"What there is unfortunate I will tell you myself," replied the marquis. "There is the fact that nobility is an exclusive privilege which all families do not share; that established distinctions rest upon a false principle, and that the peasant hero does not win fame and have his name inscribed in history like the patrician hero; that the domestic virtues of the workingman are not recorded in a book that is always open to his posterity; that the poor and virtuous mother of a family, lovely and chaste to no purpose, does not leave her name and her image on the walls of her hovel; that that hovel of the poor man is not even assured to his descendants as a place of refuge; that all men are not wealthy and free, so that they may consecrate thought, monuments and works of art to the worship of their past; lastly, that there is no such thing as the history of the human race, but only of a few names rescued from oblivion, which are called illustrious names, heedless of the fact that at certain times whole nations become illustrious under the influence of the same deed and the same idea. Who can tell us the names of all the enthusiastic, noble hearts who have thrown aside the spade or the hoe to go to fight the infidel? You have ancestors among them, I doubt not, Pier-Angelo, and you know nothing of them! Or the names of all the sublime monks who have preached the law of God to savage peoples? Your ancestors are among them, Fra Angelo, and you know nothing of them! Ah! my friends, how many noble hearts are stilled forever, how many noble deeds buried in oblivion without advantage to those who live to-day! How melancholy and disastrous is this impenetrable darkness of the past to the common people, and how my heart aches to think that you are probably descended from the blood of brave men and martyrs, although you cannot find the faintest trace of their passage upon the paths you follow through life! Whereas I, who am not so good a man as you, can learn from Master Barbagallo what ancestor of mine was born or died this month five hundred years ago! Consider! On one side the unmitigated abuse of this worship of the patrician; on the other the horror of a vast grave which swallows up without distinction the consecrated bones and the impure bones of the common people! Oblivion is a punishment which should be visited upon the wicked only, and yet it is visited upon no one in our haughty families; whereas in yours it overtakes the most virtuous! History is confiscated to our profit, and you people seem to have no connection whatever with history, which, however, is your work more than ours!"