The god who laughs at all my dreams, after hurling me from the Janiculum with the old Conscript Fathers, has brought me back to Tasso in another way. Here I am able to form a still better opinion of the poet whose three daughters were born at Ferrara: Armida, Erminia and Clorinda.
Where is the 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]
A visit to Tasso's tomb.
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.
On the walls, outside the prison and all around the grating, one reads the names of the worshippers of the god: the statue of Memnon, quivering with harmony under the touch of dawn, was covered with the declarations of the several witnesses of the prodigy. I did not daub my ex-voto; I hid myself in the crowd, whose secret prayers must, by reason of their very humility, be more acceptable to Heaven.
The buildings in which Tasso's prison is enclosed to-day belong to a hospital open to every infirmity; they have been placed under the protection of the Saints: Sancto Torquato sacrum. At some distance from the blest cell is a dilapidated yard; in the middle of that yard, the porter cultivates a garden-plot surrounded by a hedge of mallows: the pale-green palissade was loaded with large and beautiful flowers. I gathered one of those roses, the colour of royal mourning, that seemed to me to be growing at the foot of a Calvary. Genius is a Christ: denied, persecuted, scourged, crowned with thorns, crucified by men and for men, it dies leaving them the light and rises again to be worshipped.
Ferrara, 18 September 1833.
I went out on the morning of the 18th and, on returning to the Three Crowns, found the street blocked with people; the neighbours were gaping at the windows. An escort of one hundred men of the Austrian and Papal troops occupied the inn. The corps of officers of the garrison, the magistrates of the town, the generals, the Pro-legate were awaiting Madame, whose coming had been announced by a courier wearing the French arms. The stair-case and drawing-rooms were decorated with flowers. Never was finer reception arranged for an exile.