Where is çoisRenéthe House of Este to-day? Who thinks of the Obizzos[197], the Nicholases[198], the Hercules[199]? Whose name lingers in those palaces? Leonora's. What do we look for at Ferrara? Alphonsus' dwelling-house? No; Tasso's prison. Whither do men go in procession from century to century? To the sepulchre of the persecutor? No; to the cell of the persecuted.
Tasso, in these parts, obtains an even more memorable victory: he makes us forget Ariosto; the stranger leaves the bones of the singer of Orlando at the Museum and hastens in search of the cell of the singer of Rinaldo at Sant' Anna. Seriousness befits the tomb: one abandons the man who laughed for the man who cried. During life, happiness may have its merit; after death, it loses its value: in the eyes of the future, only unhappy existences are beautiful. To those martyrs of intelligence, pitilessly immolated upon earth, their adversities are reckoned to the increase of their glory; they sleep in the grave with their immortal sufferings, like kings with their crowns. We vulgar unfortunates are of too little account that our troubles should, among posterity, become the ornament of our lives. Stripped though I be of everything as I complete my course, my tomb will not be a temple, but a cool place; Tasso's fate will not be mine; I shall deceive the affectionate and harmonious predictions of friendship:
Le Tasse, errant de ville en ville, Un jour, accablé de ses maux, S'assit près du laurier fertile Oui, sur la tombe de Virgile, Étend toujours ses verts rameaux, etc.[200]
I lost no time in carrying my homage to that son of the Muses, so nobly consoled by his brothers: as a rich ambassador, I had subscribed towards his mausoleum in Rome; as a poor pilgrim in exile's train, I went to kneel in his prison at Ferrara. I know that fairly well-founded doubts are raised as to the identity of the spots; but, like all true believers, I set history at defiance: that crypt, whatever men may say, is the very place in which the _pazzo per amore_ lived for seven whole years; one had necessarily to pass through those cloisters; one came to that gaol where the daylight stole in through the iron bars of an air-hole, where the low-hanging vault that freezes your head drips saltpetrous water on a damp soil that petrifies your feet.