^{Note 1 in page 314} All quotations from the episode (Inferno v.25–142) follow the text of the Società Dantesca Italiana as published in Le opere di Dante (Florence, 1921).

^{Note 2 in page 316} This is the only point where I fail to follow the text of the Dantesca. Instead of closing the verse just quoted with a period, as I have done on the authority of other editors, the Dantesca joins the final sentence with the opening line of the following verse, in this way:

E come li stornei ne portan 1' ali

nel freddo tempo a schiera larga e piena,

cosí quel fiato li spiriti mali

di qua, di là, di giù, di su li mena ...

^{Note 3 in page 317} Fiato means in Italian also “wind,” but hardly “blast,” as Norton renders it in his Translation (Boston, 1891–93).

^{Note 4 in page 320} Norton refers to this legend in the following way: “According to the post-Homeric account of the death of Achilles, which was current in the Middle Ages, he was slain by Paris in the Temple of Apollo in Troy, ‘whither he had been lured by the promise of a meeting with Polyxena, the daughter of Priam, with whom he was enamoured’.”

^{Note 5 in page 322} See Inferno, vi.1–2:

Al tornar délia mente, che si chiuse

dinanzi alla pietà de' due cognati...

^{Note 6 in page 325} The textual tradition has preserved another variant, according to which the wings of the doves are not “raised,” alzale, but “open,” aperte. The change does not affect the visual content of the image, nor does it detract in any way from its power or fitness. The metaphor itself is consciously patterned after a famous simile in the Aeneid (v.213–217).

^{Note 7 in page 326} A main difference between the Troubadours and the poets of “the sweet new style” is that the former celebrate the bride, and the latter, the maiden. The Italians, moreover, unlike the Provencals, do not prize nobility per se.

^{Note 8 in page 327} In the essay “Hamlet and His Problems” (1919), reprinted in Selected Essays, (New York, 1932) pp. 121–126.

^{Note 9 in page 329} Such is the interpretation I have chosen to give to ci lace: although most of the commentators prefer to interpret the particle in its adverbial and locative sense, as meaning “here,” “on this spot,” rather than in the pronominal one, as meaning “to us,” “for us.”

^{Note 10 in page 331} It is perhaps unnecessary to remark that in Dante's language, or, more generally, in Old Italian, gentile means almost without exception “noble,” “well born,” “of high birth,” and the like.

^{Note 11 in page 334} These significant suspension points separate the end of Ch. x from the beginning of Ch. xi in Pt. ii of Tolstoy's novel, and immediately precede the sudden revelation that Anna has already become the mistress of Vronsky.

^{Note 12 in page 334} I Promessi Sposi, Ch. x.

^{Note 13 in page 335} Francesca's words are a gnomic sentence only in the sense that they paraphrase a famous passage in Boethius' De Consolatione Philosophiae (ii, 4): “In omni adversitate fortunae infelicissimum est genus infortunii fuisse felicem.”

^{Note 15 in page 343} It is from Paulus Orosius' Historia (i, 4) that Dante takes the formula by which he states one of the sinful deeds of Semiramis: che libito fe' lictio in sua legge. The Orosius passage reads thus: “Praecepit enim ut inter parentes ac filios, nulla delata reverentia naturae, de coniugis adpetendis, quod cuique libitum esset licitum fieret.”

^{Note 16 in page 343} The expression libro galeotto, directly derived from the line: Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse, was to become proverbial in Italian, with the meaning of “erotic book.” See for instance Boccaccio's masterpiece, the title of which is followed by these words: “Comincia il libro chiamalo Decameron, cognominato Principe Galeotto.”

^{Note 17 in page 345} Trionfo d'Amure, i, 25–26.

^{Note 18 in page 346} Ibid., ii, 79–84.

^{Note 19 in page 351} There is no doubt that Dante read the French medieval romances in the original language. As for Paolo and Francesca, they must have read their libro galeolto in the same tongue: for, “if an Italian translation of Tristan was already extant from the Thirteenth Century, there is no proof that Lancelot had been granted the same fortune: moreover, and this is what matters most ... French .. . was then the courtly language par excellence in the Italian North,” according to Pio Rajna's statement in his article “Dante e i romanzi della Tavola Rotonda,” Nuova Antologia, 1157 (1 June 1920). The same problem had been studied before Rajna by Paget Toynbee, in his essay “Dante and the Lancelot Romance,” Fifth Annual Report of the Dante Society of America, Cambridge, Mass. (1886), and, more fully, in his Ricerche e Note Dantesche (Bologna, 1904); after Rajna, by Nicola Zingarelli, in his article “Le reminiscenze dal ‘Lancelot’,” in Studi Danteschi, i, 82–90.

All these studies deal in detail not only with the relevant lines in this canto, but also with another famous passage of the Commedia connected with the Lancelot romance, to which I have already referred in the present essay. This passage is to be found in Paradiso, xvi.13–15, and reads thus:

onde Beatrice, ch'era un poco scevra,

ridendo, parve quella che tossio

al primo fallo scritto di Ginevra.

Here Dante alludes to the same chapter of the Lancelot romance to which Francesca refers in Inferno, v; but now he recalls merely a minor incident, preceding the climax of the chapter, which is the kiss exchanged between Lancelot and Guinevere. The one “who coughed” is the Dame de Malehaut, who is also in the grove, during the nightly meeting of the Knight and the Queen. The Dame is still in love with Lancelot, who was once her prisoner, although he pretends to have forgotten it. Pio Rajna (op. cit.) explains the reference, and its connection with the present situation, in the following way: “By coughing, and thus recalling back to herself the attention of Lancelot, the Dame de Malehaut warns him that she is nearby, and makes him understand that the secret he has been so jealously keeping (i.e., his love for the Queen) is no longer a secret for her. Likewise Beatrice, after having withdrawn a little aside, as feeling estranged from the worldly conversation between Cacciaguida and his descendant, with her laughter recalls Dante to the awareness of her presence, so that he may watch himself; and at the same time warns him that the reason of that proud voi had not escaped her.” (Dante, who at first addresses his ancestor with “tu,” shifts to the more respectful “voi” as soon as he learns Cacciaguida had been knighted before his death.)

I have discussed this passage in detail only to have the opportunity of commenting on the highly interesting closing line of the terzina, “al primo fallo scritto di Ginevra.” These words are clearly a definition of the crucial chapter of the Lancelot romance; i.e., of the scene ending with the first kiss of the two lovers. The presence of the adjective primo may, in our context, throw some light on one of the most famous lines of Inferno, v, which is precisely “quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante”: and make perhaps more valid my interpretation of that line. Even more significant is Dante's description of the romance itself as a fallo scritto, as a “sin written down,” exactly because such a description sounds like an explicit replica of the moral judgment about romantic literature which this canto states implicitly, and which Francesca herself sums up in the words: “Galeotto fu il libro chi lo scrisse.”

^{Note 20 in page 352} The passage quoted from De Vulgari Eloquio may be found in i, x, 2. The double meaning of ambages is discussed by Pio Rajna, who prefers interpreting that word in its figurative, rather than in its literal sense. This term's equivocal significance seems to anticipate Petrarch's pun on erranli (“wandering” and “erring”), discussed elsewhere in this essay.

^{Note 21 in page 353} This passage, as well as the following ones, is quoted from the most important of all Francesco de Sanctis' Dante essays, and is given as translated by me. De Sanctis originally published that essay in 1869, under the title Francesco, da Rimini secondo i critici e seconda Parte. The essay was later included in the collection of his Saggi Critici. The text used here is the one reprinted in the 1952 Laterza edition of Saggi Critici (vii, 240–256). Though disagreeing with de Sanctis' view, I still feel that his critique of the Paolo and Francesca episode is a masterpiece. Anything the great critic had to say about the Commedia, even beyond the famous pages in his Storia delta Letteratura Italiana, is worth rereading. Such a task can now be easily done, since the Einaudi edition of the Opere di Francesco de Sanctis, made under the direction of Carlo Muscetta, has just devoted its 5th volume (Turin, 1955) to the Lezioni e Saggi su Dante.

^{Note 22 in page 356} Pt. i, Ch. xi (as translated by Constance Garnett).

^{Note 23 in page 356} In the “Commiato,” or “Farewell Song,” which precedes the play.

^{Note 24 in page 358} In his Reflections sur le Roman, passim.

^{Note 25 in page 358} Nuovi Studii Danteschi, ii (Milan, 1907), 531.

^{Note 26 in page 358} This concept was first used by Erich Heller, in his article “Goethe on the Avoidance of Tragedy” in The Disinherited Mind: Essays in Modem German Literature (Philadelphia, 1952).