vening he was taken ill with fever; his own physician was
absent, and he dictated a treatment to the doctor who was called in,
which he thought would make his illness a short one. He was bled five
times in four days. On the fourth day he summoned a cabinet council
to his bedside; the ministers, sharing his own opinion that he was
better, allowed it to be prolonged for several hours. When they went
out, an old friend came in and read death in his face. Other doctors
were consulted, and the treatment was changed. It was too late. From
the first the chance of recovery was small, owing to the mental
tension at which Cavour had lived for months; whatever chance there
was had been thrown away. He knew people when he first saw them, but
then fell back into lethargy or delirium. Suddenly he said: "The king
must be told."

When the case became evidently desperate, the family sent for a monk,
named Fra Giacomo, who had promised Cavour during the cholera epidemic
of 1854 that the refusal of the sacraments to Santa Rosa should not
be repeated in his own extremity. An excited crowd gathered round the
palace. One workman said: "If the priests refuse, a word and we will
finish them all." But Fra Giacomo kept his promise. "I know the
Count," he said (for many years he had dispensed his private
charities); "a clasp of the hand will be sufficient." On the evening
of the same day, June 5, the king ascended the secret staircase
leading to Cavour's bedroom, which had been so often mounted before
dawn by too compromising visitors. Cavour exclaimed on seeing him: "O
Maesta!" but the recognition seemed not to last. "These Neapolitans,
they must be cleansed," he said, interrupting the sovereign's kind
commonplaces of a hope that was not. Then he ordered that his
secretary, Artom, should be ready to transact business with him at
five next morning; "there was no time to lose." Cavour's biographers
have repeated statements as to precepts and injunctions spoken by him
in his last hours. But he was continually delirious; all that could be
understood was that his wandering mind was running on what had been
the life of his life, Italy. In the early dawn of the 6th, he imagined
that he was making a ministerial statement from his place in the
Chamber of Deputies; his voice sounded clear and distinct, but ideas,
names, words, were incoherently mixed together. At four o'clock he
became silent, and very soon life was pronounced to be extinct.

One Sunday