It appears that this time Cavour would have acted even without the assent of Napoleon; it was, however, evidently of great moment to secure it if possible. The Emperor was making a tour in the newly acquired province of Savoy when General Cialdini and L.C. Farini were despatched by Cavour to endeavour to win him over. The interview, which was held at Chambéry, was kept so secret that its precise date is not now known. Cavour tried, not for the first time, the effect of entire frankness. He counted on persuading Napoleon that their interests were identical: the White Reaction and the Red Republic were the enemies of both. He did not neglect the item that Lamoricière was disliked at the Tuileries. With regard to Garibaldi, he represented that since the cession of Nice no one could manage him. The end of it was that, if Napoleon did not say the words "Faites, mais faites vite," which rumour attributed to him, he certainly expressed their substance.
On September 11 the Sardinian army, more than double as strong as Lamoricière's, crossed the papal frontier. With the exception of England and Sweden, all the Powers recalled their representatives from Turin. The French Ministry telegraphed to Napoleon, who was at Marseilles, to ask what they were to do. They got no answer, and, left to their own inspiration, they informed the Duke de Grammont, the French Ambassador at Rome, that the Emperor's Government "would not tolerate" the culpable aggression of Sardinia, and that orders were given to embark troops for Ancona. These misleading assurances encouraged Lamoricière, but in any case he would probably have thought it incumbent on him to make what stand he could. He was defeated by Cialdini on the heights of Castelfidardo--"yesterday unknown, to-day immortal," as Mgr. Dupanloup eloquently exclaimed. Ancona fell to a combined attack from land and sea. Meanwhile Fanti advanced on Perugia, and was on the point of entering Viterbo when a detachment from the French garrison in Rome suddenly occupied the town: one of Napoleon's facing-both-ways evolutions by which he thought to save the goat and cabbages of the Italian riddle, but the final result was to lose both one and the other. Lamoricière went home, declaring that he took his defeat less to heart than the cruel disillusions he had undergone in Rome. Some one proposed that he should go to the rescue of King Francis, but he answered that his wish had been to serve the Pope, not the Neapolitan Bourbons.