An army twice beaten, a bankrupt exchequer, a triumphant invader waiting to dictate terms; this was but the beginning of the inventory of the royal inheritance. The internal condition of the kingdom, even apart from the financial ruin which had succeeded to the handsome surplus of two years before, was full of embarrassments of the gravest kind. There was a party representing the darkest-dyed clericalism and reaction whose machinations had not been absent in the disaster of Novara. Who was it that disseminated among the troops engaged in the battle broadsides printed with the words: 'Soldiers, for whom do you think you are fighting? The King is betrayed; at Turin they have proclaimed the republic'? There were other broadsides in which Austria was called the supporter of thrones and altars. The dreadful indiscipline witnessed towards the end of, and after the conflict was due more to the demoralising doctrines that had been introduced into the army than to the insubordination of panic. There was another party strengthened by the recent misfortunes and recruited by exiles from all parts of Italy, which was democratic to the verge of republicanism in Piedmont and over that verge at Genoa, where a revolution broke out before the new King's reign was a week old. Constitutional government stood between the fires of these two parties, both fanned by Austrian bellows, the first openly, the second in secret. Victor Emmanuel was not popular. The indifference to danger which he had shown conspicuously during the war would have awakened enthusiasm in most countries, but in Piedmont it was so thoroughly taken for granted that the Princes of the House of Savoy did not know fear, that it was looked on as an ordinary fact. The Austrian origin of the Duchess of Savoy formed a peg on which to hang unfriendly theories. It is impossible not to compassionate the poor young wife who now found herself Queen of a people which hated her race, after having lived since her marriage the most dreary of lives at the dismallest court in Europe. At first, as a bride, she seemed to have a desire to break through the frozen etiquette which surrounded her; it is told how she once begged and prayed her husband to take her for a walk under the Porticoes of Turin, which she had looked at only from the outside. The young couple enjoyed their airing, but when it reached Charles Albert's ears, he ordered his son to be immediately placed under military arrest. The chilling formalism which invaded even the private life of these royal personages, shutting the door to 'good comradeship' even between husband and wife, may have had much to do with driving Victor Emmanuel from the side of the Princess, whom, nevertheless, he loved and venerated, to unworthy pleasures, the habit of indulgence in which is far easier to contract than to cure. [Illustration: VICTOR IMMANUEL]