Il Santo abounds in mausoleums, among which Bembo's is famous. In the cloisters stands the tomb of young d'Orbesan, who died in 1595:
Gallus eram, putavi, morior, opes una parentum!
D'Orbesan's French epitaph ends with a line which a great poet would like to have written:
Car il n'est si beau jour qui n'amène sa nuit[221].
Charles Gui Patin[222] is buried in the cathedral: his wag of a father[223] was no longer there to save him, he who had "treated a gentleman of seven years old, who was bled thirteen times and cured in a fortnight, as though by a miracle."
The ancients excelled in funeral inscriptions:
"Here lies Epictetus[224]," said his monumental pillar, "who was a slave, disfigured, poor as Irus, yet a favourite of the gods."
Camoens, among the moderns, composed the most magnificent of epitaphs, that of John III. of Portugal[225]:
"Who lies in this great sepulchre? What is he whom the illustrious arms on this massive scutcheon indicate? Nothing! For that is what all things come to.... May the earth lie as light on him now as he, formerly, lay heavy on the Moor."
My Paduan cicerone was a chatterbox, very different from my Antonio of Venice: he spoke to me at every turn of "that great tyrant Angelo[226];" in the streets, he told me the name of every shop and every café; at Il Santo, he would absolutely show me the well-preserved tongue of the preacher of the Adriatic[227]. Might not the tradition of those sermons come from the songs which, in the middle-ages, the fishermen, following the example of the Ancient Greeks, used to sing to the fishes to charm them? A few of these pelagic ballads still remain to us, in Anglo-Saxon.