Chapter VII: Book VII: 145 (1)

Arrival of Madame de Bauffremont in Venice--Catajo--The Duke of Modena--Petrarch's Tomb at Arqua--The land of poets--Tasso--Arrival of Madame la Duchesse de Berry--Mademoiselle Lebeschu--Count Lucchesi-Palli--Discussion--Dinner--Bugeaud the gaoler--Madame de Saint-Priest, M. de Saint-Priest--Madame de Podenas--Our band--I refuse to go to Prague--I yield at a word--Padua--Tombs--Zanze's manuscript--Unexpected news--The Governor of the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom--Letters from Madame to Charles X. and Henry V.--M. de Montbel--My note to the Governor--I set out for Prague.

_Between_ VENICE and FERRARA, 16 _to_ 17 _September_ 1833.

There was an immense interval between those dreamings and the truths to which I returned when calling at the Princesse de Bauffremont's hotel; I had to jump from 1806, with the memories of which year I had been occupied, to 1833, the year in which I found myself in reality: Marco Polo[146] fell from China into Venice, after an absence of exactly twenty-seven years.

Madame de Bauffremont displays the name of Montmorency wonderfully in her face and manner: she might very well, like that Charlotte, the mother of the Grand Condé and the Duchesse de Longueville, have been loved by Henry IV. The princess told me that Madame la Duchesse de Berry had written me a letter from Pisa which I had not received: Her Royal Highness was arriving at Ferrara, where she hoped to see me.

It cost me a pang to leave my retreat; I needed another week to complete my survey: I especially regretted that I was not able to carry through the adventure of Zanze[147]; but my time belonged to the mother of Henry V., and, whenever I am following a certain road, there comes a jolt that flings me into another path.

I departed, leaving my luggage at the Hôtel de l'Europe, counting on returning with Madame. I found my calash at Fusina: they took it out of an old coach-house, like a jewel from the Crown Wardrobe. I left the bank which perhaps takes its name from the three-pronged fork of the King of the Sea: _Fuscina._

On arriving at Padua, I said to the postillion:

"The Ferrara Road."

This road is charming, as far as Monselice: extremely graceful hills, orchards of fig-trees, mulberry-trees and willows festooned with vines, gay meadows, ruined castles. I passed the Catajo, all dressed out with soldiers: the Abbé Lenglet[148], a very learned man otherwise, mistook that manor-house for China. The Catajo does not belong to Angelica[149], but to the Duke of Modena[150]. I ran plump up against His Highness, who was deigning to go on foot along the high-road. This Duke is the scion of the Princes invented by Machiavelli[151]: he has the spirit not to recognise Louis-Philippe.

The village of Arqua shows Petrarch's tomb, sung, together with its site, by Lord Byron[152]:

"Che fai, che pensi? che pur dietro guardi
Nel tempo, che tornar non pote omai,
Anima sconsolata?"

[Sidenote: The poet's country.]

All this country, within a diameter of forty leagues, is the native soil of the writers and poets: Livy[153], Virgil[154], Catullus[155], Ariosto[156], Guarini[157], the Strozzis[158], the three Bentivoglios[159], Bembo[160], Bartoli[161], Bojardo[162], Pindemonte[163], Varano[164], Monti[165] and a crowd of other celebrated men owe their birth to this land of the Muses. Tasso himself was of Bergamasque origin[166]. Of the later Italian poets, I have seen only one of the two Pindemontes. I have known neither Cesarotti[167] nor Monti; I should have been happy to meet Pellico and Manzoni, the parting rays of Italian glory.

The Euganean Hills, which I crossed, were gilded by the gold of the setting sun with an agreeable variety of shapes and a great purity of outline: one of those hills resembled the chief pyramid of Sakkarah, when it imprints itself at sunset on the Libyan horizon.

I continued my journey at night through Rovigo; a sheet of mist covered the earth. I did not see the Po, except when crossing at Lagoscuro. The carriage stopped; the postillion summoned the ferry-boat with his bugle. The silence was complete; only, on the other side of the river, the baying of a dog and the distant cascades, with their treble echo, made answer to his horn: the proscenium of Tasso's Elysian empire, which we were about to enter.

A ripple on the water, through the mist and the darkness, announced the coming of the ferry-boat; it glided along the towing-rope fastened to boats at anchor. I reached Ferrara between four and five o'clock, on the morning of the 16th; I alighted at the Three Crowns Hotel: Madame was expected there.

_Wednesday_ 17.

As Her Royal Highness had not arrived, I visited the church of San Paolo: I saw nothing but tombs there; for the rest, not a soul, except those of a few dead men and mine, which is hardly living. At the back of the choir hung a picture by Guercino[168].

