Paolo and Francesca: love, reading and guilt in Inferno V

In the second circle of Hell, where the lustful are swept along ceaselessly by a storm, Dante meets two souls who move together and seem light upon the wind. They are Francesca da Polenta and Paolo Malatesta. The fifth canto, written in the early years of the fourteenth century, is one of the most read and discussed texts of Italian literature, and their story has become the very symbol of guilty love.

The historical affair

The facts, as far as they can be reconstructed, are these. Francesca, daughter of Guido da Polenta, lord of Ravenna, was married for political reasons to Giovanni Malatesta, known as Gianciotto, of the family that ruled Rimini. She fell in love with her brother-in-law Paolo, and her husband, according to the traditional account, surprised the two and killed them both. The crime probably took place between 1283 and 1285, but the date is not certain.

Contemporary chronicles say very little about it, and almost everything we know depends on Dante and his commentators. Boccaccio, in his lectures on the Commedia, added the detail, perhaps fictional, of a deception at the wedding: Francesca supposedly believed she was marrying the handsome Paolo rather than the coarse Gianciotto. In the last years of his life Dante was a guest in Ravenna of Guido Novello da Polenta, Francesca's nephew.

The three tercets of love

The heart of Francesca's speech is three tercets that all begin with the word Love. In the first, love kindles swiftly in the gentle heart, with a clear echo of Guinizelli; in the second it is «Amor, ch'a nullo amato amar perdona», the love that allows no one who is loved to refrain from loving in return; in the third it is the love that led the two lovers to a single death.

Francesca uses the language of courtly love and of the Stil novo, the same language Dante had practised in his youth, to present her passion as inevitable. Hers is a most elegant self-defence. Dante is shaken by it, asks to know how the two recognised their still uncertain desires, and prepares to hear the account of the decisive moment.

The book was a Galehaut

One day, Francesca relates, she and Paolo were reading for pleasure the romance of Lancelot, the knight in love with Queen Guinevere. When they reached the point where Lancelot kisses the queen, Paolo kissed Francesca, «tutto tremante», all trembling, and that day they read no further. The book and its author played for them the part of Galehaut, the character who in the romance brings Lancelot and Guinevere together.

The line has had enormous fortune: in Italian galeotto became a common noun for a go-between in love, and Boccaccio gave the Decameron the subtitle Prencipe Galeotto. The scene raises a question that runs through the whole history of literature, namely how far reading can shape feelings and lead to action. While Francesca speaks, Paolo weeps, and Dante faints «come corpo morto cade», as a dead body falls.

The canto offers neither an easy condemnation nor an absolution. Dante places the two lovers in Hell, yet feels for them a pity that overwhelms him. It is precisely this tension between moral judgement and emotional sympathy that has made Paolo and Francesca inexhaustible figures, taken up over the centuries by painters, sculptors and composers, from Ingres to Rodin and Tchaikovsky.