Cavour | Page 8

destroyer, in that future; architects, he said, were what was most wanted in public affairs, and Italy had always lacked them. There is no reason to think that Cassio's sympathy had chilled, but Cavour, in his morbid state, thought that it was so; he imagined that what had drawn Cassio to him "was not I, but my powerful intellectual organisation"; and with undeserved mistrust he did not turn to him for comfort.
He was at the nadir of his dejection when he received a letter in a well-known handwriting, that of a woman who had strongly attracted him four years before by her beauty, grace, and elevation of mind. Separation cut short the incipient love-affair, and Cavour never thought of renewing it. With the woman it was otherwise; from her first meeting with the youth of twenty to the day of her death, absent or present, he was the object of an idolatry in which all her faculties united: her being was penetrated by a self-sustaining passion which could not cease till it had consumed her. De Stendhal is the only novelist who could have drawn such a character. She was of noble birth, and from an early age had been eminently unhappy. Cavour, in his private papers, called her "L'Inconnue," and so she will be remembered. Her own life-story, and whether she was free to give her heart where she would, the world does not and need not know; on the last point it is enough to say that Cavour's father and mother were aware of his relations with her and saw in them nothing reprehensible.
On a page meant for no eyes but his own, Cavour describes the excitement into which he was thrown by the brief letter which announced that the Unknown had arrived at Turin and that she wished to see him. He hastened back to town and sought her at her hotel, and then at the opera where she had gone. After looking all round the house, he recognised her in a box--the sixth to the left on the first row--dressed in deep mourning and showing on her face such evident marks of suffering that he was at once filled with remorse "and intoxicated by a love so pure, so constant, and so disinterested." Never would he forsake this divine woman again!
For a moment he thought of flight to distant shores, but he soon decided that "imperative duties required that she should remain where she was." Their intercourse chiefly consisted of letters; his do not seem to exist, hers were found after his death carefully preserved and numbered. In these letters she laid bare her innermost soul; she was ardently patriotic, steeped in the ideas of Mazzini, and far more Italian than Piedmontese, though she wrote in French. She knew English, and Cavour advised her to read Shakespeare. Remarkably gifted, she had the deep humility of many of the best Italian women; "What have I done, O Camille," she asks, "to meet a soul like yours!... To have known you for an instant fills a long existence; how can you love me, weak as I am?" She had an astonishing instinct of his future greatness: "Full of force, life, talent, called, perhaps to make a brilliant career, to contribute to the general good," such expressions as these occur frequently in her letters. The romance ended as it could not help ending. The "eternal vows" were kept for a year and a few months; then on Cavour's side a love which, though he did not guess it, had only been a reflection, faded into compassionate interest. The Inconnue uttered no reproaches; after a few unhappy years she died, leaving a last letter to her inconstant lover. "The woman who loved you is dead ... no one ever loved you as she did, no one! For, O Camille, you never fathomed the extent of her love." With a broken-hearted pride she declared that "in the domain of death she surpassed all rivals." It remained true; if Cavour was not, strictly speaking, more faithful to the _Inconnue's_ memory than he had been to her while she lived, yet this was the only real love-passage in his life. Fatal to her, it was fortunate to him. It found him in despair and it left him self-reliant and matured. The love of such a woman was a liberal education.

CHAPTER II
TRAVEL-YEARS
During the fifteen years which he devoted to agriculture, Cavour made several long and important visits to France and England. In this way he enlarged his experience, while keeping aloof from the governing class in his own country, connection with which could, in his opinion, only bring loss of reputation and effacement in the better days that were to come. Cavour knew himself to be ambitious, but he had the self-control never even