Who She Is
Francesca is the first condemned soul to whom the poem lets tell her own story, and she tells it in the second circle, that of the lustful, who are swept along by a wind that never stops. She comes at the call of Dante with another spirit, one that does not speak and weeps the whole time, like doves called by desire, out of the troop in which Dido is. She does not say her own name: she introduces herself by the land where she was born, on the seashore, where the Po descends to find peace with its followers, and it is Dante who calls her Francesca, three tercets later, when he asks her how love let them know the doubtful desires. Rimini, the place that fame assigns her, and Paolo, the name that fame gives her companion, are not in the poem: they come from tradition, which identifies the other as her brother-in-law and the murderer of both as her husband, Gianciotto. In Canto V of the Inferno she only says that Caina awaits whoever took their lives. What defines her is the courtesy with which she speaks and the way she tells it: three times the subject of what happened to her is Love, never she.
Trajectory
In Canto V of the Inferno, Virgil names the shades that the wind drags (Semiramis, Dido, Cleopatra, Helen, Achilles, Paris, Tristan), and Dante, almost lost in pity, asks to speak with two who go together and seem light on the wind. Francesca answers with courtesy: she thanks Dante, who visits in the dark air those who stained the world with blood, and says that she would pray for his peace if the King of the universe were a friend to them both, since he has pity for their wicked evil. Then she tells where she came from and begins with Love:
Amor, ch’al cor gentil ratto s’apprende, / prese costui de la bella persona / che mi fu tolta; e ’l modo ancor m’offende. / Amor, ch’a nullo amato amar perdona, / mi prese del costui piacer sì forte, / che, come vedi, ancor non m’abbandona, Love, which seizes the noble heart swiftly, seized this one for the beautiful person who was taken from me, and the way it happened still offends me. Love, which does not pardon any beloved from loving, took hold of me so strongly with his pleasure that, as you see, it still does not abandon me.
The next tercet puts the death and the accusation in the same sentence, and closes with the murderer sent to Caina, the bottom of Hell reserved for traitors to kin:
Amor condusse noi ad una morte. / Caina attende chi a vita ci spense, Love led us to one death; Caina awaits whoever took our life from us.
Dante lowers his face and raises it only when Virgil asks him what he is thinking. He answers, speaking of what is happening within him:
Oh lasso, / quanti dolci pensier, quanto disio / menò costoro al doloroso passo, alas, how many sweet thoughts, how much desire led these two to the painful passage!
Turning to her, he calls her by name and asks how love let them know the doubtful desires. Her answer opens with a sentence about memory, and refers to a teacher whom she does not name:
E quella a me: «Nessun maggior dolore / che ricordarsi del tempo felice / nella miseria; e ciò sa ’l tuo dottore, and she said to me: no greater pain than to remember the happy time in misery; and your teacher knows this.
She then tells the scene of the reading: they read for pleasure, one day, the story of Lancelot; they were alone and unsuspecting, their eyes met and their faces changed color, and only one point overcame them, when they read that the longed-for smile was kissed by such a lover. The one who kissed her, trembling, and who will never be separated from her, is the other spirit. Francesca closes the account with the sentence that takes the act out of herself:
Galeotto fu ’l libro e chi lo scrisse: / quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante, Galeotto was the book and the one who wrote it: that day we read no further.
While she spoke, the other wept, and Dante falls in a faint as a dead body falls. She does not appear in any other canto, but the poem returns to her scene when it measures the pilgrim: in Canto XXIX of the Inferno, the laments of the forgers wound him with pity as arrows do, the same pity that knocked him down in Canto V of the Inferno, and in Canto XXXII of the Inferno the first zone of the ice is the Caina of which she spoke.
Themes Embodied
Francesca is the illustration of what the canto defines as the sin of the lustful, and the poem says so through the voice of the narrator before she speaks:
Intesi ch’a così fatto tormento / enno dannati i peccator carnali, / che la ragion sommettono al talento, I understood that to such a torment are condemned the carnal sinners, who submit reason to appetite.
Desire comes to her in its most lovable face: a love that asks no leave, a trembling kiss, a romance as go-between. Sin, in the canto's definition, is reason submitted to appetite, and what Francesca does in speaking is to take her own appetite out of the center of the sentence and put it on Love.
The scene is staged to move, and at the same time to force the reader to notice the exchange of subjects. Dante, in answering, gives the subject back to the movements of those who have them (thoughts, desire), and the difference between her sentence and his is what the canto asks us to see.
Divergent Readings
The text sustains two readings of Francesca, and the poem does not choose. In one, she is frank: she describes with the words of a courtly tradition what happened to her, and does not hide the death or whom she blames. In the other, she shifts to Love the decision that belonged to both of them, and the final sentence about the book makes the romance the go-between, the Galeotto who carries the lovers' message. Whoever reads the first sees a defeated woman, and Dante's pity seems just. Whoever reads the second sees the poet pointing out the mechanism by which desire disguises itself, and pity, which here is a faint, becomes the first example of the reaction the poem is going to educate.
To take the poet as her defender does not hold up against the fact that she never says "I" when she speaks of what happened, and to take him as a silent accuser does not hold up against Dante's faint. What the text gives the reader is the whole scene in which to decide.
Relationships
- Dante: the visitor whom she treats as a gracious and kindly creature, who calls her by name and falls in a faint at the end of her account (Canto V of the Inferno).
- Virgil: the teacher she cites without naming when she speaks of the pain of remembering the happy time, and the master who tells Dante to call her in the name of the love that carries her.
- Minos: the judge of the circle, before whom Virgil repeats the formula of the will that no one disputes, moments before she speaks.