soon thoroughly braced up to the
work before him. As he began to see his way, he was rather spurred
on than disconcerted by the chorus of dismal predictions which the
Congress and his own part in it evoked at home. Almost every notable
man in Piedmont contributed his quota of melancholy vaticination, in
which the note, "I told you so!" was already audible. Who could plead
Italy's cause in a congress in which Austria had a voice? Was there
ever such midsummer madness? "But we knew how it would be from the
first."

Cavour had said that he hated playing at diplomacy; but some of his
smaller, as well as larger gifts, marked him out as a successful
diplomatist. He was watchful for little advantages. All who could help
the cause were enlisted in its service. Thus he made a convert of a
fair Countess, to whose charms Napoleon III was supposed not to be
insensible. Paris was full of notabilities whom he sought to turn
into useful allies. In a letter to the Marquis Emanuel d'Azeglio (the
Sardinian Minister in London) he tells how he even "made up" to Lady
Holland's dog with such success that he got it to put its large paws
on his new coat! When the Marchioness of Ely arrived to be present on
the part of the Queen at the birth of the Prince Imperial, Cavour,
knowing her to be the Queen's intimate correspondent, lost no time in
paying his court to her; but in this instance an acquaintance begun
from political motives ripened into real friendship on both sides. A
point which is worth observing is that, as minister, no one ever made
less use of what may he called the influence of society than Cavour.
He never tried to make himself agreeable at Turin, least of all to the
king. For a long time he was considered haughty by those who did not
know him, and arbitrary by those who did. But abroad he underwent a
change which probably came about from his revealing not less but more
of his natural self. "He has that petulance," Massimo d'Azeglio said,
"which is exactly what they like in Paris." Abroad he could give this
quality freer play than in Italy, where vivacity offends in a serious
man. He charmed even those who did not share his opinions. At a dinner
given by the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris to all the members of the
Congress, he sat next to the Abbe Darboy, one day to succeed to the
see and meet a martyr's death in the Commune. The Abbe never forgot
his neighbour of that evening, and in 1870, at Rome during the
Oecumenical Council,