A charming countess who had made a favourite of Cavour in his boyhood tried to extract a promise from him that he would never again mix himself up in politics; he refused to give it; sooner or later, he writes in his diary, she would have blushed for him had he consented. But, he adds bitterly, what was the good of demanding such a promise from one for whom politically everything was ended? "Ah! if I were an Englishman, by this time I should be something and my name would not be wholly unknown!" Here, again, was a source of depression. At the Military Academy he had formed one almost romantic comradeship with a delicate and reserved youth, some years older than himself, Baron Severino Cassio, to whom he first confided his determination to Italianise himself: to study the language, history, laws, customs of the whole country with a view to preparing for the future. Cassio presciently marked out for his friend the part of architect, not of 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 to contemplate the purchase of what then passed for power by the sacrifice of his principles. "My principles," he once wrote, "are a part of myself." The best way "to prepare for the honourable offices of the future" was to keep his independence intact, and to study abroad the working of the institutions which he wished to see introduced at home. Through his French relations, he took his place immediately in the best society of the capital of the citizen king, under whose reign, sordid as it was in some respects, Paris attained an intellectual brilliancy the like of which was never equalled in the spectacular glare of the second empire. It was the moment of a short-lived renaissance; literature, art, science, seemed to be starting on new voyages of discovery. New worlds were opened up for conquest; oriental studies for the first time became popular, the great field of unwritten traditions surrendered its virgin soil. Above all, it was a time of fermentation in moral ideas; every one expected the millennium, though there was a lack of agreement as to what it would consist in. Every one, like Lamennais in Béranger's poem, was going "to save the world." The Good, the True, the Beautiful, were about to dislodge the Bad, the False, the Ugly. If all these high hopes had some fruition in the region of thought, they had none in the region of facts, but meanwhile they lent a rare charm to Paris in the Thirties. Cavour speaks of elasticity as the ruling quality of French society; he praises the admirable union of science and wit, depth and amiability, substance and form, to be found in certain Parisian salons and nowhere else. He was thinking especially of the salon of Mme. de Circourt, who became his friend through life. For no one else had he quite the same unchanging regard. Attracted as he always was by the conquest of difficulties, he admired the force of mind and will by which this Russian lady, whom a terrible accident had made a hopeless invalid, overcame disabilities that would have reduced most people to a state of living death. In her, spirit annihilated matter. She joined French vivacity to the penetrating sensibility of the Sclavonic races, and she was a keen reader of character. Cavour interested her at once. Even in his exterior, the young Italian, with blond hair and blue eyes, was then more attractive than those who only knew the Cavour of later years could easily believe; while his gay and winning manners, combined with a fund of information on subjects not usually popular with the young, could not but strike so discerning a judge as the Countess de Circourt as indicating not a common personality. She feared lest so much talent and promise would be suffocated for ever in the stifling air of a small despotism. Cavour himself drew a miserable picture of his country: science and intelligence were reputed "infernal things by those who are obliging enough to govern us"; a triumphant bigotry trembled alike at railways and Rosmini; Cavour's aunt, the Duchess de Clermont Tonnerre, only got permission to receive the Journal des Débats after long negotiations between the French minister at Turin and the Sardinian government. No wonder if Mme. de Circourt impulsively entreated the young man to shake the dust of Piedmont off his feet and to seek a career in France. In his answer to this proposition, he asks first of all, what have his parents done that he should plunge a knife into their hearts? Sacred duties bound him to them, and he would never quit them till they were separated by the grave. This filial piety stands the more to Cavour's credit, as his home life had not been very happy. He went on to inquire, what real inducement was there for him to abandon his native land? A literary reputation? Was he to run after a little celebrity, a little glory, without ever reaching the real goal of his ambition? What influence could he exercise in favour of his unhappy brothers in a country where egotism monopolised the high places? What was the mass of foreigners doing which had been thrown into Paris by choice or misfortune? Who among them was useful to his fellow-men? The political troubles which desolated Italy had obliged her noblest sons to fly far from her, but in their exile their eminent faculties became forceless and sterile. Only one Italian had made a name in Paris, Pellegrino Rossi; but this man, whose capacities Cavour rated as extraordinary, reached the summit of success open to him in France when he obtained a professorship at the Sorbonne and a chair in the Academy, whereas, in the country which he repudiated, he might have one day guided his compatriots in the paths of the new civilisation—words which read like an imperfect prophecy, since the unfortunate Rossi was to lose his life later in the attempt to reform the papal government. Cavour repeats that literature would be the only promising opening, and for literature he feels no vocation; he has a reasoning, not an inventive head; he does not possess a grain of imagination; in his whole life he had never been able to construct even the smallest story to amuse a child; at best he would be a third-class literary man, and he says in the matter of art he can only conceive one position: the highest. Certainly he might turn to science; to become a great mathematician, chemist, physicist, was a way of seeking glory as good as another; only he confessed that it had few attractions "for the Italian with the rosy complexion and the smile of a child." Ethical science interested him more, but this was to be pursued in retirement, not in great cities. "No, no," he writes, "it is not in flying from one's fatherland because it is unhappy that one can attain a glorious end." But if he were mistaken, if a splendid future awaited him on foreign soil, still his resolution would be the same. Evil be to him who denies his fellow-countrymen as unworthy of him. "Happy or unhappy, my country shall have all my life; I will never be unfaithful to her even were I sure of finding elsewhere a brilliant destiny."
