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. 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] [Sidenote: A visit to Tasso's tomb.]