The cathedral is deceptive: you see a front and sides encrusted with bas-reliefs representing sacred and profane subjects. Over this exterior run other ornaments usually placed in the interior of Gothic edifices, such as rudentures, Arab corbels, nimbused soffits, galleries with small columns, pointed arches and trefoils, disposed in the thickness of the walls. You enter, and you stand dumbfounded at the sight of a new church with spherical vaults, with massive pillars. Something of that incongruity exists in France, both physically and morally: in our old castles, they are contriving modern closets, with plenty of pigeon--holes, alcoves and clothes-presses. Break into the souls of a good many of those men tabarded with historic names: what do you find there? Backstair tendencies.

I was quite abashed at the sight of that cathedral: it seemed to have been turned, like a gown worn inside out; a burgess' wife of the time of Louis XV. cloaked as a castellan's lady of the twelfth century[169].

[Sidenote: Ferrara.]

Ferrara, formerly so much fretted by its women, its pleasures and its poets, is almost uninhabited: in places where the streets are wide, they are deserted and sheep could browse there. The dilapidated houses do not gather fresh life, as at Venice, from the architecture, the ships, the sea and the native gaiety of the place. Standing at the gate of the so unfortunate Romagna, Ferrara, under the yoke of an Austrian garrison[170], has something of the face of a persecuted victim: it seems to wear everlasting mourning for Tasso; ready to fall, it is bent like an old woman. As the only monument of the day, rises half from the ground a criminal court, with unfinished prisons. Whom will they send to those cells of recent construction? Young Italy. Those new gaols, topped with cranes and bound with scaffoldings, like the palaces in Dido's city, touch hands with the old cell of the singer of the _Gerusalemme._

FERRARA, 18 _September_ 1833.

If there be a life that should make one despair of happiness for men of talent, it is Tasso's. The beautiful sky upon which his eyes looked when they opened to the light was a deceptive sky:

"My adversities," he says, "began with my life. Cruel fortune
snatched me from my mother's arms. I remember her kisses moist with
tears, her prayers which the winds have carried away. I was not
again to press my face to her face. With an uncertain step, like
Ascanius or young Camillus, I followed my wandering and outlawed
father. I grew up in poverty and exile."

Torquato Tasso lost Bernardo Tasso[171] at Ostiglia. Torquato has killed Bernardo as a poet; he has made him live as a father.

Drawn from obscurity by the publication of _Rinaldo_[172], Tasso was summoned to Ferrara. He made his first appearance there amid the festivals on the occasion of the marriage of Alphonsus II. with the Archduchess Barbara. He there met Leonora, Alphonsus' sister: love and misfortune ended in giving his genius all its beauty.

"I saw," says the poet, describing, in _Aminta_[173], the first
Court of Ferrara, "I saw charming goddesses and nymphs, without
veils, without clouds: I felt the inspiration of a new virtue, of a
new divinity, and I sang of war and heroes."

Tasso read the stanzas of the _Gerusalemme_, as he composed them, to Alphonsus' two sisters, Lucrezia and Leonora. He was sent to the Cardinal Ippolito of Este[174], who was settled at the Court of France: he pawned his clothes and furniture to take that journey, while the cardinal whom he was honouring with his presence made Charles IX. the gorgeous present of one hundred Barbary horses with their Arab riders superbly dressed. Left at first in the stables, Tasso was afterwards presented to the Poet-King, the friend of Ronsard. In a letter which has been preserved for us, he judges the French harshly. He wrote a few verses of his _Gerusalemme_ in an abbey of men in France with which Cardinal Ippolito was endowed; this was Châlis, near Ermenonville, where Jean-Jacques Rousseau was to dream and die: Dante also had passed obscurely through Paris.

Tasso returned to Italy in 1571 and did not witness the Massacre of St. Bartholomew[175]. He went straight to Rome and from there came back to Ferrara. _Aminta_ was played with great success. Although he became the rival of Ariosto, the author of _Rinaldo_ admired the author of _Orlando_ to such a degree that he refused the homage of that poet's nephew:

[Sidenote: Tasso at Ferrara.]

"This laurel which you offer me," he wrote, "the judgment of wise
men, of men of the world and my own judgment have laid on the head
of the man to whom you are bound by ties of blood. Prostrate before
his image, I give him the most honourable titles that affection and
respect are able to dictate to me. I will loudly proclaim him my
father, my lord and my master."

This modesty, so little known in our time, did not disarm jealousy. Torquato beheld the feasts given by Venice to Henry III. returning from Poland, when a manuscript of the _Gerusalemme_ was printed by stealth: the minute criticism of the friends whose tastes he consulted alarmed him. Perhaps he showed himself too sensitive; but perhaps he had built the success of his love-affairs on his hopes of fame. He imagined himself set about by pitfalls and treasons; he was obliged to defend his life. His stay at Belriguardo, where Goethe evokes his shade, failed to calm him. Says the great German poet, who makes the great Italian poet speak:

Thus like the nightingale, conceal'd in shade,
From his love-laden breast he fills the air
And neighbouring thickets with melodious plaint:
His blissful sadness and his tuneful grief
Charm every ear, enrapture every heart[176].
. . . . . . . .
And what is more deserving to survive,
And silently to work for centuries,
Than the confession of a noble love
Confided modestly to gentle song[177]?

