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 Maestà!" 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 in June, a year before, Cavour spent some hours in the ancestral castle at Santena, which he so rarely visited. On that occasion he said to the village syndic: "Here I wish my bones to rest." The wish was respected, the king yielding to it his own desire to give his great minister a royal burial at the Superga. Cavour had the old sentiment that it was well for a man to be buried where his fathers were buried, and to die in their faith. At all times it would have been repugnant to him to pose as a sceptic, most of all on his deathbed. Once, when he was reminded in the Campo Santo at Pisa that he was standing on holy earth brought from Palestine, he said, smiling, "Perhaps they will make a saint of me some day." He died a Catholic, and, instead of launching its censures against Fra Giacomo, the Church might have written "ancor questo" among its triumphs. For the rest, with minds such as Cavour's, religion is not the mystical elevation of the soul towards God, but the intellectual assent to the ruling of a superior will, and religious forms are, in substance, symbols of that assent. The essence of Cavour's theology and morality is expressed in two sayings of Epictetus. One is, that as to piety to the gods, the chief thing is to have right opinions about them; to think that they exist, and that they administer the all well and justly. The other is: For this is your duty, to act well the part that is given to you.