“Garrone!” shouted the mason, with a changed countenance, “he has called you by name; it is two days since he spoke; he has called you twice; he wants you; come quickly! Ah, holy God, if this is only a good sign!”
“Farewell for the present,” said Garrone to us; “I shall remain,” and he ran in with the father. Derossi’s eyes were full of tears. I said to him:—
“Are you crying for the little mason? He has spoken; he will recover.”
“I believe it,” replied Derossi; “but I was not thinking of him. I was thinking how good Garrone is, and what a beautiful soul he has.”
COUNT CAVOUR.
Wednesday, 29th.
You are to make a description of the monument to Count Cavour. You can do it. But who was Count Cavour? You cannot understand at present. For the present this is all you know: he was for many years the prime minister of Piemont. It was he who sent the Piemontese army to the Crimea to raise once more, with the victory of the Cernaia, our military glory, which had fallen with the defeat at Novara; it was he who made one hundred and fifty thousand Frenchmen descend from the Alps to chase the Austrians from Lombardy; it was he who governed Italy in the most solemn period of our revolution; who gave, during those years, the most potent impulse to the holy enterprise of the unification of our country,—he with his luminous mind, with his invincible perseverance, with his more than human industry. Many generals have passed terrible hours on the field of battle; but he passed more terrible ones in his cabinet, when his enormous work might suffer destruction at any moment, like a fragile edifice at the tremor of an earthquake. Hours, nights of struggle and anguish did he pass, sufficient to make him issue from it with reason distorted and death in his heart. And it was this gigantic and stormy work which shortened his life by twenty years. Nevertheless, devoured by the fever which was to cast him into his grave, he yet contended desperately with the malady in order to accomplish something for his country. “It is strange,” he said sadly on his death-bed, “I no longer know how to read; I can no longer read.”
While they were bleeding him, and the fever was increasing, he was thinking of his country, and he said imperiously: “Cure me; my mind is clouding over; I have need of all my faculties to manage important affairs.” When he was already reduced to extremities, and the whole city was in a tumult, and the king stood at his bedside, he said anxiously, “I have many things to say to you, Sire, many things to show you; but I am ill; I cannot, I cannot;” and he was in despair.
And his feverish thoughts hovered ever round the State, round the new Italian provinces which had been united with us, round the many things which still remained to be done. When delirium seized him, “Educate the children!” he exclaimed, between his gasps for breath,—“educate the children and the young people—govern with liberty!”