistently that, when the work of unity was done, a
Constituent Parliament should meet to draw up a "national pact," which
was apparently to be an ill-defined constitution, temporarily
admitting a democratic monarchy, and defining the social duties of the
country and the respective functions of state and local bodies. He had
a bold domestic programme, whose chief articles were a universal
volunteer system, the nationalisation of railways, mines, church
lands, and "some great industrial undertakings," state encouragement
for productive cooperative societies, and a reorganisation of local
government on a basis of some twelve large "regions" and big,
amalgamated communes.
Meanwhile, save for an occasional visit to Switzerland, he was living
in England, where he returned after leaving Naples at the end of 1860.
Here in new lodgings at 2 Onslow Terrace, Brompton, he returned to the
old life of the fifties. The days were spent in the weary round of
letter-writing, but it was often a physical torture now, and failing
eyesight made it impossible to go on after dark. In the evening he had
two hours' reading, then went to the Stansfelds' neighbouring house in
Thurlow Square, to return home at eleven and read his letters and the
Italian papers. His personal life was more and more a struggle with
failing health. Earlier attacks he had conquered by force of will.
"Make an effort of will and be well; I have often successfully done
so," he wrote once to a friend; and again, "I hear that you are rather
unwell. Don't. It is absurd to be ill, while nations are struggling
for liberty." He had always scorned medicine and doctors, and had an
especial detestation for "that infernal irony of homæopathy, for which
Hahnemann must atone somehow, somewhere." But now he had often to
succumb to an internal trouble, which brought acute pain and sometimes
prostrated him. He no doubt smoked too much, and a few years after
this Lloyd Garrison tried in vain to break him off the habit.
Rheumatism made him "stiff like an English statesman." He could not
eat his landlady's ill-cooked dinners, and hid the untouched food
rather than hurt her feelings. Now and again he would feel he had
"more than ever the ardour of a young man with all the obstinacy of an
old one"; more often he knew that work was killing him, and he had a
recurring presentiment that he would not live through each new year.
He had financial troubles again to worry him. His small annuity was
not enough to meet his heavy doctor's bills, and a royalty, which he
had been receiving for the collected edition of his writings, failed
through the unwillingness or inability to pay of his Milanese
publisher. A subscription was raised for him in Italy, but it was
passed on to his Venetian fund, and probably most of the £500, that
were collected for him in England in 1866, went to public purposes.
Serene and cheerful as ever on the outside, he had moods of great
depression. "I am sick of men and things," he wrote, "and long for a
desperate peace." "Morally," he writes to "Daniel Stern," with whom he
began a steady correspondence at this time, "I am always the same,
given up to work without enthusiasm, from a sense of duty; expecting
nothing, hoping for nothing in the scrap of individual life left me;
loving and recognising those I love,[30] not for the joy but for the
sorrow they can give me; believing, as in early youth, in the future I
have dreamed of for Italy and the world; sick at the present, but
resigned and calm, if people don't talk too much of materialist
pantheism or tactics or happiness or French music." When Lincoln was
assassinated, he contrasted sadly with himself the man who died in the
knowledge that his cause had triumphed.
His literary work at this time was unimportant, for politics and
sickness used up his strength; but his longings went, as ever, to a
life of study. "I should like," he wrote, "to drag myself from library
to library, from one monastic archives to another, to unearth some
lines of a great forgotten thinker, Joachim for instance." Mystical
writers, like Joachim and Eckhart, attracted him more strongly than
ever; and he seems to have joined an esoteric society in Italy, which
had Dante for its spiritual chief. Modern spiritualism, however, only
irritated him; "when men have ceased to believe in God," he said, "God
pays them out by making them believe in Cagliostro or table-turning."
His admiration of English life was stronger than ever. He held up for
Italian imitation its freedom of life and thought, notwithstanding his
suspicions that his letters still ran the risk of being tampered with
in the English Post-Office. He had words of praise even for the
monarchy and aristocracy, but predicted that the growing power of
financial magnates would prove the death of both. It was about this
time that he became again a prominent figure in English politics. A
Calabrian, named Greco, attempted to assassinate Louis Napoleon.
Mazzini had had no part in or knowledge of the plot; but he had known
Greco in the past, and letters from him were found on the assassin.
The French police caught at the opportunity to bring odium on him and
inculpate Stansfeld, whose name and address were found in one of his
letters. Without any particle of evidence to connect the letters with
the plot, the French court condemned Mazzini; and the Tories and Irish
in the House of Commons gleefully used the handle given them to
discredit his English friend. Stansfeld, who was a member of the
government, resigned office rather than embarrass his colleagues, but
the insincerity of the attack was as clear as its audacious
shamelessness. The incident had its sequel of comedy, when Disraeli,
who had been foremost in denouncing the imagined sympathy with
assassination, was confronted with a _Revolutionary Epick_ of his own
youthful days, in which he had blessed "the regicidal steel."