Says Goethe again, interpreting Leonora's sentiments:

How charming is it in the mind's clear depths
One's self to mirror . . . .
. . . . . . . .
To feel his presence, and with him to near,
With airy tread, the future's hidden realm!
Thus should old age and time their influence lose.
. . . . . . . .
All that is transient in his song survives;
Still art thou young, still happy, when the round
Of changeful time shall long have borne thee on[178].

The singer of Erminia conjures Leonora (still in the lines of the poet of Germania) to banish him to one of her loneliest villas:

Oh, send me thither! There let me be yours!
And I will tend thy trees, construct the shed
That shields thy citrons from autumnal blasts,
Fencing them round with interwoven reeds!
Flowers of the fairest hues shall strike their roots,
And ev'ry path be trimm'd with nicest care[179].

The story of Tasso's loves was lost: Goethe found it again.

The sorrows of the Muses and the scruples of religion were beginning to impair Tasso's reason. He was subjected to a temporary confinement. He escaped almost naked: wandering in the mountains, he borrowed the rags of a shepherd and, thus disguised, arrived at his sister Cornelia's. The caresses of this sister and the charms of his native country allayed his sufferings for a moment:

"I wanted," he said, " to retire to Sorrento, as to a peaceful
harbour: _quasi in porto di quiete._"

But he could not remain where he was born. A spell drew him to Ferrara: love is the real mother-land! Coldly received by Duke Alphonsus, he withdrew once more; he wandered through the little Courts of Mantua, Urbino, Turin, singing to pay for the hospitality shown him. He said to the Metauro, Raphael's native stream:

"Weak, but glorious child of the Apennines, I, a vagrant traveller,
come to seek safety and repose upon thy banks."

Armida had passed to Raphael's cradle; she was to preside over the enchantments of the Farnesina.

Surprised by a storm in the neighbourhood of Vercelli, Tasso celebrated the night which he had passed in a noble-man's house in the beautiful dialogue known as the _Padre di famiglia._ At Turin, he was refused admission at the gates, so wretched was his condition. Hearing that Alphonsus[180] was about to contract a new marriage, he again took the road for Ferrara. A divine spirit attached itself to the steps of this god hidden under the garb of the shepherds of Admetus; he thought that he saw and heard that spirit; one day, seated by the fire and seeing the sun-light on the window:

"_Ecco ramico spirito_," he said, "_che cortesemente è venuto a favellarmi._"

[Sidenote: Tasso in prison.]

And Torquato conversed with a sun-beam. He re-entered the fatal city even as the bird flings itself into the jaws of the serpent that fascinates it. Disowned and spurned by the courtiers, taunted by the servants, he launched out into complaints, and Alphonsus ordered him to be locked up in a mad-house in the Hospital of Sant' Anna.

Then the poet wrote to one of his friends:

"Bowed down under the weight of my misfortunes, I have renounced
all thoughts of glory; I should think myself lucky if I could
only quench the thirst with which I am devoured....The idea of
an unlimited captivity and my indignation at the ill-treatment to
which I am subjected increase my despair. The filthiness of my
beard, hair and clothes renders me an object of disgust to myself."

The prisoner implored the whole earth and even his pitiless persecutor; he drew from his lyre accents which ought to have made the walls to fall with which his wretchedness was girt about:

Piango il morir; non piango il morir solo,
Ma il modo . . . . . .
. . . . . . . .
Mi saria di conforto, aver la tomba,
Ch' altra mole innalzar credea co' carmi.

Lord Byron wrote a poem called the _Lament of Tasso_; but he cannot get away from himself and substitutes himself everywhere for the persons whom he sets before us; even as his genius lacks tenderness, his "lament" is no more than an imprecation.

Tasso addressed the following petition to the Council of the Ancients of Bergamo:

"Torquato Tasso, a Bergamasque not merely by origin, but by
affection, having first lost his father's inheritance and his
mother's dowry.... and (after the bondage of many years and the
fatigues of a very long period) having not yet lost, in the midst
of so much misery, the faith which he has in this city, ventures
to ask its assistance. Let it conjure the Duke of Ferrara, once
my benefactor and protector, to restore me to my country, my
family and myself. The unfortunate Tasso therefore beseeches Your
Lordships to send Monsignore Licino or some other to treat for my
deliverance. The memory of their kindness will not end until after
my life.

_"Di VV. SS. affezionatissimo servidore_,

"TORQUATO TASSO.

"PRIGIONE E INFERMO NEL OSPEDAL DI SANT' ANNA IN FERRERA."

