Mrs. Browning, whose consternation and grief over Villafranca broke out in burning verse, yet made a defence of Napoleon's action here which might have been worked into Browning's poem with advantage. She wrote to John Foster that while Napoleon's intervention in Italy overwhelmed her with joy it did not dazzle her into doubts as to the motive of it, "but satisfied a patient expectation and fulfilled a logical inference. Thus it did not present itself to my mind as a caprice of power, to be followed perhaps by an onslaught on Belgium and an invasion of England. Have we not watched for a year while every saddle of iniquity has been tried on the Napoleonic back, and nothing fitted? Wasn't he to crush Piedmontese institutions like so many eggshells? Was he ever going away with his army, and hadn't he occupied houses in Genoa with an intention of bombarding the city? Didn't he keep troops in the north after Villafranca on purpose to come down on us with a grand duke or a Kingdom of Etruria and Plon-Plon to rule it? And wouldn't he give back Bologna to the Pope?... Were not Cipriani, Farini and other patriots his 'mere creatures' in treacherous correspondence with the Tuileries 'doing his dirty work'?" Of such accusations as these the intelligent English journals were full, but she maintains that against "The Inane and Immense Absurd" from which they were born is to be set "a nation saved." She realized also how hard Napoleon's position in France must be to maintain "forty thousand priests with bishops of the color of Monseigneur d'Orleans and company, having, of course, a certain hold on the agricultural population which forms so large a part of the basis of the imperial throne. Then add to that the parties who use this Italian question as a weapon simply." Many of Napoleon's own statements have furnished Browning with the arguments used in the apology. After deliberately destroying the constitution, for example, and himself being the cause of the violence and bloodshed in Paris, he coolly addressed the people in the following strain, in which we certainly recognize Hohenstiel-Schwangau: "Frenchmen! the disturbances are appeased. Whatever may be the decision of the people, society is saved. The first part of my task is accomplished. The appeal to the nation, for the purpose of terminating the struggle of parties, I knew would not cause any serious risk to the public tranquillity. Why should the people have risen against me? If I do not any longer possess your confidence--if your ideas are changed--there is no occasion to make precious blood flow; it will be sufficient to place an adverse vote in the urn. I shall always respect the decision of the people."