Page:De Amicis - Heart, translation Hapgood, 1922.djvu/232

200 “Are you crying for the little mason?” I said. “He has spoken; he will recover.”

“I believe it,” replied Derossi; “but I was not thinking of him. I was thinking how good Garrone is, and what a beautiful soul he has.”

Wednesday, 29th.

You are to write a description of the monument to Count Cavour. You can do it. But who was Count Cavour? You cannot understand at present. For the present this is all you know: he was for many years the prime minister of Piedmont. It was he who sent the Piedmontese army to the Crimea to raise once more, with the victory of the Cernaia, our military glory, which had fallen with the defeat at Novara; it was he who made one hundred and fifty thousand Frenchmen descend from the Alps to chase the Austrians from Lombardy; it was he who governed Italy in the most solemn period of our revolution; who gave, during those years, the most potent impulse to the holy enterprise of the unification of our country, he with his brilliant mind, with his invincible perseverance, with his more than human industry.

Many generals have passed terrible hours on the field of battle; but he passed more terrible ones in his cabinet, when his enormous work might suffer destruction at any moment, like a fragile edifice at the tremor of an earthquake. Hours, nights of struggle and anguish did he pass, sufficient to make him issue from it with reason deranged and death in his heart. And it was this gigantic and stormy work which shortened his life by twenty years. Nevertheless, devoured by the fever which was