Tasso was refused ink, pens, or paper. He had sung the "magnanimous Alphonsus," and the magnanimous Alphonsus thrust into a madman's cell him who had shed imperishable lustre on his ungrateful head. In a most graceful sonnet, the prisoner beseeches a cat to lend him the brightness of its eyes to replace the light of which he has been deprived; a harmless raillery which proves the poet's gentleness and the excess of his distress:

Fatemi luce a scriver queste carmi.

At night, Tasso imagined that he heard strange noises, the tolling of funeral knells. Ghosts tormented him:

"I am worn out," he cried, "I succumb!"

Attacked by a serious illness, he thought that he saw the Virgin save him by a miracle:

Egrio io languiva, e d'alto, sonno avvinto.
. . . . . . . .
Giacea con guancia di pallor dipinta,
Quando di luce incoronata . . .
Maria, pronta scendesti al mio dolore.

Montaigne visited Tasso reduced to this excess of adversity and showed him no compassion. At the same time, Camoens was ending his life in an alms-house in Lisbon: what consoled him, as he lay dying on a pallet? The verses of the prisoner of Ferrara. The captive author of the _Gerusalemme_, admiring the mendicant author of the _Lusiadas_, said to Vasco de Gama:

Tant' oltre stende il glorioso volo
Che i tuoi spalmate legni andar men lungo.

Thus did the voice from the Eridanus resound on the banks of the Tagus; thus did two illustrious sufferers of a like genius and a like destiny congratulate each other across the seas, from hospital to hospital, putting mankind to shame.

How many kings, great men and fools, drowned to-day in oblivion, but believing themselves, towards the close of the sixteenth century, persons worthy of remembrance, were ignorant of the very names of Tasso and Camoens! In 1754, for the first time, was read "the name of Washington, in the account of an obscure combat delivered in the back-woods between a troop of French, English and savages[181]: which clerk at Versailles, which purveyor to the Parc-aux-Cerfs, which man, above all, of the Court or the Academy would have cared, at that time, to change names with that American planter[182]?"

FERRARA, 18 _September_ 1833.

Envy hastened to spread its poison over open wounds. The Accademia della Crusca declared that "the _Gerusalemme Liberata_ was a cold and heavy compilation, obscure and unequal in style, full of ridiculous lines and barbarous words, with no single beauty to redeem its innumerable defects."

A fanatical love for Ariosto dictated that verdict. But the shout of popular admiration drowned the academic blasphemies: it was no longer possible for Duke Alphonsus to prolong the captivity of a man who was guilty only of singing that captivity. The Pope[183] claimed the deliverance from the honour of Italy.

[Sidenote: Tasso's release.]

Tasso was released from prison[184], but none the happier for it Leonora was dead. He dragged himself from town to town with his sorrows. At Loretto, ready to die with hunger, he was on the point, says one of his biographers, "of taking up the hand that had built Armida's palace."

In Naples, he experienced some of the sweet sentiment of country:

E donde
Partii fanciullo, or dopo tanti lustri
Torno . . . . . .
Canuto ed egro alle native sponde.

He preferred to sumptuous abodes a cell at the Convent of Montoliveto. During a journey which he took to Rome, fever having laid hold of him, a hospital was once more his refuge.

Returning from Rome and Florence to Naples, laying the blame of his ills on his immortal poem, he rewrote it and spoilt it. He commenced his cantos, _Delle sette Giornato del Monde Creato_, a subject treated by Du Bartas[185]. Tasso makes Eve issue from Adam's bosom, while God:

. . . irrigò di placida quiete Tutte le membra al sonnachioso ...

The poet weakens the biblical image, and, in the gentle creations of his lyre, woman becomes no more than man's first dream. The sorrow of leaving uncompleted a pious work which he regarded as an expiatory hymn decided Tasso to condemn his profane songs to destruction.

Less respected by society than by the robbers, the poet received from Marco Sciarra[186], the famous leader of _condottieri_, the offer of an escort to take him to Rome[187]. He was presented at the Vatican, and the Pope addressed him in these words:

"Torquato, you do honour to the crown that honoured those who wore it before you."

Posterity has confirmed this eulogy. Tasso replied to the praises by quoting this line from Seneca:

Magnifica verba mors prope admota excutit.

Attacked by an evil which he foresaw was to cure all the others, he retired to the Convent of Sant' Onofrio, on the 1st of April 1595. He climbed up to his last refuge during a tempest of wind and rain. The monks received him at the gate where Domenichino's frescoes are fading away to-day. He greeted the fathers:

"I come to die among you."

O hospitable cloisters, deserts of religion and poetry, you have lent your solitude to outlawed Dante and to dying Tasso!

[Sidenote: Tasso's death.]

All succour was unavailing. On the seventh morning of the fever, the Pope's[188] doctor declared to the patient that he had very little hope. Tasso kissed him and thanked him for announcing such good news to him. Next he looked up to the sky and, with an abundant outpouring of the heart, gave thanks to God for His mercies.

