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