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To rigid principles he added attractive and chivalric manners, which smoothed his relations with the young king, who, if brusque himself, did not like brusqueness in others. Cavour retired, as became his wont, to enjoy the sweetness of rural leisure at Leri: for him the sovereign remedy to political disquietude.
Leri, which Cavour looked upon henceforth as his true home, lies in one of the ugliest parts of the plains of Piedmont, cold in winter, scorched by a burning sun in summer, and unhealthy from the exhalations of the rice-fields which contribute to its wealth.
He was on the point of getting into his carriage to catch the train for Leri when the messenger reached the Palazzo Cavour with the royal command to go to the castle. If he had refused office and returned to the congenial activity of his life as a country gentleman, his name would not be attached to the melancholy sacrifice which Napoleon was now determined to exact from Italy.
Some writers again, among whom it is with much regret I am compelled to mention Lopez de Gomara and Juan de Leri, insinuate that the Canaanites, being driven from the land of promise by the Jews, were seized with such a panic that they fled without looking behind them, until stopping to take breath, they found themselves safe in America.
As usual he sought refreshment in the fields of Leri, and when, after a brief rest, he returned to Turin, the furious passions which had surged round this domestic duel were beginning to cool as the eyes of the nation became more and more fixed on the conflict in the East and its significance to Italy.
Cavour proposed the health of the guest of the evening at the Cobden banquet at Turin, but almost immediately after, he retired to Leri, as he did not wish it to appear that he meant to embark on public life while the existing political dead-lock lasted. There was only room for conspirators or for those who extended toleration to the régime in force.
The Congress hung fire, and Cavour remained at Leri occupied with his cows and his fields, but secretly chafing at the sight of Italy in a perilous crisis abandoned to men whom he believed incapable. From the moment that he had been called back to the public service, his own return to the premiership could only be a question of time, and he wished that time to be short.
Acting on these reflections, he resigned his commission, and his father, perhaps to keep him quiet, bought him a small independent property near the ancestral estate at Leri.
Cavour was often bitterly blamed for favouring and sparing the landowning class, though whether he did this because he had estates at Leri, as his detractors alleged, or because agriculture must always be the most vital of all Italian interests, need not be discussed now. Improved education stimulated enterprise.
He induced others to join him in experiments which were then innovations: steam-mills, factories for artificial manures and the like, while the machinery and new methods introduced at Leri revolutionised farming in Piedmont. One great scheme planned by him, an irrigatory canal between the Ticino and the Po, was only finished after his death, as the most worthy tribute to his memory.
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