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.

Of course the biographer has the advantage of you in one important
particular. He knows how his story is coming out In a way, he's betting
on a certainty. Now you, as I judge, don't know how your story is coming
out, and if it doesn't come out, all you have to do is to say that is
the way you meant it to be. You cut off so many square feet of reality,
and let it go at that. Now that is very convenient for you, but from the
reader's point of view, it's unsatisfactory. It mixes him up, and he
feels a grudge against you whenever he thinks how much better he might
have spent his time than in following a plot that came to nothing. You
see you are running up against that same law of supply and demand. There
are so many failures in the world that the market is overstocked with
them. There is a d