friend, destined by your birth, your fortune, and above all by your character and your genius, to represent Piedmont so usefully at Paris or London, condemned to inaction for your whole life perhaps; officers like Saint Marsan, Lisio, and Collegni reduced to the necessity of breaking their swords; finally, he who surpassed you all,-permit me to say it, he whose heroic soul better directed, and whose superior talent ripened by experience, would have been able to give to his native Piedmont and to the house of Savoy the minister most capable of guiding her destinies, M. de Santa-Rosa, proscribed, wandering in Europe, and going to die in Greece in a contest hardly worthy of him: such are the bitter fruits of an enterprise at once most noble and most imprudent.

Europe scarcely remembers that there was a liberal movement in Piedmont in 1821. Those who have the instinct of the beautiful distinguished in that passing report certain words which revealed a great soul. The name of Santa-Rosa resounded for a moment; a little later, that name reappeared in the affairs of Greece, and it was learned that the same

awaken certain sympathies, to recall certain memories, and to serve as a text for certain sad conversations in a circle narrowed day by day. The public, I know, is indifferent, and ought to be, to these entirely domestic details between two men, of whom one has been long since forgotten, and the other soon shall be forgotten; but in this long malady which consumes me, and in the sombre inaction to which it condemns me, I find a melancholy charm in reverting to those days for ever vanished. I love to bind my languishing life to that animated episode of my youth. I evoke for a moment before me the shade of my friend, ere I go to rejoin him. Sad pages, written thus to speak between two tombs, and destined to die in your hands!*

In the month of October, 1821, suspended from my functions as Professor of the History of Modern Philosophy in the Faculté des Lettres, and menaced in my teaching of the Normal School, which itself was soon after suppressed; confined in an humble retreat situated by the side of the garden of the Luxembourg, I had been, as an addition

in his short dictatorship of 1821, had bravely died in 1825, while defending the isle of Sphacteria against the Egyptian army; then ensued a profound silence, an eternal silence, and the memory of Santa-Rosa lives only in a few souls scattered at Turin, at Paris, and at London.

I am one of these. My relations with Santa-Rosa were very brief, but intimate. More than once I have been tempted to write his life, that life half romantic, half heroic; but I have renounced that project. I am not about to dispute with oblivion the name of a man who failed of his destiny; but several persons, and you in particular, who take a pious interest in his memory, have often asked me to recount by what adventure I, a Professor of Philosophy, an entire stranger to the events of Piedmont, happened to be so intimately connected with the chief of the Piedmontese revolution, and what were my true relations with your dear and unfortunate compatriot. I am about to do that which you desire. I shall abstain from all general, political, and philosophical considerations. My subject shall be only Santa-Rosa and myself. This is not a historical composition; it is a simple home picture, traced for some faithful friends, to

toil upon the unedited manuscripts of Proclus, violently attacked with that affection of the chest which during all my youth frightened my family and my friends. I was almost in the condition in which you see me to-day. I know not how at that time there fell into my hands a pamphlet entitled "The Piedmontese Revolution," having for an epigraph this verse from Alfieri: "Sta la forsa per lui, per me sta il vero." My journey in Italy during the summer and autumn of 1820, my attachment to the cause of European liberty, the report of the lost affairs of Piedmont and Naples, naturally interested me in that production; and although sick, shunning every lively emotion, especially every political emotion, I read that pamphlet as one would read a romance, without searching in it for any thing else than a diversion for my ennui and the spectacle of human passions. In fact, I found a true hero of romance in the avowed chief of that revolution, the Count de Santa-Rosa. That man so ruled the events of those thirty days, that he alone engaged my attention. I saw him at first, a partisan of the English parliamentary

* The public is deciding otherwise, and these pages shall die only with French literature.-ED

even a hereditary peerage; and then, when the fatal example of the Neapolitans and the adoption of the Spanish constitution had carried away all minds, no longer occupying himself except with a single thing, the military direction of the revolution, and, borne by circumstances to a veritable dictatorship, displaying an energy that his enemies themselves admired, without losing for a single moment that spirit of chivalrous moderation so rare in times of revolution. I still recollect and wish to reproduce here the order of the day which he published March 23, 1821, at the very moment when the constitutional cause seemed to be despaired of:

"Charles-Albert of Savoy, Prince of Cariguan, invested by his Majesty Victor-Emanuel with the authority of regent, has named me, by his decree of the 23d of this month, regent of the ministry of the army and the navy.

"I am, therefore, a legitimately constituted authority, and it is my duty, in the terrible circumstances in which the country is found, to let my companions in arms hear the voice of a subject, affectionate to his King and a loyal Piedmon

tese.

