Ghismonda Drinks Poison and Dies for Love

Ghismonda’s death follows Tancred’s murder of Guiscardo and turns the heart of the murdered lover into the center of a final, deliberate act of love. Rather than answer her father’s cruelty with silence or submission, Ghismonda receives the heart, mourns it, drinks poison she has already prepared, and asks that her body be placed beside Guiscardo’s. Her death closes their love story with a burial together, granted only after Tancred’s violence has made reunion in life impossible.

The murder and the heart’s arrival

Before this scene, Ghismonda had told Tancred that if he killed Guiscardo, she would do the same to herself. Tancred doubted that she was as firmly resolved as her words suggested. He ordered Guiscardo’s two guardians to strangle him quietly, remove his heart, and bring it to him. The next morning, Tancred placed the heart in a handsome gold bowl and sent it to his daughter through a trusted servant. His message presented the gift as consolation: he was sending her the thing she loved most, just as she had deprived him of what he loved most.

The message makes the bowl more than a container. Tancred uses it to stage the death he has caused and to force its physical evidence into his daughter’s hands. Ghismonda, however, has already anticipated what might happen. After Tancred left, she had herbs and roots prepared and reduced to liquid, keeping the poison ready in case her fear proved justified. The heart’s arrival therefore does not create her resolve; it confirms the outcome she had prepared herself to meet.

Ghismonda’s response to the gift

The servant finds Ghismonda composed. She uncovers the bowl, recognizes Guiscardo’s heart, and remarks on the worthiness of its golden resting place. Her response refuses the message’s intended measure of power: Tancred can send her the heart, but he cannot make it an object of mere consolation or diminish the love it represents. She kisses it and thanks her father for what she calls his final gift, turning his attempt to wound her into the occasion for a last farewell.

Ghismonda then addresses the heart as the former dwelling of her pleasures. She contrasts seeing Guiscardo inwardly, in memory, with the pain of seeing his heart bodily before her. She recognizes that his life has run its course and that he has received a burial place worthy of him, but says that one thing remains: the tears of the woman who loved him. Although she had intended to die without tears, she now weeps over the heart and kisses it repeatedly. The scene moves from the controlled recognition of the gift to an outpouring of grief, while the heart remains the physical focus of both her mourning and her resolve.

Poison, farewell, and death

Ghismonda’s women do not understand what the heart is or what her words mean. They see her grief, question her, and try to comfort her, but she gives them no explanation that would interrupt the farewell. When she has wept as much as she chooses, she dries her eyes and declares that she has completed what she owed the heart. Her remaining act, she says, is to join it with her soul.

She pours the prepared poison into the gold bowl, where it mingles with her tears around Guiscardo’s heart, and drinks it without hesitation. Then she climbs onto the bed, arranges her body as decently as she can, and presses the dead heart against her own. The sequence is deliberate: she does not die before completing her leave-taking, and the object sent to her as a token of loss becomes the companion she holds at the threshold of death.

Her women send word to Tancred. Fearing what has happened, he rushes to her chamber, but arrives too late to comfort her. Ghismonda rejects his tears as misplaced, since he himself has brought about the fate he mourns. Her final request is that, because he would not permit her to live secretly with Guiscardo, he allow her body to lie openly beside Guiscardo’s wherever he has had the dead man cast. She dies holding the heart against her breast, without another word. The request gives Tancred one last chance to determine the lovers’ relation after death, but only in the form of their shared resting place.

Burial and narrative significance

Tancred’s grief follows his daughter’s death, and he repents too late of his cruelty. He has the lovers buried honorably in the same tomb, amid the mourning of the people of Salerno. The burial fulfills Ghismonda’s request, but it cannot undo the murders or restore the lives his command destroyed. The final arrangement joins the lovers in death only after the father’s violence has separated them beyond repair.

The scene’s force rests on the contrast between Tancred’s intended message and Ghismonda’s answer. He sends a severed heart as proof of his power and as a bitter substitute for the lover; she makes it the focus of her own farewell, then follows Guiscardo in death. Her calm attention to the heart, the tears she allows herself, the prepared poison, and her last request form a continuous sequence of choices rather than a sudden, unexplained collapse. As the ending of the first tale of the Fourth Day of the Decameron, her death completes the lovers’ tragedy while exposing the cost of Tancred’s attempt to govern their love through force.