“What have I done, O Camille,” she asks, “to meet a soul like yours!...  To have known you for an instant fills a long existence; how can you love me, weak as I am?” She had an astonishing instinct of his future greatness:  “Full of force, life, talent, called, perhaps to make a brilliant career, to contribute to the general good,” such expressions as these occur frequently in her letters.  The romance ended as it could not help ending.  The “eternal vows” were kept for a year and a few months; then on Cavour’s side a love which, though he did not guess it, had only been a reflection, faded into compassionate interest.  The Inconnue uttered no reproaches; after a few unhappy years she died, leaving a last letter to her inconstant lover.  “The woman who loved you is dead ... no one ever loved you as she did, no one!  For, O Camille, you never fathomed the extent of her love.”  With a broken-hearted pride she declared that “in the domain of death she surpassed all rivals.”  It remained true; if Cavour was not, strictly speaking, more faithful to the Inconnue’s memory than he had been to her while she lived, yet this was the only real love-passage in his life.  Fatal to her, it was fortunate to him.  It found him in despair and it left him self-reliant and matured.  The love of such a woman was a liberal education.

CHAPTER II

TRAVEL-YEARS

During the fifteen years which he devoted to agriculture, Cavour made several long and important visits to France and England.  In this way he enlarged his experience, while keeping aloof from the governing class in his own country, connection with which could, in his opinion, only bring loss of reputation and effacement in the better days that were to come.  Cavour knew himself to be ambitious, but he had the self-control never even to contemplate the purchase of what then passed for power by the sacrifice of his principles.  “My principles,” he once wrote, “are a part of myself.”  The best way “to prepare for the honourable offices of the future” was to keep his independence intact, and to study abroad the working of the institutions which he wished to see introduced at home.  Through his French relations, he took his place immediately in the best society of the capital of the citizen king, under whose reign, sordid as it was in some respects, Paris attained an intellectual brilliancy the like of which was never equalled in the spectacular glare of the second empire.  It was the moment of a short-lived renaissance; literature, art, science, seemed to be starting on new voyages of discovery.  New worlds were opened up for conquest; oriental studies for the first time became popular, the great field of unwritten traditions surrendered its virgin soil.  Above all, it was a time of fermentation in moral ideas; every one expected the millennium, though there was a lack of agreement as to what it would consist in.  Every one, like Lamennais in Beranger’s