Giovanni the Lame had a brother named Paulo the Handsome, who was a widower, and left a son.
Twelve years after Francesca's marriage, by which time she had become mother of a son who died, and of a daughter who survived her, she and her brother-in-law Paulo were slain together by the husband, and buried in one grave.
Two hundred years afterwards, the grave was opened, and the bodies found lying together in silken garments, the silk itself being entire.
Now, a far more touching history may have lurked under these facts than in the half-concealed and misleading circumstances of the received story—long patience, long duty, struggling conscience, exhausted hope.
On the other hand, it may have been a mere heartless case of intrigue and folly.
But tradition is to be allowed its reasonable weight; and the probability is, that the marriage was an affair of state, the lady unhappy, and the brothers too different from one another.
The event took place in Dante's twenty-fourth year; so that he, who looks so much older to our imaginations than his heroine, was younger; and this renders more than probable what the latest biographers have asserted—namely, that the lord of Ravenna, at whose house he finished his days, was not her father, Guido da Polenta, the third of that name, but her nephew, Guido the Fifth.
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No. IIII