in the great game which will be played sooner or later in Europe.”  A few weeks later Napoleon declared at Bordeaux that “the empire was peace,” but like all intelligent onlookers Cavour received the statement with incredulity.  Possibly the only person who believed in it was the speaker—­for the moment; he may have thought that “bread and games” was a formula by which he could rule France, or rather Paris, but he was soon to find it insufficient.

Cavour sought out several of the Italian exiles who were leading a life of privation and obscurity in Paris, one of whom was Manin, the Dictator of Venice.  With him Cavour expressed himself “very much satisfied, though his sentiments were rather too Venetian”:  sentiments which Manin sacrificed—­a last act of abnegation—­when he finally gave his support to Italian unity under Victor Emmanuel, carrying with him two-thirds of the republican party, who could brave the charge of changed allegiance if so incorruptible a patriot led the way.  Cavour also saw Gioberti, “always the same child of genius, who would have been a great man had he had common sense.”  Gioberti, however, had made a great stride towards common sense, for instead of dreaming of liberating popes, he was now imagining a renovating statesman, and he had inscribed Cavour’s name under his new portrait.  In a book published in Paris, Gioberti drew the Cavour of the future with a penetration and a sureness of touch which would make a reader, who did not know the date, suppose that the words were written ten years later.  Men of great talent, he said, rarely threw aside the chance of becoming famous; rather did they snatch it with avidity; and what fame more splendid could now be won than that of the minister of the Italian prince who should re-make the country?  He fixed his hopes on Cavour, because he alone understood that in human society civilisation is everything, all the rest, without it, nothing.  “He knows that statutes, parliaments, newspapers, all the appurtenances of free governments, even if they are of use to individuals, are miserable shams to the commonalty if they fail to help forward social progress.”  He was willing to forgive him the generous error of treating a province as if it were a nation, when he compared it with the pettiness of those who treated the nation as if it were a province.  He invoked some great and solemn act of Italianita on his part, which should pledge him irrevocably to the national cause.  Cavour was too little influenced by others for it to be safe to say that this was one of the prophecies which tend to their own fulfilment; still it is worth noticing that he read the passage and was struck by it.