The Lady of Roussillon Eats Her Lover’s Heart and Kills Herself

The Lady of Roussillon Eats Her Lover’s Heart and Kills Herself brings a tale of adultery and revenge to its stark conclusion. Guillaume de Roussillon turns his wife’s supper into a revelation of murder: she unknowingly eats the heart of Guillaume de Guardestaing, the man she loves, before her husband tells her what the dish contained. Her response refuses the punishment he has devised. She condemns his act, then leaps from a high window and dies. The lovers’ bodies are ultimately laid in one tomb, making the husband’s attempt to separate them end in a final, literal joining.

The Revelation at Supper

The Lady has been waiting impatiently for Guillaume de Guardestaing, who was expected to come to supper that evening. When he does not appear, she asks her husband why. Guillaume de Roussillon says that he has received word that Guardestaing cannot arrive until the next day; the explanation leaves her troubled, but does not disclose what has happened.

The husband has already returned to his castle after killing Guardestaing. He gives the dead man’s heart to the cook and orders him to prepare the most delectable dish he can, then have it served to him in a silver porringer. The cook minces the heart, seasons it with rich spices, and makes it into a ragout. The care lavished on the preparation makes the concealed violence part of an apparently ordinary meal: the heart reaches the wife as food, not as evidence she can recognize.

At table, Guillaume de Roussillon eats little, preoccupied by the deed he has committed. He feigns that he is indisposed and commends the ragout to his wife. She tastes it, finds it good, and eats the whole dish. Only after she has finished does he ask what she thinks of it. When she praises it, he reveals that she has eaten the heart of Guillaume de Guardestaing, torn from his breast by his own hands shortly before his return. The meal thus changes meaning in an instant: what had seemed an act of hospitality becomes the means by which the husband makes his violence known to the woman who loved his victim.

The Lady’s Answer

The Lady pauses after hearing the revelation, then answers by condemning her husband as a disloyal and base knight. She distinguishes her own responsibility from Guardestaing’s: she had freely made the lover lord of her love and thereby offended her husband, she says, but Guardestaing had not forced her, and she alone should have borne the penalty. Her defense does not deny the affair. Instead, it rejects the husband’s choice to punish the lover through murder and to make her participate unknowingly in the desecration of his body.

She calls Guardestaing a valiant and courteous gentleman and refuses to let any other food follow what she describes as his noble heart. Then she rises without hesitation and throws herself backward through a window behind her. The window is so high above the ground that the fall kills her and nearly breaks her body to pieces. Her death is a deliberate response to the revelation, not an accidental consequence of discovering the heart: she chooses it immediately after declaring that her lover’s heart will be her final food.

Flight, Burial, and the Tale’s Ending

Seeing his wife fall, Guillaume de Roussillon is dismayed and recognizes that he has done ill. Afraid of the people of the country and of the Count of Provence, he has his horses saddled and flees. His revenge has not secured silence or control; the next day, the story of what happened becomes known throughout the country.

With great grief and lamentation, Guardestaing’s people and the Lady’s people take up the two bodies. They bury them in the same sepulchre, in the chapel of the Lady’s own castle, and place verses over the tomb identifying the dead and the manner and cause of their deaths. The shared grave gives the ending its bitter reversal: the husband who murdered the lover and served his heart to his wife cannot prevent their bodies from resting together. The verses preserve the account of the violence rather than allowing the threat of silence to erase it.

Narrative Frame and Traditional Source

The episode is the conclusion of an embedded tale in the Fourth Day’s storytelling. Its movement depends on a delayed recognition: Guardestaing’s absence first troubles the Lady, the carefully prepared dish conceals the murder from her, and the husband’s disclosure turns the supper into the scene of her final choice. The heart links the lover’s body, the Lady’s act of eating, and her refusal to survive the revelation; the shared tomb then supplies the story’s final answer to the husband’s attempt to punish their love.

A note accompanying the tale identifies it with the well-known story of the troubadour Guillem de Cabestanh or Cabestaing, while observing that Boccaccio alters the name to Guardastagno or Guardestaing. The note places the tragic episode within an existing literary tradition; the narrative itself closes not with reconciliation but with flight, public knowledge, and the two lovers’ burial together.