Mazzini keenly watched the American Civil War. He had for many years
felt intensely about slavery, and he now gave his sympathy and
subscription to the London Emancipation Society, which was enlisting
English sympathy for the North. "I believe," he wrote to his friend,
Mr W. Malleson, who was its Secretary, "that in these times of ours
there are three things, against which a man ought to protest before
dying, if he wants to die in peace with his own conscience:
slavery--capital punishment--and the actual either narrow or
hypocritical condition of the religious question." "Abolition," he
wrote to Mr Moncure Conway, "is the religious consecration of your
battles." But he was not equally enthusiastic for the Union. In
curious inconsistency with his usual preference for big nations, he
thought that America was "wide enough for two or three eventual
sisterly confederations." When the war was over, he implored the
Americans not to impair their victory by refusing the vote to the
negroes, though they should see that education went hand in hand with
it. Again, as in 1854, he was eager that America should come into
world politics, and help to build up the future Europe of nationality
and the republic. "You," he said, "have become a leading nation. You
may act as such. In the great battle which is fought throughout the
world between right and wrong, justice and arbitrary rule, equality
and privilege, duty and egotism, republic and monarchy, truth and
lies, God and idols, your part is marked; you must accept it." He
hoped that they would upset Napoleon's Mexican scheme, which meant
"Imperialism at their own door"; at the time of the suggested
Anglo-French intervention, when American feeling was bitter against
England, he wrote, "war with England would be a crime and a fault; war
for Mexico a holy thing." Shortly before Lincoln's assassination, he
and Ledru Rollin and Karl Blind wrote to the President, urging the
danger to the Union that threatened from Mexico, and suggesting a
cooperation with the democrats of Europe, that would weaken or upset
Napoleon. Apparently the plan was that the Americans should invade
Mexico, while their unofficial allies stirred a republican movement in
France or organised an attack on Rome. Lincoln seems to have listened
to the suggestion not unfavourably. When the Northern army disbanded
after the war, Mazzini would have liked to see the men go as
volunteers to aid the Mexicans, and the government "whisper" that it
would follow. "It would have done more than anything towards the
fraternisation of North and South, and the negroes would have won
then, undisputed, the right to the suffrage."
A few years later, he was much concerned in the fate of the Fenian
prisoners. "I am feeling," he writes, "between the unhappy and the
furious about the Fenians condemned. To-day, I think, is the Queen's
birthday. Does she read a newspaper? Cannot she find a womanly feeling
in her heart and ask the Cabinet to commute the punishment? In point
of fact, the killing of these men will prove an absolute fault
[mistake]. Burke will be the Robert Emmet of 1867. A feeling of
revenge will rekindle the energy of the discouraged Fenians. The
dream will become, through martyrdom, a sort of religion. But that is
not my ground. It is the legal murder reenacted against a _thought_, a
thought which ought to be refuted, destroyed by thought only. Burke
and others are genuine believers in Irish nationality. I think they
are philosophically and politically wrong; but are we to refute a
philosophical error with hanging?" After their reprieve he wrote, "You
have been spared the infamy of Burke's execution. I am glad of it; I
have a weakness for England, and did not like the shame for her."
* * * * *
Mazzini's active political work in these years was given almost wholly
to the winning of Venetia. Before he left Naples in 1860, he and
Garibaldi had agreed to agitate for an attack on either Venetia or
Rome in the following year. But the jealousy, that was always latent
between the two, prevented any cordial cooperation. The fault was very
little on Mazzini's side. He must have felt it, that Garibaldi, whose
work for the country was so small beside his own, had eclipsed himself
in the nation's imagination; but he was ever ready to let him take the
honour and keep himself in the background. Once get Garibaldi with the
volunteers, he said, "and he may send me to the devil the day after."
But Garibaldi had always some grievance to nurse, and he had not
forgotten the friction at Rome in 1849. Mazzini's theories irritated
him, and he dubbed him "the great doctrinaire." The most easily led of
men, "weak beyond expression," as Mazzini truly said of him, he hated
it to be thought that he was under anybody's influence; and Mazzini
complained with cause that "if Garibaldi has to choose between two
proposals, he is sure to accept the one that isn't mine." The
mischief-makers, who always clustered round the hermit of Caprera, did
their best to feed his prejudices. And though the two men were both
burning to free Venice and Rome, they had radical differences as to
the means. Garibaldi believed in the King; Mazzini's faith in him was
very limited. Garibaldi wanted to have an understanding with the
government; Mazzini generally wished to act independently. He saw that
the patriots must concentrate on the freeing of Venice; Garibaldi was
ever running back to his cherished design of marching to Rome, or, if
he temporarily abandoned it, he leaned to some knight-errant
enterprise in Eastern Europe, where he could attack Austria from the
rear.
