“The war is imminent. Perhaps it will be declared to-morrow. God send we may see France victorious and Italy delivered.”[69] For months Mme. d’Agoult and her friends had been eagerly following Italy’s struggle for liberty. With the whole of France they ardently desired their Latin sister’s liberation from the Austrian yoke. The Countess herself had Italian connections. She was related to a well-known Florentine family, the Peruzzi. Juliette, before she came to Paris, had known little of foreign politics. Save for a vague prejudice against England, the legacy of the Napoleonic Wars, a mistrust of Prussia and a liking for the Russians because Russian soldiers, billeted in the house of Chauny, had been kind to her grandmother, Juliette had no very decided sympathies or antipathies towards countries not her own. But in Mme. d’Agoult’s salon such indifference speedily vanished. On the very first evening in the Rue Presbourg she met the Alsatian, Nefftzer, who had been editor of _La Presse_ and was later to direct _Le Temps_. “By him,” she writes, “for the first time in my life I heard foreign politics lucidly discussed, and it was then that I began to take an interest in them.”[70] Among the European nations outside France, Italy was Juliette’s first love and Garibaldi her greatest hero. Next to Italy, as one might expect from so ardent a Hellenist, came Greece. She and her Grecian friends were highly delighted when the Ionian Isles were reunited to Greece. She was in the South of France at the time, but de Ronchaud wrote announcing the good news and exclaiming “_Vive l’indépendence_.” But that was in 1862. To return to 1859 and to the cause of Italian unity as it appealed to Mme. d’Agoult’s salon. Napoléon’s declaration of war against Austria so delighted Juliette and her friends that for a moment they almost forgot their opposition to the Empire. The news of the victories which followed increased their rejoicing, but their joy was short-lived; for in a few weeks came a bitter disillusionment. In July the Peace of Villafranca was signed. Instead of fulfilling Napoléon’s proud boast and freeing Italy from the Alps to the Adriatic, it delivered her tied hand and foot into the power of Austria. Francis Joseph remained master of Italy, the most powerful member of the Italian Confederation, over which the Pope, Pio-Nono, presided.