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;