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Forbidden Love II: Paolo and Francesca
In Dante’s Divine Comedy, within the second circle of hell, an ‘infernal tempest’ ‘rends and roils the spirits with its force’. This storm is reserved for those who lived and died by lust: ‘carnal sinners, who let appetite rule reason’ — the wind a reminder of how they got ‘carried away’.
In this second circle, Dante sees history’s most notorious adulterers: Antony and Cleopatra, Helen and Paris, Tristan and Isolde, and a ‘thousand more at least’ ‘who left our life for love’. Dante sees these spirits but never together — with one exception. There is one couple ‘who do not fly alone, but as a pair’: Paolo and Francesca da Rimini, wife and her brother-in-law lover whom Dante knew personally.
Dante asks Francesca to explain how their affair occurred to which she says Love ‘drove them mad’:
Love pardons no one loved from Love, and I
Was drawn to him with what force you can see:
It still holds me beside him as we fly.
Love gave two lives one death for destiny.
She then explains that it was while reading Lancelot’s romance that their love affair began:
