It seems incredible, nay impossible, does it not? Read this letter from Prince Belmonte-Pignatelli, minister of the King of Naples, to Chevalier Riocca, minister of the King of Piedmont:—
"We know that in your king's council are several cautious, we might even say timid ministers, who shudder at the idea of perjury and of murder, as though the late treaty of alliance between France and Sardinia were to be considered a political act, which could be respected. Was it not dictated by the superior strength of the conqueror? Was it not accepted under the pressure of necessity? Such treaties weigh most unjustly on the oppressed, who in violating them but make amends on the very first opportunity afforded them by good fortune. What! with your king a prisoner in his own capital, surrounded by the enemy's bayonets, you would call it perjury to break promises wrung from you by force against your consciences? You would call the extermination of your tyrants assassination? No, the French battalions are scattered up and down Piedmont full of confidence in the security of peace. Stir up the patriotic feelings of the people to a pitch of enthusiasm and frenzy, until every Piedmontese will pant to tread his enemies beneath his feet. A few individual murders will be more useful in Piedmont than victories won on the field of battle, and an impartial posterity will never give the name of treason to the spirited actions of a whole people, who pass over the dead bodies of their oppressors in regaining their liberty.... Our brave Neapolitans, under the leadership of worthy General Mack, will be the first to give the signal of death. They may be already on the track of the enemy of thrones and nations by the time this letter reaches you."
Now it was into the hands of a Government which could write such letters as the above, that my father, a Republican general, was to fall, when he left Egypt on account of his devotion to the Republic, which was threatened, as he thought, by Bonaparte's personal ambition.
And at what a moment, too! When the head of that Government had been defeated on all sides by a mere handful of French troops, chased from his kingdom on the mainland, and obliged to retire to Palermo; carrying in his train feelings of bitter hatred and anger and vows of vengeance, such as always accompany defeat, and fill the minds of the vanquished with desperate and deadly resolutions.
We shall now see how Prince Belmonte-Pignatelli put in practice upon my father and his unfortunate companions the precepts enjoined by him upon his colleague, the Chevalier Riocca, minister of the King of Piedmont.
I will leave my father himself to relate the story of this terrible captivity; his voice shall rise from a tomb closed for forty-five years, and, as did the voice of Hamlet's father, shall denounce the crime and the murderers to the whole world.
[1] All those who took part in the Egyptian campaign are so called.