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 role, 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