By the king's wish, Cavour and Garibaldi met and exchanged a few courteous, if not cordial, words. Cavour ignored the scene in the Chamber; he had already said that for him it had never happened. It was their last meeting. The wear and tear of public life as it was lived by Cavour must have been enormous; it meant the concentration, not only of the mental and physical powers, but also of the nervous and emotional faculties, on a single object. He had not the relaxation of athletic or literary tastes, or the repose of a cheerful domestic life. Latterly he even gave up going to the theatre in order to dose undisturbed. A doctor warned him not to work after dinner, and to take frequent holidays in the mountains; he neglected both rules. He was inclined to despise rest. He used to say: "When I want a thing to be done quickly, I always go to a busy man: the unoccupied man never has any time." He, himself, did not know how to be idle; yet he was painfully conscious of overwork and brain-fag. He told his friend Castelli that he was tormented by sleeplessness, but still more by certain ideas which assailed him at night, and which he could not get rid of. He got up and walked about the room, but all was useless; "I am no longer master of my head." When Parliament was open, he never missed a sitting, and he left nothing to subordinates in the several departments in his charge. While his mental processes remained clear and orderly, the brain, when not governed by the will, did its tasks as a tired slave does them; thus he was surrounded by a mass of confused papers and documents, amongst which he sometimes had to seek for days for the one required at the moment.
In the last half of May he was noticed to be unwontedly irritable and impatient of contradiction. The debates bored him; on the last day that he sat in his accustomed place, he said that, when Italy was made, he would bring in a Bill to abolish all the chairs of rhetoric. That evening 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."