The author of the Henriade expires at the Hôtel de Villette, on a quay of the Seine[190], and rejects the aid of the Church; the bard of the Gerusalemme dies a Christian at Sant' Onofrio: compare and see what beauty faith lends to death.
All that is related of Tasso's posthumous triumph appears to me to be open to suspicion. His ill-fortune was even more persistent than has been supposed. He did not die at the hour indicated for his triumph: he survived that projected triumph by twenty-five days. He did not lie to his destiny: he was never crowned, not even after death; his remains were not exposed at the Capitol in senator's robes amid the throng and the tears of the people: he was buried, as he had ordered, in the Church of Sant' Onofrio. The stone with which they covered him, again according to his wish, bore neither date nor name; ten years later, Manso, Marchese Della Villa[191], Tasso's last friend and Milton's host composed the admirable epitaph:
Hic jacet Torquatus Tassus
Tasso's tomb.
Manso succeeded only with difficulty in having it carved; for the monks, who religiously observed testamentary wishes, objected to any inscription: and yet, without the Hic jacet or the words, Torquati Tassi ossa, Tasso's ashes would have been lost in the hermitage on the Janiculum, as Poussin's have been at San Lorenzo in Lucina.
Cardinal Cintio formed the plan of erecting a mausoleum to the singer of the Holy Sepulchre; the plan was abortive. Cardinal Bevilacqua drew up a pompous epitaph destined for the slab of another future mausoleum, and the thing went no further. Two centuries later, the brother of Napoleon thought about a monument at Sorrento: Joseph soon bartered Tasso's cradle for the Cid's tomb.
Lastly, in our own days, a grand funeral decoration has been begun in honour of the Italian Homer, once poor and wandering like the Greek Homer: will the work be completed? As for me, I prefer to any marble tumulus the little stone in the chapel of which I spoke as follows in the Itinéraire:
"I looked[192] in a deserted church for the tomb of this last painter[193], and I had some trouble in finding it: the same thing had happened to me in Rome[194] with the tomb of Tasso. After all, the ashes of a religious and unfortunate poet are not too ill-placed in a hermitage. The singer of the Gerusalemme seems to have taken refuge in this unknown burying-place, as though to escape men's persecutions; he fills the world with his fame and himself lies unrecognised under the orange-tree[195] of Sant' Onofrio."
The Italian committee entrusted with the necrolithic[196] labours asked me to collect for them in France and to distribute the indulgences of the Muses to every faithful donor of a few mites towards the poet's monument. July 1830 came: my fortune and credit began to look like the fate of Tasso's ashes. Those ashes seem to possess a virtue that rejects any display of opulence, repels any lustre, shrinks from any honours: little men want big tombs, big men little ones.