The Count of Roussillon Kills Guardastagno and Gives His Heart to His Wife is a tale of friendship turned to murderous vengeance, in which a husband makes his wife unknowingly consume the heart of the man she loves. The killing does not end with the murder: Guillaume de Roussillon transforms Guardestaing’s heart into a dish, then turns the shared meal into a cruel revelation. The wife’s response reverses the husband’s intended triumph, and the lovers’ deaths bring the tale to its final image of a shared tomb.

An embedded Provençal tale

Filostrato tells the story after Neifile’s account of an ill-fated love has moved the company to compassion. He observes that the next lovers deserve no less pity, and that their misfortune is crueller still. The tale is presented as something related by the Provençals, locating its subject among a remembered tradition of aristocratic love and violence. Its emphasis falls not only on the lovers’ fate but on the conduct of the people around them: a husband and friend bound by fellowship, a wife who chooses her lover, and a household turned into the setting for revenge.

The two men are noble knights, each possessing castles and vassals. Guillaume de Roussillon and Guillaume de Guardestaing are renowned for prowess in arms and love one another greatly. They travel together to tournaments, jousts, and other feats of arms, often wearing the same colours. Their castles lie roughly ten miles apart, so their friendship is both intimate and sustained across separate households. That bond makes the betrayal especially stark: Guardestaing’s love for Roussillon’s wife violates the friendship, but Roussillon’s eventual murder of his friend gives that breach a lethal answer.

Love discovered and vengeance prepared

Although Guardestaing knows that Roussillon has a beautiful and desirable wife, he becomes passionately enamoured of her. He finds ways to make his feelings known, and she returns his love. The two meet more than once. Their attachment grows into a relationship they conceal less carefully than they should, and Roussillon discovers their familiarity. His affection for Guardestaing turns into mortal hatred. Rather than reveal his anger, he keeps it hidden and resolves to kill him.

A tournament in France gives Roussillon a pretext. He informs Guardestaing of it and invites him to come so they can consider travelling together. Guardestaing accepts cheerfully and promises to arrive for supper the next day, not suspecting danger from the friend who has invited him. Roussillon takes this expected visit as an opportunity to act. He arms himself, rides out with a servant, and waits in a wood about a mile from his castle, on the route Guardestaing must take.

Guardestaing approaches unarmed, accompanied by two servants who are also unarmed. Roussillon rushes at him with a lance, declares him dead, and strikes him before he can defend himself or even speak. Guardestaing falls from his horse, transfixed, and dies shortly afterward. His servants flee toward their lord’s castle without waiting to discover who attacked him. Roussillon then dismounts, opens the dead man’s breast with a knife, and tears out his heart with his own hands. He wraps it in a lance pennon, gives it to one of his men to carry, orders that no one speak of what happened, and returns to the castle after nightfall.

The heart served at supper

Roussillon’s wife has been expecting Guardestaing to arrive that evening and waits for him impatiently. When he does not appear, she asks her husband the reason. He lies, saying he has received word that Guardestaing cannot come until the following day. Her concern persists, but the lie postpones her understanding of the murder and keeps the evening’s deception in place.

Roussillon calls his cook and gives him the heart, falsely identifying it as a wild boar’s. He orders a fine dish, to be served to him in a silver porringer. The cook minces the heart, seasons it richly, and prepares a savoury ragout. At supper, Roussillon sits with his wife but eats little, troubled by the deed he has committed. He has the dish set before her, pretends to feel unwell, and urges her to enjoy it. She tastes it, finds it good, and eats it all.

Only after she has finished does Roussillon disclose that the dish was Guardestaing’s heart, which he says he tore from his friend’s breast himself. The revelation recasts the meal: what the wife received as a delicacy was the physical remainder of the man she loved, prepared by the very husband who had deceived her about his absence. The silver vessel, the cook’s careful preparation, and Roussillon’s feigned indisposition make the household ritual serve as an instrument of revenge.

The wife’s answer and the shared tomb

The wife is overcome by grief. She answers that Roussillon has acted as a disloyal and base knight. If she gave her love to Guardestaing without being forced and thereby offended her husband, she says, she—not Guardestaing—should have borne the penalty. Her judgment distinguishes her own choice from the lover’s fate and rejects the husband’s attempt to make the murdered man pay for it. She also refuses to follow the meal with any other food after having eaten the heart of so valiant and courteous a gentleman.

She rises and throws herself backward through a window set high above the ground. The fall kills her and almost shatters her body. Seeing her dead, Roussillon is dismayed and recognizes that he has done wrong. Afraid of the country people and the Count of Provence, he has his horses saddled and flees. His revenge has not secured his wife or preserved his honour; it has left him to escape the consequences of the murder while she chooses death rather than life under his violence.

The next day, the story becomes known throughout the country. Guardestaing’s people and the lady’s people take up both bodies with grief and lamentation, and bury them in the chapel of her own castle. Verses over the tomb identify the dead and the manner and cause of their deaths. The ending therefore brings the lovers together only after Roussillon’s actions have killed them both: the friendship that once joined the knights has been destroyed, while the shared grave preserves the lovers’ connection beyond the husband’s attempt to punish it.