Meanwhile, Anita was dying in a peasant's cottage, to which Garibaldi
carried her when the strong will and dauntless heart could no longer
stand in place of the strength that was finished. This was the 4th of
August. Scarcely had she breathed her last breath when Garibaldi,
broken down with grief as he was, had to fly from the spot. The
Austrians were hunting for him in all directions. All the Roman
fugitives were proclaimed outlaws, and the population was forbidden to
give them even bread or water. Nevertheless--aided in secret by
peasants, priests and all whose help he was obliged to seek--Garibaldi
made good his flight from the Adriatic to the Mediterranean, the whole
route being overrun by Austrians. When once the western coast was
reached, he was able, partly by sea and partly by land, to reach the
Piedmontese territory, where his life was safe. Not even there,
however, could he rest; he was told, politely but firmly, that his
presence was embarrassing, and for the second time he left
Europe--first for Tunis and then for the United States.
While the French besieged Rome, the Austrians had not been idle. They
took Bologna in May, after eight days' resistance; and in June, after
twenty days' attack by sea and land, Ancona fell into their hands. In
these towns they pursued means of 'pacification' resembling those
employed at Brescia. All who possessed what by a fiction could be
called arms were summarily slaughtered. At Ancona, a woman of bad
character hid a rusty nail in the bed of her husband, whom she wished
to get rid of; she then denounced him to the military tribunal, and
two hours later an English family, whose house was near the barracks,
heard the ring of the volley of musketry which despatched him. Austria
had also occupied the Grand Duchy of Tuscany; and when, in July,
Leopold II. returned to his state, which had restored him by general
consent and without any foreign intervention, he entered Florence
between two files of Austrian soldiery, in violation of the article of
the Statute to which he had sworn, which stipulated that no foreign
occupation should be invited or tolerated. The Grand Duke wrote to the
Emperor of Austria, from Gaeta, humbly begging the loan of his arms.
Francis Joseph replied with supreme contempt, that it would have been
a better thing if Leopold had never forgotten to whose family he
belonged, but he granted the prayer. Such was the way in which the
House of Hapsburg-Lorraine, that had done much in Tuscany to win
respect if not love, destroyed all its rights to the goodwill of the
Tuscan people, and removed what might have been a serious obstacle to
Italian unity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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