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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2008
Guido's marriage to Pompilia was a mismatch by age, class, education, and temperament. The disparity, however, runs much deeper than any of these elements. The rift between them is a disparity in the very quality of their souls and is the source of Guido's surpassing hatred and gratuitous malevolence toward his wife. The public, however, seems uninterested in the mysterious subtleties of this couple's spiritual drama. Though Count Guido Franceschini is on trial for murder, the issue is the virtue of his victim. Pompilia Comparini is on trial as an erring wife, a violator of husbandly honor. Because Guido's spiritual quality is reflected in society, that society has no problem supporting him in his defense of such an overt, cowardly, and heinous crime. The sympathetic bond between the nobleman and his auditors is the base for his brash, swaggering bravado about the murder by himself and four armed men of an old man, an old woman, and a seventeen-year-old girl recovering from childbirth. Hardly the stuff of heroism, yet Guido speaks from an eminence of security with the swagger of cheap heroics.
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