27. The Case Against Francesca: INFERNO, Canto V, Lines 88 - 142
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, “Gianciotto Discovers Paolo and Francesca” (1819)
Dante, our pilgrim, calls the two who are light on the winds of lust to float down to him. When they arrive, he gets more than he bargained for. Francesca (along with her Paolo) proves the greatest danger yet to our pilgrim.
Francesca's self-narrated "novella" is a master class in manipulation. Or at least so we see it in this episode. Join me as I build a case against her, arguing that she is justifiably damned.
Seducer. Flatterer. Conniver. Francesca proves so oily, she escapes the pilgrim's grasp and pulls him to see the world her way, a damned way. There’s no way way out.
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The segments of this episode of WALKING WITH DANTE:
[02:19] My English translation of INFERNO, Canto V, lines 88 - 142. If you'd like to read along, find a study guide for a more intense interpretation of this passage, or leave a comment for me so we can continue talking about this episode, please scroll down this page.
[06:55] Historical facts about the speaker, Francesca da Rimini, including Boccaccio's (unreliable?) story about her.
[09:46] Two strange words in Francesca's speech: "Caïna" and "galeotto."
[12:32] The case against Francesca: five points that justify her damnation.
[20:42] A little bit about courtly love.
[23:26] More in the case against Francesca: her literary downfall.
[30:43] And finally, a little about the two men on the scene: her lover Paolo and our pilgrim, as well as their analogous and telling reactions to her speech.
My English translation of INFERNO, Canto V, Lines 88 - 142:
“O gracious and benevolent living creature,
Who comes in the doom-filled air to visit us,
The ones who stained the world with blood,
If the king of the universe were our friend,
We would pray he grant you peace,
Because you have displayed so much pity over our bad twists of fate.
All the things that it pleases you to speak or hear,
We really want to hear and speak with you,
While the wind has quieted, as now.
I was born in that land
Where the river Po and all its tributaries slow down
And descend to find peace in the sea.
Love, that quickly catches fire in the gentle heart,
Seized this one with me, because of my gorgeous body
That has been taken from me—and the way it was taken still hurts me.
Love, that doesn’t stop anyone loved from loving,
Seized me with such a strong passion for this guy
That, as you see, it hasn’t abandoned me yet.
Love drove both of us to one death.
Caïna waits for the man who blotted out our lives.”
These words were blown from them to us.
When I heard these scarred souls,
I bowed my head and kept it down
Until the poet said to me, “What are you thinking about?”
When I could reply, I began, “Alas,
How many sweet thoughts, how much desire,
Drove these two to the sorrowful pass!”
Then I turned to them to speak again
And began, “Francesca, all this pain
Makes me weep with sorrow and pity.
“But tell me: in the time of those sweet sighs,
By what means and how did love
Make you cognizant of your dubious desires?”
And she to me, “There is no greater sorrow
Than to remember our happy times
In the middle of misery, as your teacher knows.
“But if you really want to know the originary [first] root
Of our love that you are so drawn to,
I will tell it as one who both weeps and tells.
“One day, just for pleasure, we were reading
About how love got the better of Lancelot.
We were alone and without any suspicions.
“That reading made us lock eyes more than once
And robbed the color from our faces—
But on a single point, we were defeated.
“When we read how the much-desired smile
Was kissed by such a great lover,
This guy, who will now never be divided from me,
“Kissed me on my mouth, trembling all over.
That book and the one who wrote it were our Galeotto.
That day we didn’t read any further.”
All the time this spirit said this,
The other one beside her wailed—such that pity
Overcame me as if I’d died.
And I collapsed as a dead body collapses.
FOR MORE STUDY
Three translation issues:
It’s hard to see the blasphemy of Francesca’s claims, especially after the Protestant Reformation and the evangelical upsurges of the late twentieth century; but it’s important to note how she talks about God: “se fosse amico il re de l’universo” (literally, “if was [a] friend the king of the universe”—line 91). “Amico”? Really? Modern revivalist theology talks about God as a friend, but not much medieval theology. You might also hear her jarring juxtaposition: “amico” v. “re” (“friend” v. “king”). Kings were rarely your friends, especially to a commoner like Francesca.
In her nine-line hymn to love, it’s wild to see the poet’s craft at work. Take line 103: “Amor, ch’a nullo amato amar perdona” (literally, “Love, that to no one loving forbids love”). First off, we have to see that crazy repetition: “amor,” “amato,” “amar.” She’s conjugating her verb as fast as she can. And perhaps the poet is showing us her ability to transmute love into whatever she needs it to be. Secondly, the line doesn’t break in Dante’s typical style. We’ve talked about how most lines in COMEDY have a caesura (a natural pause). But this line doesn’t have one. It’s not after “nullo” and the rhythm refuses it after “amato” (where there’s even a sounded-out ellision between the “'o” in “amato” and the “a” in the next word, “amar”). The line tumbles forward, as if it’s so liquid, you can barely notice what she’s saying.
When she claims that something still afflicts her (line 102), the meaning is still highly debated. In the back half of that line, she says, “e ‘l modo ancor m’offende” (literally, “and the way still me hurts”). What way? The way she fell in love? That’s how I interpreted it in my translation. But it could also be her killing: the method of the murder still pains me. I feel the stab even now. Even in the Florentine, the meaning is not clear. Is this lack of clarity on purpose? Or a fault of the line’s concision? If she’s eliding the meaning on purpose, is she trying to get us to confuse her love and her murder? Or make us think the “real” problem is her death, not her adultery?
Five interpretive issues:
When Francesca begins to speak a second time and claims that there’s no greater sorrow than to remember happy times when you’re miserable (lines 121 - 123), she becomes even more literary than you might think. She cribs these lines from both Virgil’s THE AENEID (Book II, lines 3 - 13) and from Boethius’s THE CONSOLATION OF PHILOSOPHY, Book II, part iv. So when she says that your “teacher” knows this human fact about the relationship between remembered happiness and present sorrow, there’s a long debate in commentary about whether she’s referring to Virgil as the teacher (he’s standing right there) or to Boethius, whose writings are central to Dante’s thought and who will show up in full force a couple of cantos from now. Perhaps, however, the bigger question has to do with what these lines are doing in the middle of her speech. As far as I can tell, there are two ways to begin to understand them. (There are probably more!) One begins with our poet, Dante. Why did he put such a learned tercet (three-line stanza) in the center of her dialogue? We could say that he needs a fulcrum for the story, so he’s using classical learning to turn from her high-blown hymn about love to her more personal story of adultery and murder. We could also say that Dante may be afraid this whole discourse is getting too secular, so he feels the need to bolster the scene with some classical and Christian learning. Or we might say that the poet is driving toward a complex irony: She’s all about herself (“me, me, me”) while the world of books informs her experience in ways she might not even realize. The other way to understand these lines is begin with Francesca. They say something about her as a character. But what? That she’s more learned than she lets on, so she’s a master at hiding her learning in a story? (Isn’t Dante the poet the same?) That she’s testing the pilgrim and maybe the readers to see how smart they are? That she’s wedging Virgil and Boethius into her story to give it more heft, more weight? In which case, does she realize it’s not weighty enough on its own (especially with Helen of Troy right back there)? Is she making fun of our bookish pilgrim, quoting texts he would know to jab at him that he’s not the only smarty-pants in the area? Or is she subtly ingratiating herself with Virgil, too, since he’s right beside the pilgrim and she’s quoting some of his lines? (And to give a point to the next episode and the case for her, does this level of literary sophistication show us that Francesca’s story is tragic, especially since Dante so values classical learning and since she ultimate falls because of a rather trashy book?)
When Francesca reaches the climax of her story, she offers that strange bit about the book as her “galeotto.” Here’s line 137: “Galeotto fu ‘l libro e chi lo scrisse” (literally, “Galeotto was the book and who it wrote”). Although I did my best to explain “galeotto,” there’s evidence to suggest it might have been an obscure word even in Dante’s day . . . or at the least, a hyper-literary word, right out of Arthurian romances, read by the privileged few. In other words, she’s deploying our poet’s literary lingo right at him! (Is she then also flattering us, her readers, who might pat ourselves on the backs for getting the reference?) That said, her line is tellingly constructed to end with “chi lo scrisse.” That’s who’s at fault: the guy who wrote it. Is she absolving herself? Because she’s certainly not “writing” anything, just telling it. In fact, Dante is writing it? Is writing the whole problem? (She falls because of the written word—look what books can do!) Is Dante playing with fire by having Francesca speak so much in his poem? Might we readers slip into her failing just as she did, seduced by her hymn to love? In any event, she’s pinning the blame on the likes of Dante. Does he accept that blame at the end of the canto when he collapses? If you look back over her speech, think about the ways she constructs narrative and how her story is perhaps not what Dante hopes to do in COMEDY. Dante clearly doesn’t want you to collapse at the end. Is it always wise to drive for a reader’s sympathy?
Just to be clear, although Francesca claims the one who killed them (her husband) is in Caïna (line 107), we won’t see him when we get down there. And when she acknowledges that the pilgrim is still alive (line 88), it’s a tad shocking . . . but only if you’ve read all of COMEDY. You’ll soon see that many of the dead are shocked witless by the spectacle of a living man among them.
When we listed off Virgil’s greats on the wind, we talked about lust leading to social instability: Semiramis, Helen, Achilles, Paris. But the same cannot be said of Francesca’s death. Her murder didn’t bring down a family, must less start a war. It would probably be forgotten today, were it not for Dante. So what’s happened in this canto? Has it shifted gears? Is that showing us the difference between Virgil and our pilgrim? Is there a difference between what Virgil can know and what Dante can experience? Or is Virgil’s rationale the classical, pagan explanation of lust and Dante’s the Christian, private-life experience? Or are there several types of lust and Virgil just gets the “big” ones?
That last line! “E caddi come corpo morto cade” (literally, “And I feel as body dead falls”). I translated “caddi” as “collapsed,” but it does have the idea of a fall behind it (so think about the Garden of Eden!). Also, look at the alliteration in that line, all those “k” sounds. (it’s harsh in tone, but repeated sounds can give something the sense of an ending.) In the early twentieth century, Francesco Torraca was perhaps the first to note that this line is an almost exact quote from an Italian version of the Arthurian legend of Tristan and Isolde. In La Tavola Ritonda (The Round Table), when Tristan sees his dead lover, “e cadde sì come corpo morte.” So our pilgrim’s response is straight out of romance legend! Or he reacts out an emotional overflow about the same way Francesca and Paolo do when they read about Lancelot’s kiss. How is our pilgrim like the reader of chivalric tales? And how then is the reader of Dante’s COMEDY supposed to be a different sort of reader?
A journaling prompt:
Over and over in this episode, we saw how Francesca wants to claim “the real problem is. . . .” Name it: love, my murder, a little book we were reading. How is “the real problem is” a poor excuse for behavior? Do you use the phrase? Or have you had it used on you? For example, when you hurt someone, have you ever said, “The real problem is you’re too sensitive”? Or when someone has hurt you, how have you felt when they said, “The real problem is I had a bad childhood”? What happens inside you at those moments?