The political troubles which desolated Italy had obliged her noblest sons to fly far from her, but in their exile their eminent faculties became forceless and sterile.  Only one Italian had made a name in Paris, Pellegrino Rossi; but this man, whose capacities Cavour rated as extraordinary, reached the summit of success open to him in France when he obtained a professorship at the Sorbonne and a chair in the Academy, whereas, in the country which he repudiated, he might have one day guided his compatriots in the paths of the new civilisation—­words which read like an imperfect prophecy, since the unfortunate Rossi was to lose his life later in the attempt to reform the papal government.  Cavour repeats that literature would be the only promising opening, and for literature he feels no vocation; he has a reasoning, not an inventive head; he does not possess a grain of imagination; in his whole life he had never been able to construct even the smallest story to amuse a child; at best he would be a third-class literary man, and he says in the matter of art he can only conceive one position:  the highest.  Certainly he might turn to science; to become a great mathematician, chemist, physicist, was a way of seeking glory as good as another; only he confessed that it had few attractions “for the Italian with the rosy complexion and the smile of a child.”  Ethical science interested him more, but this was to be pursued in retirement, not in great cities.  “No, no,” he writes, “it is not in flying from one’s fatherland because it is unhappy that one can attain a glorious end.”  But if he were mistaken, if a splendid future awaited him on foreign soil, still his resolution would be the same.  Evil be to him who denies his fellow-countrymen as unworthy of him.  “Happy or unhappy, my country shall have all my life; I will never be unfaithful to her even were I sure of finding elsewhere a brilliant destiny.”

While Cavour was in Paris, Tocqueville’s Democracy in America was published, and immediately gave its author European fame.  It did not probably exercise much influence over Cavour in the formation of opinions, but he found his own confirmed in it both as to the tendency of modern societies towards democracy for better or worse, and also as to the independence of the Church from State control, in which, from the time that he began to think at all on such matters, he had thought to see the solution of all difficulties of a politico-religious sort.  Cavour changed his practice, but rarely his mind; most of the conclusions of the statesman had been reached at twenty-five.  It was not easy for him to take those who fundamentally differed from him entirely seriously.  Once, when he was the guest of the Princess Belgiojoso, Musset’s irresponsive idol and Heine’s good angel, the fair hostess bestowed on him such a republican lecture that he wrote, “They will not catch me there again”; but he went.  At the Duchess d’Abrantes’ receptions he met “the relics of all the governments.”