His weakness increased; he wished to receive the Eucharist in the church of the monastery: he dragged himself there leaning on the monks and returned carried in their arms. When he was stretched once more upon his couch, the prior asked him as to his last wishes.

"I have troubled very little about fortune's gifts during my life; I care still less for them at my death. I have no will to make."

"Where will you have your burying-place?"

"In your church, if you will deign to do my remains so great an honour."

"Will you dictate your epitaph yourself?"

Thereupon, turning towards his confessor:

"Father, write: I return my soul to God, who gave it me, and my body to the earth, whence it came. I bequeath to this monastery the sacred image of my Redeemer."

He took in his hands a crucifix which the Pope had given him, and pressed it to his lips.

Seven more days passed by. The tried Christian having solicited the favour of the Holy Oils, Cardinal Cintio arrived, bringing the blessing of the Sovereign Pontiff. The dying man displayed great joy at this:

"Here," said he, "is the crown which I came to Rome to seek; I hope to triumph to-morrow with its aid."

Virgil sent to beg Augustus to fling the _Æneid_ into the fire; Tasso entreated Cintio to burn the _Gerusalemme._ Thereafter, he desired to be left alone with his crucifix.

The cardinal had not reached the door when his tears, till then violently restrained, burst forth: the bell was tolled, and the monks, chanting the prayers for the dead, wept and lamented in the cloisters. At this sound, Torquato said to the charitable recluses, whom he seemed to see wander around him like shadows:

"Friends, you think you are leaving me; I am only going before you."

Thenceforth, he held no converse except with his confessors and a few fathers great in doctrine. When he was on the point of breathing his last, they gathered this stanza from his lips, the fruit of his life's experience:

"If death were not, there would be nothing upon earth more miserable than man."

On the 25th of April 1595, about the middle of the day, the poet cried:

"_In manus tuas, Domine...._[189]"

The remainder of the verse was scarcely audible, as though it had been uttered by a departing traveller.

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

[Sidenote: 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.

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.]

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.

When the carriages came in sight, the drums beat a salute, the music of the regiments burst forth, the soldiers presented arms. Madame, in the midst of the throng, was put to it to descend from her calash, when it drew up in front of the hotel; I had hastened up; she recognised me among the crowd. She held out her hand to me across the established authorities and the beggars who flung themselves upon her, and said:

"'My son is your King;' do help me to pass through."

I did not find her very much changed, though she was thinner; she had something of a sprightly, little girl.

I walked in front of her; she gave her arm to M. de Lucchesi; Madame de Podenas[201] followed her. We climbed the stairs and entered the apartments between two rows of grenadiers, amid the clatter of arms, the sound of trumpets, the cheers of the spectators. They took me for the majordomo, they applied to me to be presented to the mother of Henry V. My name was linked to those names in the minds of the crowd.

[Sidenote: Arrival of Madame.]

You must know that Madame was received with the same tokens of respect from Palermo to Ferrara, notwithstanding the Notes of Louis-Philippe's envoys. M. de Broglie had had the audacity to ask the Pope to send away the outlaw; Cardinal Bernetti replied:

"Rome has always been the asylum of fallen grandeurs. If the family
of Bonaparte, in its later days, found a refuge beside the Father
of the Faithful, with still greater reason must hospitality be
shown to the family of the Most Christian Kings."

I am no great believer in this dispatch, but I was keenly struck by one contrast: in France, the Government lavishes insults upon a woman of whom it is afraid; in Italy, they remember only the name, the courage and the misfortunes of Madame la Duchesse de Berry.

I was obliged to accept my improvised role of First Lord of the Bed-chamber. The Princess was very funny: she wore a gown of greyish cloth, fitting close to her figure; on her head, a sort of little widow's cap or the biggin of a child or naughty school-girl. She ran here, there and everywhere, like a giddy goose; rushed about heedlessly, in the midst of the curious throng, with an air of assurance, just as she had sped through the woods of the Vendée. She looked at no one, recognised no one; I was obliged to catch her disrespectfully by her dress, or to bar her road, saying:

"Madame, there is the Austrian Commandant, that officer. in white; Madame, there is the commandant of the pontifical troops, that officer in blue; Madame, there is the Pro-legate, that tall young priest in black."

She stopped, spoke a few words in Italian or French, not too appropriate, but roundly, frankly, prettily, so that their very unpleasantness was not displeasing. It was a sort of manner resembling nothing that one had ever known before. It made me feel almost ill at ease, and yet I had no anxiety as to the effect produced by the little woman who had escaped from the flames and gaol.

