Cavour. By Maurice Paleologue. (Ernest Benn. 16s.) M. MAURICE PALEOLOGUE'S
Cavour is a brilliant piece of his- tory in the form of biography—or should we say of biogra- phies ? The portrait of the great Piedmontese :statesman, if painted in more detail, is not more striking than those of Victor Emmanuel, Napoleon III, Jerome Napoleon, Mazzini or Garibaldi. The figures of the great drama stand out in their relation to one another in a marvellously vivid manner, and it is by the personalities reintroduced to us, rather than by the plot again unfolded, that we arc impressed. The reader who knew nothing about the events which led to the unification of Italy might fail, as he read, to get the story clear in his head, but he would not be able to put the book down because of the fascination of its character-study.
Cavour and his King, long and enthusiastically as they worked together for a common cause, were never, M. Paleologue believes, in any true sense friends. Victor Emmanuel loved Garibaldi, " a poor man's son, a seaman by trade, a captain adventurer hostile to all social hierarchies " ; he did not love Cavour.
Cavour was an aristocrat despite his bourgeois looks ; he could trace his descent back to the Third Crusade, but in his later traditions letters counted for more than arms. St. Francis de Sales is found among his collateral ancestors ; his uncle the Comte de Sellon, whose influence upon his character was not unimportant, had known Rousseau, Voltaire, Mine. de Stael and Gibbon. In his house " the fragrance of the eighteenth century still lingered." A whole world was open to the Prime Minister which was shut to the King, though their tastes were not wholly divergent. Cavour's passionate enjoyment of country life was as great as the King's, and " from the day he left the military college at Turin his gallantries were beyond all reckoning."
Victor Emmanuel was too clever not to recognize the genius of Cavour, and although in his presence he felt himself to be rough, and an inferior, he yet tolerated Cavour on that account." The man of whom Queen Victoria so simply said that " he was more like a mediaeval knight or King than anything one knows now " was a man " of rough even vulgar tastes." In a strange degree he had the manners and habits of a peasant, a fact which gave rise to the legend that he was the child of a poor woman, secretly substituted for the Piedmontese heir who died. " Surly of speech, untidy in his dress," he hated the refinements and restrictions of social " With his sword between his legs, his strong hands folded one above another across the hilt, he sat and watched his guests without troubling to conceal from them his boredom and his impatience." Again, the divergence between the two men went very deep in the matter of religion. Victor Emmanuel, in spite of his ungoverned passions, in spite, of the fact that he sacrificed his daughter by marrying her to that " declass& Caesar" and cynical atheist Jerome Napoleon, was man of deep piety. Cavour, as M. Paleologue paradoxically tells us, feared God rather than believed in Him and had no
belief in Christian dogma, though he kept his affection for Catholic ceremonial and died fortified by the rites of the Church.
Perhaps the two most striking chapters in the whole book— and they have the dramatic character of a great play—deal with Orsini's attempt to assassinate Napoleon III and the celebrated interview between the Emperor and Cavour at Plombieres. The terrible scene outside the Opera, when the Emperor and Empress, " saved as by a miracle, stepped
calmly from their wrecked carriage " and " with blanched faces and horror-stricken eyes entered the Imperial box to
rounds of applause," is not more impressive than the trial, when " a curious psychological phenomenon of collective suggestion transferred Orsini from an assassin into a hero whose personal magnetism penetrated beyond the Court and the streets into the Tuileries." The Austrian Ambassador Hubner notes in his diary that " the Empress herself is infatuated with the handsome assassin." The great question of Orsini's letter to the Emperor even to-day, M. Paleologuc admits, presents a difficult problem to historians : " Was Orsini really the writer of the letter ? " M. Paleologue believes that it was drafted by his advocate Jules Favrc, but drafted " on an inspiration emanating from a very exalted source, from the Emperor himself."
" It is pleasant to picture Cavour," writes M. Paleologue, " in a brilliant moment of his career." The opportunity had come to him " to negotiate alone with a man who had never been able to weigh the implications of Iris actions." Ile had over-persuaded Napoleon III to conclude a pact with Piedmont.
" Forty-seven years of age, physically robust, with a spirited and mischievous eye, a mouth at once sensual and ironic, humorous, open-hearted, observant, a clear thinker and a precise and finished speaker, a debater feared for his command of brilliant and irresistible repartee, animated by an untiring energy that was yet so well disciplined and distributed that
he even found time in the midst of his multifarious activities to pursue his amours, and above all by an unshakable optimism and courage that enabled him with smiling coun- tenance to face the world and shoulder the heavy responsi- bilities thrust upon him." Such, he goes on, he appeared
when spending his evenings with his niece " the exhilarating Marchioness Alfieri or when taking his afternoon stroll through the Arcades of the Rue du Po." But graphic as these glimpses of Cavour are " in his habit as he lived " they arc short. It is with the work of his life, his statecraft, that the author is chiefly concerned.
Joseph de Maistre's sentence, "The whole art of a statesman is to know how to work with fate," might well be its motto.
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