Now Cavour didn’t try, as you might have expected, to reconcile these people.  He saw that it couldn’t be done.  He didn’t mind their hating one another; when they got too peaceable he would make an occasion for them to hate him.  He kept them all irreconcilably at work, till, in spite of themselves, they got to working together.  And when they began to do that, Cavour would encourage them in it.  As long as they were all working for Italy he didn’t care what they thought of each other or of him.  He had his eye on the main chance—­for Italy.

I notice that in your novel, when your man got into trouble he threw up the sponge.  That rather turned me against him and I wished I hadn’t wasted so much time on his affairs.  That wasn’t the way with Thayer’s hero.  One of the largest deals Cavour ever made was with Napoleon III, who at that time had the reputation of being the biggest promoter of free institutions in Europe.  He was a regular wizard in diplomacy.  Whatever he said went.  You see they hadn’t realized then that he was doing business on borrowed capital.

Well, Napoleon agreed to underwrite, for Cavour, the whole project of Italian Unity.  Everybody thought it was going through all right, when suddenly Napoleon, from a place called Villafranca, wired that the deal was off.

That floored Cavour.  He was down and out.  He couldn’t realize ten cents on the dollar on his securities.  If he had been like your man, Thayer would have had to bring his book to an end with that chapter.  He would have left the reader plunged in gloom.

Cavour was mad for awhile and went up to Switzerland to cool off.  Thayer describes the way he went up to a friend’s house, near Lake Geneva, with his coat on his arm.  “Unannounced, he strode into the drawing-room, threw himself into an easy-chair, and asked for a glass of iced water.”

Then he poured out his wrath over the Villafranca incident, but he didn’t waste much time over that.  In a few moments he was enthusiastically telling of the new projects he had formed.  “We must not look back, but forward,” he told his friends.  “We have followed one road.  It is blocked.  Very well, we will follow another.”

That’s the kind of man Cavour was.  You forgot that he was a European statesman.  When you saw him with his coat off, drinking ice-water and talking about the future, you felt toward him just as you would toward a first-rate American who was of Presidential size.

Now, I’m not saying that there’s any more realism to the square inch in a Life of Cavour than in a Life of Napoleon III.  It would take as much labor on the part of a biographer to tell what Napoleon III really was as to tell what Cavour really was—­perhaps more.  But you come up against the law of supply and demand.  You can’t get around that.  There isn’t much inquiry for Napoleon, now that his boom is over.

The way Thayer figured it was, I suppose, something like this.  It would take eight or ten years to assemble the materials for a first-rate biography such as he wished to make.  If he chose Napoleon there would be steady deterioration in the property, and when the improvements were put on there would be no demand.  If he put the same work on Cavour, he would get the unearned increment.  I think he showed his sense.