A comical piece of confusion followed. I must say one thing with all modest reserve: the vain noise of my life grows in volume as the real silence of that life increases. I am unable nowadays to alight at an inn, either in France or abroad, without being at once besieged. For old Italy, I am the defender of religion; for young Italy, the defender of liberty; for the authorities I have the honour of being _Sua Eccellenza_ GIA _Ambasciadore di Francia_ at Verona and in Rome. Ladies, all doubtless of rare beauty, have lent the language of Angelica and Aquilante il Nero to the Floridan Atala and the Moor Aben-Hamet. I therefore see scholars arrive, old priests with wide skull-caps, women, whom I thank for their translations and their favours; next, _mendicanti_, too well-bred to believe that an ex-ambassador is as poor a beggar as their lordships.

Now, my admirers had hurried to the Hôtel des Trois-Couronnes, together with the crowd attracted by Madame la Duchesse de Berry: they got me up into a corner of a window and began to address me in an harangue the end of which they went off to recite to Marie-Caroline. In their mental confusion, the two troops sometimes mixed up the patron and the patroness: I was greeted as "Your Royal Highness," and Madame told me that she had been complimented on the _Génie du Christianisme_; we exchanged our mutual fames. The Princess was charmed at having written a work in four volumes, and I was proud to have been taken for the daughter of kings.

Suddenly, the Princess disappeared: she went off on foot, with Count Lucchesi, to see Tasso's cell; she was a judge of prisons. The mother of the banished orphan, of the child-heir of St. Louis, Marie-Caroline leaving the Fortress of Blaye and seeking in the town of Renée of France[202] only a poet's prison-cell is an unique thing in the history of fortune and human glory. The venerables of Prague would have passed through Ferrara a hundred times without taking such an idea into their heads; but Madame de Berry is a Neapolitan and a country-woman of Tasso, who said:

"_Ho desiderio di Napoli, come l'anime ben disposte del paradiso._"

It was when I was in opposition and disgrace; the Ordinances were secretly simmering at the Palace and still joyously lying at the bottom of men's hearts. One day, the Duchesse de Berry saw an engraving representing the singer of the _Gerusalemme_ at the bars of his cell:

"I hope," she said, "that we shall soon see Chateaubriand like that."

Words of prosperity, of which we must take no more notice than of a rash word spoken in drunkenness. I was to join Madame in Tasso's very dungeon, after suffering in the prisons of the police on her behalf. What loftiness of sentiment it showed in the noble Princess, how great a mark of esteem she gave me, when she applied to me in the hour of her misfortune, after the desire that she had expressed! If her first wish appraised my talents too highly, her confidence was less mistaken as to my character.

FERRARA, 18 _September_ 1833.

M. de Saint-Priest[203], Madame de Saint-Priest and M. A. Sala[204] arrived. The latter had been an officer in the Royal Guards; he has been substituted in my publishing arrangements for M. Delloye[205], a major in the same guards.

Two hours after Madame's arrival, I saw Mademoiselle Lebeschu[206], my fellow-Breton; she hastened to tell me of the hopes that they were good enough to place in me. Mademoiselle Lebeschu figures in the _Carlo-Alberto_ trial.

On returning from her poetic visit, the Duchesse de Berry sent for me: I found her waiting for me with M. le Comte de Lucchesi and Madame de Podenas.

Count Lucchesi-Palli is tall and dark: Madame calls him a Tancred on the distaff side. His manners towards the Princess his wife are a master-piece of propriety: neither humble nor arrogant; a respectful mixture of the authority of the husband and the submission of the subject.

Madame at once talked business with me; she thanked me for coming in reply to her invitation; she told me that she was going to Prague, not only to join her family, but to obtain her son's deed of majority: she next declared that she was going to take me with her.

This declaration, for which I was not prepared, struck me with consternation: to return to Prague! I put forward the objections that suggested themselves to my mind.

If I went to Prague with Madame and she obtained her wish, the honours of the victory would not belong wholly to the mother of Henry V., and that would be a bad thing; if Charles X. persisted in refusing to grant the deed of majority, I being present (and I was persuaded that he would so persist), I should lose my credit. It seemed to me better, therefore, that I should be kept as a sort of reserve force, in case Madame should fail in her negociation.

[Sidenote: Her Liveliness.]

Her Royal Highness opposed these arguments: she maintained that she would be able to put forth no strength in Prague, if I did not accompany her; that I frightened her great relations; that she consented to leave to me the glory of the victory and the honour of linking my name with her son's accession.

M. and Madame de Saint-Priest entered in the middle of this discussion and laid great stress on the Princess's view of the matter. I persisted in my refusal. Dinner was announced.

Madame was very lively. She described to me, in the most amusing fashion, her contests with General Bugeaud[207] at Blaye. Bugeaud used to attack her on politics and lose his temper; Madame lost her temper even more than he did his: they screamed like a pair of eagles and she ended by turning him out of the room. Her Royal Highness kept back certain details which she would perhaps have communicated to me if I had remained with her. She gave Bugeaud no rest; she pulled him to pieces finely:

"You know," she said, "that I asked for you four times? Bugeaud passed on my demands to d'Argout[208]. D'Argout sent back word to Bugeaud that he was a fool, that he ought to have refused your admission at once and on the face of it: he has such good taste, that M. d'Argout."

