The unconquerable dislike of men of principle, like Mazzini, to joining hands with the author of the _coup d'état_ was perfectly explicable. There were doubtless some sincere Bulgarian patriots who disliked joining hands with the Autocrat of all the Russias. The gift of freedom from a despot means a long list of evils. Mazzini grasped the maleficent influence which Napoleon III. would be in a position to exercise over the young state; he knew, moreover, when only two or three other persons in Europe knew it, that the bargain of Plombières was on the principle of give-and-take. How Mazzini was for many years better informed than any cabinet in Europe, remains a secret. 'I know positively,' he wrote on the 4th of January 1859, 'that the idea of the war is only to hand over a zone of Lombardy to Piedmont, and the cession of Savoy and Nice to France: the peace, upon the offer of which they count, would abandon the whole of Venetia to Austria.' A month before this he had disclosed what was certainly true, namely, that Napoleon wanted to place a Murat on the throne of Naples, and to substitute Prince Napoleon for the Grand Duke of Tuscany. The point that is doubtful in the above revelation is the statement that the Emperor never meant to emancipate Venetia. The probabilities are against this. He may, however, have questioned all along whether his troops, with those of the King of Sardinia, would display a superiority over the Austrian forces sufficiently incontestable for him to risk taking them into the mouse-trap of the Quadrilateral. In this one thing Napoleon was amply justified--in having no sort of desire to take a beaten army back to Paris.