"Let no Piedmontese accuse the intentions of a

Prince whose liberal heart, whose devotion to the Italian cause, have thus far been the hope of all well-disposed people. A small number of men, deserters of their country and servants of Austria, have without doubt deceived, by an odious tissue of falsehoods, a young Prince who has not the experience of stormy times.

"A declaration, signed by the King CharlesFelix, has appeared in l'iedmont; but a Piedmontese King in the midst of Austrians, our unavoidable enemies, is a captive King; nothing that he

says can or ought to be regarded as coming from Let him speak to us on a free soil, and then we will prove to him that we are his children.

him.

"Piedmontese soldiers, national guards! do you desire civil war? Do you desire the invasion of strangers, the devastation of your plains, the conflagration and the pillage of your cities and your villages? Do you wish to lose your glory, to soil your ensigns? Go on then. Can armed Piedmontese rise up against Piedmontese? Can the breasts of brothers strike against the breasts of brothers

Commanders of corps, officers, sub-officers, and soldiers! there is no longer any means of safety. Rally to your colors, surround them, seize them, and run to plant them on the banks of the Te sin and the Po. The country of the Lombards awaits you, that territory which will devour its enemies at the sight of your van-guard. Woe to him whom different opinions upon the institutions of

Italy brought him one morning to my chamber. I had just been spitting blood, and the first words I said to him were these: "Sir, you are the only man whom I can, in my condition, desire yet to know." How many times since have we recalled this first interview, -I dying, he condemned to death, concealed under a feigned name, without resources, and almost without bread! Omitting the details of our conversation, it will be sufficient to say that I found still more than I had expected. In his look, his gait, in all his words, I easily recognized the fire and energy of the author of the proclamation of the 23d of March; and at the same time my feeble health seemed to inspire him with an affectionate compassion, expressed each moment by the most amiable cares. Seeing my critical situation, he forgot himself and thought only of me. Our long conversation, of which he bore the burden, having left me agitated and feeble, he returned in the evening to inquire about me. The next morning he came again, and so the morning after; and at the expiration of a few days, we felt as if we had passed our lives together. The name which he had taken was that of Conti. He lodged near me, in the street Francs-Bourgeois-Saint-Michel, opposite the street Racine, in a furnished attic chamber with a friend from Turin, who had voluntarily left his country to follow him, although he had taken no part in the revolution, and was in no wise compromised by it.

Who then is this man, with whom one can prefer exile to the sweets of country and of family? It is impossible to express the charm of his society. To me, this charm, I repeat, was in the union of strength and kindness. I saw him always ready, at the least ray of hope, to engage in the most perilous enterprises, and I found him happy too in passing his life obscurely by the bedside of a suffering friend. His heart was an inexhaustible store of affectionate sentiment. To every one he was good, even to tenderDid he encounter any unfortunate person in the street? he shared with him the farthing of the poor. Was his poor old hostess sick? he took care of her as if she had been a member of his own family. Did any one need his counsel? he lavished it, like every thing else, with an irresistible instinct, of which he seemed scarcely conscious. It was this that rendered it im

possible to know him without loving him. I doubt whether any human creature, even a woman, could have been loved as well. He had at Turin a friend, to whom he was able to confide his wife and children, and another had accompanied him in his exile. Behold in this a striking proof of the senti. ment which he inspired. At an early age he was attached to the regiment of his father in the service of the army of the Alps. Here a young man of his own country had been given him as a comrade. Having left the army at Piedmont, this young man lost sight of his youthful master; but a deep remembrance of him never left his heart. One day the noble Count, lying in his wretched garret in the street Francs-Bourgeois, saw suddenly standing before him the poor Bossi, then a coffee-house keeper of Paris. Bossi had learned by the public journals the adventures of his young officer, and could take no rest until he had discovered his abode and offered to him his scanty savings. How many times, after this, while repairing to the prison of Santa-Rosa, have I found, at the door of the Salle Saint-Martin, Bossi or his wife with a basket of fruits, waiting whole hours for an opportunity to glide in with me and place their offering before the prisoner, with the respect of an old servant and the tenderness of a true friend.

From the end of October, 1821, until the 1st of January, 1822, we lived together in the sweetest and most profound intimacy. During the whole day, until five or six o'clock in the evening, he remained in his little room in the street of the Francs-Bourgeois, occupied in reading and preparing a work on the constitutional governments of the nineteenth century. After dinner, night approaching, he left his cell, reached the street d'Enfer, where I resided, and spent the evening with me until eleven or twelve o'clock. I too had arranged my mode of life somewhat like his. I passed the day in taking medicine and in studying Plato; at evening I closed my books and received my friends. Santa-Rosa had a passion for conversation, and he talked wonderfully; but I was so languid and so feeble that I could not support the energy of his words. They produced fever and nervous excitement, which terminated in prostration and faintness. Then the energetic man gave place to the most affectionate creature. How many nights has he spent at my bed-side