Madame laid stress on the rhyme of those two words[209], with her Italian accent.

Meanwhile the rumour of my refusal had spread among our faithful friends and was beginning to alarm them. Mademoiselle Lebeschu came, after dinner, to read me a lecture in my room; M. de Saint-Priest, an intelligent and sensible man, first sent M. Sala to me, and then replaced him and urged me in his turn: "they had sent M. de La Ferronnays on to Hradschin, in order to remove the first difficulties. M. de Montbel had arrived; he had been told to go to Rome to obtain a copy of the marriage-contract, which was drawn up in due and proper form and which was in Cardinal Zurla's keeping[210].

"Supposing," continued M. de Saint-Priest, "that Charles X. should refuse his consent to the deed of majority, would it not be well if Madame were to obtain a declaration from her son? What should be the nature of that declaration?"

"A very short Note," I replied, "in which Henry would protest against Philip's usurpation."

M. de Saint-Priest conveyed my words to Madame. My resistance continued to occupy the minds of the Princess's environment Madame de Saint-Priest, with her nobility of sentiment, appeared to entertain the keenest regret. Madame de Podenas had not lost the habit of that serene smile which shows her beautiful teeth: her calm was the more perceptible in the midst of our agitation.

We were not unlike a strolling company of French actors playing at Ferrara, by permission of the worshipful magistrates of the town, in the _Fugitive Princess_ or the _Persecuted Mother._ The scene represented, on the right, Tasso's prison; on the left, Ariosto's house; at the back, the castle in which the feasts of Leonora and Alphonsus took place. This royalty without a kingdom; those anxieties of a Court contained in two wandering carriages and having the Hôtel des Trois-Couronnes for its palace at night; those State councils held in a room at an inn: all that completed the variety of the scenes of my fortune. I put off my knight's helm in the wings and resumed my straw hat; I travelled with the _de jure_ monarchy rolled up in my portmanteau, while the _de facto_ monarchy flaunted its baubles at the Tuileries. Voltaire calls upon all the royalties to spend their carnival in Venice with Achmet III.[211]: Ivan[212] Emperor of All the Russias, Charles Edward King of England, the two Kings of the Polacks[213], Theodore[214] King of Corsica and four Serene Highnesses.

"'Sire, Your Majesty's post-chaise is at Padua, and the bark is
ready.'

"'Sire, Your Majesty may set off when you please.'

"'Troth, Sire, they will trust Your Majesty no longer, nor myself
neither; and we may both of us chance to be sent to gaol this very
night.'"

For myself, I will say with Candid[215]:

"Gentlemen, how came you all to be kings? I must confess that neither my friend Martin here nor myself have any such titles."

It was eleven o'clock in the evening; I was hoping that I had won my case and obtained my _exeat_ from Madame. I was very far out in my reckoning! Madame does not so soon relinquish a wish; she had not questioned me about France, because, preoccupied as she was with my resistance to her plan, she was making that her business of the moment. M. de Saint-Priest entered my room and brought me the rough draft of a letter which Her Royal Highness proposed to write to Charles X.:

[Sidenote: Her persistency.]

"What!" I exclaimed, "Madame persists in her resolve? She wants me to take that letter? But it would be impossible for me, even materially, to cross Germany: my passport is only for Switzerland and Italy!"

"You will accompany us as far as the Austrian frontier," replied M. de Saint-Priest; "Madame will take you in her carriage; after crossing the frontier, you will return to your calash and you will arrive thirty-six hours before us."

I hastened to the Princess; I renewed my insistence; the mother of Henry V. said to me:

"Do not desert me."

This word put an end to the struggle; I yielded; Madame appeared over-joyed[216]. Poor woman, she had wept so much! How could I have held out against courage, adversity, fallen grandeur reduced to hide themselves beneath my "protection!" Another Princess, Madame la Dauphine, also had thanked me for my useless services: Carlsbad and Ferrara were two places of banishment, under different suns, where I had gathered the noblest honours of my life.

Madame set out pretty early in the morning, on the 19th, for Padua, where she arranged to meet me; she was to stop at the Catajo, at the Duke of Modena's. I had a hundred things to see at Ferrara: palaces, pictures, manuscripts; I had to be content with Tasso's prison. I started a few hours after Her Royal Highness. I arrived at Padua at night. I sent Hyacinthe to Venice to fetch my luggage, as scanty as a German student's, and I went to bed sadly at the Golden Star, which has never been mine.

PADUA, 20 _September_ 1833.

On Friday 20 September, I spent a part of the morning in writing to tell my friends of my change of destination. The persons of Madame's suite arrived in succession.

Having nothing left to do, I went out with a _cicerone._ We visited the two churches of Santa Giustina and San Antonio di Padova. The first, the work of Jerome of Brescia, is most majestic: from below, in the nave, you do not see a single one of the windows, which are pierced very high above, so that the church is lighted without your knowing whence the light comes. This church contains many good pictures by Paul Veronese, Liberi[217], Palma[218] and others.

