Cavour

o forward by bounds and leaps, or it may be to go backward; in either case the thread of continuity is lost. We appear to have moved far away from the men of forty years ago, except in the

the Thirteenth, was

rom it, nevertheless it had the outwardly imposing appearance which obtains for a political régime the acceptance of the apathetic and lukewarm to supplement the support of partisans. Above all, it was a phase in national existence

ef of Santena and of the old fastness of Cavour in the province of Pignerolo. This castle has remained a ruin since it was destroyed by Catinat, but in the last century Charles Emmanuel III. conferred the title of Marquis of Cavour on a Benso who had rendered distinguished military services. At the time of Cavour's birth the palace of the Bensos at Turin contained a complete and varied society composed of all sorts of nationalities and temperaments. Such different elements could hardly have dwelt together in harmony if the head of the household, Cavour's grandmother, had not been a superior woman in every sense, and one endowed with the worldly tact and elastic spirits without which even superior gifts are of little worth in the delicate, intimate relations of life. Nurtured in a romantic chateau on the lake of Annecy, Philippine, daughter of the Marquis de Sales, was affianced by her father at an early age to the eldest son of the Marquis Benso di Cavour, knight of the Annunziata, whom she never saw till the day of their marriage. At once she took her place in her new family not only as the ideal grande dame, but as the person to whom every one went in trouble and perplexity. That was a moment which developed strong characters and effaced weak ones. The revolutionary ocean was fatally rolling t

, was ordered to join General Berthier's corps, and to provide him with ￡10 pocket money she sold what till then

appointed governor of Piedmont (on account of his being the husband of Napoleon's sister, the beautiful Pauline Bonaparte, who was the original of Canova's Venus), the Marquise Philippine was commanded to accept the post of dame d'honneur to the Princess. A refusal would have meant the ruin of both the Cavours and her own kin, the De Sales, whose estates in Savoy were already confiscated. She bowed to necessity, and in a position which could not have be

d by the second daughter, Adele. After an unfortunate first marriage, Victoire became the Duchess de Clermont Tonnerre, and the youngest sister, Henriette, married a Count d'Auzers of Auvergne. All these relatives ended by taking up their abode in the Palazzo Cavour at Turin. Victoire was the cleverest, but her sisters as well as herself were what even in these days would be considered highly ed

," as he called her ("Marina" being the pet-name by which children in Piedmont called their grandmothers), and begged her to defend him against the charge of undutiful conduct. It might be true, he said, with the irony which was one day to become so familiar, that he was that dreadful thing, a liberal, but devoid of natural feeling he was not. On the great day when the Statut

s Fanchonette. The magnificent rival was Silvio Pellico's friend, the Marchioness de Barolo, who, like every one else, was attracted by the clever child with his blue eyes and little round face. Another story belonging to the same date is even more characteristic. The Cavours went every year to Switzerland to stay with their connections, the De Sellons and the De la Rives. On this occasion, when the travellers reached M. de la Rive's villa at Présinge, Camille, looking terribly in earnest, and with an air of importance, made the more comical by the little red costume he was wearing, went straight to his host with the announcement that the postmaster had treated them abominabl

the narrow coteries of the ancient Piedmontese aristocracy which are so graphically described by Massimo d'Azeglio, and the absence of constraint in which Cavour grew up makes a striking contrast to the iron paternal rule under which the young d'Azeglios trembled. It should be observed, however, that in spite of his mixed blood and scattered ties, Cavour was in feeling from the first the member of one race and the citizen of one state. The stronger influence, that of the father's strain, predominated to the exclusion of all others. Though all classes in Piedmont till within the last fifty years spoke French when they did n

t he must "do something," and at the age of ten he was sent to the Military Academy at Turin. He did not like it, but it was better for him than if he had been kept at home. Mathematics were well taught at the Academy, and in this branch he soon outstripped all his schoolfellows. He himself always spoke of his mathematical studies as having been of great service in forming the habit of precise thought; from the study of triangles, he said, he went on to the study of men and things. On the other hand the boys were taught little Lat

was borne by the king after they received the appointment. The Count d'Auzers, a strong Legitimist, was one of the oldest friends of the Prince of Carignano, who was regarded at the Palazzo Cavour as the victim of false accusations of liberalism. Charles Albert always seemed to reflect the opinions of the person to whom he was writing or speaking. Thus it

efinite project of preparing himself to play a part in life. There is not much to show what were his political ideas, except a memorandum written when he was eighteen on the Piedmontese revolution of 1821, in which he adopted the views of Santorre di Santa Rosa, once Charles Albert's friend and later his severest critic, to combat whose indictment the Count d'Auzers had written folios in the French and German newspapers. At the end of the memorandum Cavour transcribed an

ung lieutenant were well enough known. He was told that he would bring father and mother in sorrow to the grave, and he was even threatened with banishment to America. The police watched his movements. He wrote to his Swiss uncle that he had no right to complain as he was liberal and very liberal and desired a complete change in the whole system. On Charles Albert's accession to the throne he was sent to the solitary Alpine fortress of Bard; but it appears that not the king (as he supposed) but his own father suggested the step. Cavour saw in the idleness and apathy of garrison life in this lonely place a type of the disease from which the whole State was suffering. He wrote to the Cou

ces. He read Bentham and Adam Smith, and was excited by the events going on in England, then in the throes of the first Reform Bill. It was in the fortress of Bard that he gained a grasp of English politics which he never lost, and which hardly another foreigner ever possessed in a like degree. By chance he became acquainted with an English artist wh

t twenty-five he would be one never. The Marquis Michele Benso had recently assumed the post of Vicario of Turin, which his family thought below his dignity, but he apparently took it to oblige the king, with whom the Vicario, who was a sort of Prefect of Police, was in daily contact. As a result, the estate of Leri, which had been neglected before, was now going actually to ruin. Cavour, with the approval of his brother, proposed to undertake the whole management of the property, an offer gladly accepted, as the Marquis was well convinced that his younger son had rather too many than too few abilities. Cavour saw in agriculture the only field at present open to him. When he left the army he scarcely knew a cabbage from a turnip,

arnestness. He induced others to join him in experiments which were then innovations: steam-mills, factories for artificial manures and the like, while the machinery and new methods introduced at Leri revolutionised farming in Piedmont. One great scheme planned by him, an irrigatory canal between the Ticino and the Po, was only finished after his death, as the most worthy tribute to his memory. He rose at four, went to see his cattle, stood in the broiling harvest fields to overlook the reapers, acted, in short, as his own bailiff, and to these habits he returned in later years, whenever he had time to visit Leri. Cavour's mind was not poetic; we hear of his admiring only one poet, Shakespeare, but in Shakespeare it was probably the deep knowledge of man that attracted him, the apprehension of how men with given passions must act under given conditions. He did not, therefore, see country pursuits from a poet's standpoint, but he appreciated their power of calming men's minds

d. Between the brothers in after life there prevailed remarkable and unbroken harmony, but it is easy to see that when first grown to manhood Gustave presumed rather selfishly on his r?le of heir, while Camille took too seriously the supposed discovery that he was "necessary to no one!" Beyond all this, there was the undeclared clash of the new with the old, the feeling of having moved apart, which produces a moral vacuum until, by and by, it is realised that the value of the first affections and ties depends precisely on their resting on no basis of opinion. Cavour was overwhelmed by a sense of isolation; if he decided "like Hamlet" (so he writes in his diary) to abstain from suicide, he believed that he wished himself heartily out of

ing 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

h 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 eminent

ed 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

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