While Cavour was in Paris, Tocqueville's Democracy in America was published, and immediately gave its author European fame. It did not probably exercise much influence over Cavour in the formation of opinions, but he found his own confirmed in it both as to the tendency of modern societies towards democracy for better or worse, and also as to the independence of the Church from State control, in which, from the time that he began to think at all on such matters, he had thought to see the solution of all difficulties of a politico-religious sort. Cavour changed his practice, but rarely his mind; most of the conclusions of the statesman had been reached at twenty-five. It was not easy for him to take those who fundamentally differed from him entirely seriously. Once, when he was the guest of the Princess Belgiojoso, Musset's irresponsive idol and Heine's good angel, the fair hostess bestowed on him such a republican lecture that he wrote, "They will not catch me there again"; but he went. At the Duchess d'Abrantés' receptions he met "the relics of all the governments." He only spoke on one occasion to Guizot. The minister seems to have received him coldly. He remarked that with these great people you must be a person of importance to make any way; an obscure citizen of Piedmont, unknown beyond the commune of which he was syndic, could have no chance. With Thiers he got on much better; principles apart, their temperaments were not inharmonious. Of the literary men Cavour preferred Sainte Beuve; in Cousin he cared less for the philosopher than for the friend of Santorre di Santa Rosa, the exiled patriot of 1821. Cousin introduced him to several fervid Italian liberals, among others Berchet, the poet. He was invited by Alessandro Bixio to meet the author of Monte Cristo. Bixio was one day to be intimately mixed up in Franco-Italian politics, in which he acted as intermediary between Cavour and Prince Napoleon. Royer Collard, Jules Simon, Michelet, Ozanum, Quinet, and the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz were then giving lectures, which Cavour found time to attend. The great Rachel filled the stage. Cavour, who in his later years never went to a theatre except when he wanted to go to sleep, was a warm admirer of the incomparable actress, who satisfied his requirement of the absolutely first class in art. He was drawn to the highest genius as much as he was repelled by mediocrity. He blamed Rachel, however, for the choice of one particularly repulsive rôle, and suspected that she chose it because the dress suited her to perfection.
It was always known that Cavour staked considerable sums at cards, but that he had at one time a real passion for gambling was hardly supposed till the self-accusations of his journal were laid bare. Though there was little in him of the Calvinism of his maternal ancestors, he judged himself on this point with the severity of an austere moralist. In the world of pleasure in which he moved such offences were considered venial, but he looked upon them with the disgust of a man who reckons personal freedom beyond all earthly goods, and who sees himself in danger of becoming a slave. "The humiliating and degrading emotions of play" threaten, he says, to undermine his intellectual and moral faculties; his "miserable weakness" degrades him in his own eyes; conscience, reason, self-respect, interest, call upon him to fight against it and destroy it. From high play at cards to gambling on the Bourse there is but a step. Cavour embarked in a speculation the success of which depended on the outbreak of war in the East, which he believed to be imminent. No war occurred, and the loss of a few hundred pounds obliged him to apply to his father for supplies. The Marquis sent the money, and wrote good-naturedly that the mishap might teach Camille to moderate his belief in his own infallibility. He thought himself the only young man in the world in whom there was a ready-made minister, banker, manufacturer, and speculator; and if he did not take care the idea that he could never be wrong might prevent him from turning to account the superior gifts with which he was undoubtedly endowed. But the kindliness of the reproof did not lessen his own sense of shame and mortification. The lesson was useful; he forsook the Bourse, and at cards he conquered the passion without giving up the game. Rightly or wrongly it was said that many years after he played high stakes at whist with political men to gain an insight into their characters. In any case there is nothing to show that his fondness for play ever again led him into excesses which his judgment condemned. He had recovered his freedom.
Cavour invariably ended his visits to Paris by crossing the Channel, and, if in the French capital he gained greater knowledge of men, it was in England that he first grew familiar with the public life which he considered a pattern for the world. He did not find the delightful social intercourse to be enjoyed in Paris; in fact, not one of the persons to whom he brought letters of introduction took the least notice of him. English society is quicker to run after celebrities than to discern them in embryo. But the two or three Englishmen whom he already knew were active in his behalf. William Brokedon, his old friend the painter, conducted him to the dinner of the Royal Geographical Society, where a curious thing happened. Cavour's first essay in public speaking was before an English assembly. After several toasts had been duly honoured, the Secretary of the Society, to his unbounded astonishment, proposed his health. Taken unawares, he expressed his thanks in a few words, which were well received, and on sitting down he said to his neighbour, the Earl of Ripon, "C'est mon maiden speech!" Lord Ripon remarked, "with a significant smile," that he hoped it would be the opening of a long career. He dined with John Murray, and went to see Faraday, who in his working clothes made him think of a philosopher of the sixteenth century. At a party given by Babbage, the mathematician, he met Hallam, Tocqueville, Ada Byron, and the three beautiful daughters of Sheridan. With Nassau Senior he began a long friendship, and Edward Romilly, the librarian of Trinity College, Cambridge, whom he had met at Geneva, introduced him to a rich landed proprietor of the name of Davenport, who was to prove the most useful of all his English acquaintances, as he liberally placed his house in Cheshire at Cavour's disposal to give him an opportunity of studying English agriculture. The chance was not thrown away. Cavour learnt everything about the management of a well-ordered English estate down to the minutest particulars. He admired much, especially the system of subsoil drainage, then a novelty to foreigners, but he was not carried away by the beautiful appearance of the English country so far as to think that the English farmer was in all respects ahead of the North Italian. He compared the up-and-down English meadow left to itself with the highly-manured pasture lands of Piedmont, level as billiard-boards, which yield their three crops of hay a year. One point Cavour was never tired of impressing on students of agriculture; it was this, and it exactly shows his habit of mind: never consider results without knowing what they cost. Correct the selling price by the cost of production. He had no patience with model farms; they might be magnificent, but they were not agriculture. In one of his earliest writings he held them up to ridicule.