[Sidenote: Padua.]

San Antonio di Padova, known as _Il Santo_, presents a Grecianized Gothic monument, a style peculiar to the old churches of Venetia. The Cappella del Santo is by Giacomo Sansovino[219] and Francesco[220] his son: one perceives it at once; the ornaments and the form are in the same manner as the _loggetta_ in the steeple of St. Mark.

A _signora_, in a green gown and a straw hat covered with a veil, was praying before the Cappella del Santo; a servant in livery was also praying, behind her: I presumed that she was offering up her prayers for the relief of some moral or physical ailment; I was not mistaken. I saw her again in the street: she was a woman of about forty, pale and thin, walking stiffly and with a look of suffering; I had guessed her love or her paralysis. She had left the church with hope: during the space of time while she was sending up her fervent orisons to Heaven, did she not forget her pain, was she not really cured?

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.

Of Livy, no news; were he alive, I would gladly, like the inhabitant of Gades, make the journey to Rome expressly to see him; I would gladly, like Panormita[228], have sold my field to buy a few fragments of the History of Rome, or, like Henry IV., promised a province for a "Decade[229]." A mercer of Saumur did not go so far: having purchased a manuscript of Livy's, by way of old papers, from the apothecary of the convent of the Abbey of Fontevrault, he used it quite simply to make drums for battledores.

[Sidenote: Pellico's "Zanze."]

When I returned to the Stella d'Oro, Hyacinthe was back from Venice. I had charged him to call on Zanze to make my excuses for having gone away without seeing her. He found the mother and daughter in a great state of anger; she had just been reading _Mie Prigioni._ The mother said that Silvio was a "villain:" he had allowed himself to write that Brollo had pulled him, Pellico, by his leg when he, Pellico, had climbed up on a table. The daughter exclaimed:

"Pellico is a slanderer, and an ungrateful one to boot. After the services which I have done him, he now tries to dishonour me."

She threatened to have the work seized and to sue the author in the law-courts; she had begun to write a refutation of the book: Zanze is not only an artist, but a woman of letters.

Hyacinthe asked her to give me the unfinished refutation; she hesitated and then handed him the manuscript: she was pale and tired from her labours. The old gaoler's wife still claimed to sell her daughter's embroidery and mosaic work. If ever I go back to Venice, I will discharge my debt better to Madame Brollo than I did to Abou Gosch, the chief of the Arabs in the mountains of Jerusalem: I had promised him a bale of rice from Damietta and I never sent it.

Here is Zanze's commentary:

"La Veneziana maravigliandosi che contro di essa vi sieno
persona che abbia avutto ardire di scrivere pezze di un romanzo
formatto ed empitto di impie falsità, si lagna fortemente contro
l'auttore mentre potteva servirsi di altra persona onde dar sfogo
al suo talento, ma non prendersi spasso di una giovine onesta di
educazione e religione, e questa stimatta ed amatta e conosciutta a
fondo da tutti.

"Comme Silvio può dire che nella età ma di 13 anni (che talli
erano, alorguando lui dice di avermi conosciuta), comme può
dire che io fossi giornarieramente statta a visitarlo nella sua
abitazione? se io giuro di essere statta se non pochissime volte,
e sempre accompagnata o dal padre, o madre, o fratello? Comme può
egli dire che io le abba confidatto un amore, che io era sempre
alle mie scuolle, e che appena cominciavo a conoscere, anzi non
ancor poteva ne conosceva mondo, ma solo dedicatta alli doveri
di religione, a quelli di doverosa figlia, e sempre occupatta a
miei lavori, che questi erano il mio sollo piacere? Io giuro che
non ho mai parlatto con lui, ne di amore, ne di altra qualsiasi
cosa. Sollo se qualche volte io lo vedeva, lo quardava con ochio
di pietà, poichè il mio cuore era per ogni mio simille, pieno di
compazione; anzi io odiava il luogo che per sola combinazione mio
padre si ritrovava: perchè altro impiego lo aveva sempre occupatto;
ma dopo essere stato un bravo soldato, avendo bene servito la
repubblica e poi il suo sovrano, fù statto ammesso contro sua
volontà, non che di quella di sua famiglia, in quell' impiego.
Falsissimo è che io abbia mai preso una mano del sopradetto
Silvio, ne comme padre, ne comme frattello; prima, perchè abenchè
giovinetta e priva di esperienza, avevo abastanza avutta educazione
onde conoscere il mio dovere. Comme può egli dire di esser statto
de me abbraciatto, che io no avrei fatto questo con un fratello
nemeno; talli erano li scrupoli che aveva il mio cuore, stante
l'educazione avutta nelli conventi, ove il mio padre mi aveva
sempre mantenuta.