Meanwhile Minghetti and the less statesmanlike section of the
Moderates,--a tepid, craven, weak-principled crew,--wanted to stamp
out the democratic agitation; and it was left comparatively
unmolested, thanks only to the bigger outlook of Ricasoli, who had
become premier after Cavour's death. Had Ricasoli remained in office,
he would have amnestied Mazzini from the sentence of 1857; and the
greatest of living Italians would have been no longer a felon in his
own country. But Ricasoli was driven from office by a cabal; and
Rattazzi, who succeeded him, was too much under bond to Louis Napoleon
to pardon the Emperor's enemy. Rattazzi began a double game with
Garibaldi, which ended, as Mazzini had predicted, in "a solemn
mystification" and the catastrophe of Aspromonte. Mazzini was opposed
to the whole foolhardy business, and among his English friends
condemned it in strong language; but apparently he helped to collect
funds for Garibaldi, and when once Garibaldi took up the cry of "Rome
or Death," he thought it his duty to help. The day after the
volunteers crossed from Sicily on the tragi-comic march for Rome, he
left London to join them. He had got as far as Lugano, when he heard
that Italian soldiers had fired on them, and that Garibaldi lay
stricken by an Italian bullet. His anguish at the pity of it all
brought on delirium. The ghosts of martyr-patriots reproached him, as
they had done in 1836; he cried that Garibaldi was dead, and his
friends could not quiet his ravings. He recovered quickly, but broke
into passionate denunciation of the government, scourging the monarchy
as impotent and unwilling to make Italy, and threatening to raise the
republican flag again.
The threat was forgotten, as he regained his calmness, and he returned
to his old plan of a volunteer movement on Venetia, which the
government would be compelled to follow. He was "silently raging at
poor, brave Poland being left alone in the field," and hoped that an
attack on Austria would save her. It was at this juncture,--in the
spring of 1863,--that he received strange overtures for alliance from
the King. The two men had always had a certain fascination for each
other. Victor Emmanuel shared Mazzini's impatience to win Venetia, his
hatred of Austria; he had something of the great agitator's wish to
see the nationalities of Eastern Europe free. Both were irritated by
the feeble Minghetti ministry, which had come into office after
Aspromonte, half-hearted in its nationalist aspirations, dreading the
democratic forces, which Cavour would have taken in hand and guided.
The fellow-conspirators bargained hard, but, after months of tedious
negotiation, they seem to have agreed that Mazzini should foment a
rising in Venetia and waive meanwhile any republican movement, that
the King should make his government supply arms to the insurgents and
eventually declare war, while both would encourage a rising in Hungary
or Galicia. It was impossible, however, to give effect to the
alliance. The fact of the negotiations leaked out more or less. The
Greco plot, though probably few believed that Mazzini was an
accomplice, made it difficult for the King to treat with him. The
ministers, morbidly afraid of any contact with the revolutionaries,
and possibly aware that Mazzini had made their dismissal a condition
of his cooperation, remonstrated; and indeed it shows the King's and
Mazzini's small respect for parliamentary government that the personal
treaty was attempted at all. The King was irritated at Mazzini's
exigencies, and began to transfer his attentions to Garibaldi.
Garibaldi at this moment (April 1864) was paying a long promised visit
to England, where he had a mythical prestige almost as great as in his
own country. As usual he was buffeted by the various influences that
sought to capture him. The English Radicals wanted to use him for a
series of popular demonstrations; Palmerston laid his schemes to keep
him quiet in the hands of hosts, like the Duke of Sutherland and
Charles Seely, the member for Lincoln, who would be responsible for
his discreet behaviour. Victor Emmanuel, while still negotiating
fitfully with Mazzini, sent his agents to persuade him to head a
rising in Galicia; Mazzini wanted him for the Venetian movement. The
worthy, puzzled man tried to please everybody, provided that he
appeared to be managed by nobody. Mazzini wrote to him to begin his
tour in the provinces at once, before he went to London; and met him,
soon after he arrived, at Mr Seely's house in the Isle of Wight. There
was a cordial reconciliation, and Mazzini thought he had won Garibaldi
to his own scheme. At a breakfast given by Alexander Herzen, the one
rich man among the exiles, at his house at Teddington, Garibaldi spoke
of Mazzini as the counsellor of his youth and constant friend. The
incident alarmed the English government, and their contemptible and
dishonorable manoeuvres secured Garibaldi's departure. Mazzini still
supposed that Garibaldi was faithful to his scheme, and went to Lugano
to forward the preparations for the Venetian insurrection.
