capture, he and Emma escaped with their lives and, disguised as peasants, fled across the river into Switzerland, heading initially to Geneva. By 1849 they appear to have been back in Paris. Georg Herwegh, whose extremism had been exaggerated in government propaganda, and who never captured the support of the moderate majority among the reformers in the region, found himself widely ridiculed while Emma was disinherited by her father whose business interests in Berlin had, since 1842, been badly affected by his daughter's very public displays of revolutionary passion. Exile Cut off from Siegmund family funding, the Herweghs faced the challenge of supporting themselves at their accustomed level. A solution suggested itself in the form of Alexander Herzen, a fellow revolutionary who still had access to significant funding. The Herweghs and the Herzens moved together to Nice in the early 1850s, sharing a house. However, Herwegh had not taken the precaution of telling his friend that half a year earlier he had embarked on an intense love affair with Natalia, Herzen's wife. The love affair with Natalia broke Georg's friendship with Herzen who threatened to challenge Hervegh to a duel, before relocating to London. Natalia died, together with her newborn child, from tuberculosis in 1852. The affair with Natalia Herzen - much publicised by the enraged Herzen in the radical political circles in which the Herweghs moved - appears to have led to a two-year separation, during which Emma relocated to Genoa. Here she became involved with various patriotic activists, most notably forming a close friendship with Felice Orsini who would later achieve wider notability as a would-be assassin of the French emperor. Some sources imply a romantic attachment between Orsini and Emma Herwegh, but the matter is one in respect of which it becomes impossible to disentangle the factual from the fanciful. She did, in any event, became a steadfast and at times a usefully practical supporter of the patriotic adventurer. In 1854, she organised a false passport in the name of "Tito Celsi" for him. Two years later, with Orsini in jail, she sent him a coat with buttons containing an intoxicant intended for use to put his jailers out of action. When that failed, in March 1856, she conspired with others to smuggle hacksaw blades (hidden in a book) and bed sheets into a Mantua prison cell where Orsini was being held, enabling him to escape custody