Garibaldi, however, though he had given Mazzini no hint of his change
of mind, had accepted the King's plan. The Duke of Sutherland's yacht
took him to Ischia, where he was preparing to sail to the East, when
the secret was given to the world; and the King, frightened by the
publicity, hastily broke from the plot. Mazzini, though he tried to
persuade Garibaldi to visit England again and make his abandoned
provincial tour ("Newcastle is the best place"), was justly incensed
at him and the King for their want of candour. He suspected, with good
reason, that the ministry had fallen in with the Galician scheme, for
the sake of getting Garibaldi out of the country and perhaps sending
him to his death. He was "sick at heart of the equivocal position,"
and determined to "go on in a clearer path." Events helped to bring
him back to frank hostility towards the government. The September
Convention, most dishonouring and impolitic of treaties, was
concluded, and it seemed to mark, as in the letter it did, a
renunciation of the claims to Rome. He passionately denounced the
surrender, the "policy of subterfuge and crooked ways," which
threatened to founder Italy. "I prefer half a century of slavery to a
national lie," he wrote. He was hoaxed into believing that the
government had offered France a large slice of Piedmont to buy her
acquiescence in any winning of Venice or Rome. He had a bitter quarrel
with Crispi, who was fast sliding down the decline of respectability.
Crispi had attacked him in the Chamber, as dividing the country by his
republicanism. Mazzini wasted words in retorting on the opportunist,
who yesterday had been most intransigent of republicans, and was now
parading his new-found faith in the monarchy. He was inclined to break
the slender threads, that connected him with the parliamentary Left,
"who had laid aside their old democratic ardour to assume the icy
demeanour of English members of parliament." But he still hesitated at
any complete rupture with the monarchy, so long as any hope remained
that the government would attack Austria.
It was doing better than he knew. The outcry at the September
Convention had wrecked Minghetti's ministry, and under the brave and
honest La Marmora there was some chance of going forward. The
negotiations for the Prussian alliance were pushed on, and early in
April 1866 the treaty was signed. Mazzini had preached co-operation
with Germany in 1851 and 1861, but now he denounced the alliance with
"men who represented despotism," an alliance which, he imagined,
implied the abandonment of the claims to the Tyrol. He had
information, which again was almost certainly inaccurate, as to the
arrangement of Biarritz, and "knew from positive information" that
Italy had promised to cede Sardinia and part of Piedmont to France, as
the price of Napoleon's help. Much, however, as he disliked the
diplomacy, still it was a war for Venice, and he urged his followers
to join the volunteers. If the war ended in victory, they could then
march on to Rome. He had his plan of operations for the war,--to mask
the Quadrilateral, and push on with the main body of the army to
Vienna, while the volunteers landed in Istria and tried to rouse the
Slavs. Whether the plan was original or not, it was almost identical
with one, which had been favoured by Ricasoli, now again premier, by
Cialdini, one of the two Italian commanders, and probably by Bismarck,
and which was rejected, or at least mutilated, only by La Marmora's
opposition.
All the world had expected to see the Italians easily victorious. But
again, as in 1848, their chance was spoilt by incompetent generalship.
The army was defeated at Custozza, the fleet at Lissa; Garibaldi and
the volunteers had little of the spirit of 1860, and were paralysed in
the Tyrol. Equally unexpectedly, the Prussians on their side had
triumphed swiftly and conclusively; and Napoleon, afraid that the
unforeseen events would nip his schemes, stepped in with a message
that Austria had offered to cede Venetia to himself and that he would
hand it over to Italy, if peace were made. It was a bitter and
humiliating end,--to lay down arms under the shadow of defeat, to
abandon the Tyrol and Istria, to have Venetia not by right of conquest
but by the condescension of a detested patron. Mazzini did not know
how unwillingly the government had bowed to a fate, which the military
position made inevitable. To him it seemed mere pusillanimity,
pregnant with "dishonour and ruin." "It is my lot," he sadly wrote,
"to consume my last days in the grief, supreme to one who really
loves, of seeing the thing, one loves most, inferior to its mission."
FOOTNOTE:
[30] _Reconnaissant ceux que j'aime_; one suspects an omission of _à_.