Guglielmo of Roussillon Kills Guardastagno and Removes His Heart

Guillaume de Roussillon’s killing of Guillaume de Guardestaing grows out of a betrayal that joins private desire to public fellowship: the two men are close companions in arms, yet Guardestaing becomes the lover of Roussillon’s wife. Their intimacy makes the eventual violence more than a response to adultery. Roussillon’s concealed decision to kill his friend converts a bond displayed in tournaments into the setting for deliberate revenge.

Background and Motive

According to the Provençal account related in the story, Roussillon and Guardestaing are noble knights, each with castles and vassals. Both are renowned for their prowess in arms, and their friendship is so conspicuous that they habitually travel together to tournaments, jousts, and other martial contests, dressed in the same colors. Though their castles stand about ten miles apart, distance does not weaken their companionship; their shared appearance and repeated presence together make them a familiar pair.

That fellowship is ruptured when Guardestaing falls deeply in love with Roussillon’s wife. Despite his friendship with her husband, he finds ways to approach her until she learns of his passion. She is pleased by it and returns his love, coming to desire him above all others. The lovers meet more than once, and their attachment grows so strong that they speak and behave together less discreetly than prudence requires. Their failure to conceal the affair gives Roussillon cause to discover their intimacy.

The discovery transforms Roussillon’s former affection for Guardestaing into mortal hatred. He does not reveal his anger to the lovers or confront his friend openly; instead, he conceals his purpose more successfully than they had concealed their relationship and resolves privately to kill him. The contrast establishes the method of the coming crime: while the lovers’ indiscretion exposes them, Roussillon’s silence allows him to turn an ordinary invitation into an ambush. The impending murder thus begins not in a sudden quarrel but in a calculated betrayal of the trust that had made the two knights companions.

The Ambush and the Killing

A great tournament was proclaimed in France, and Roussillon used it to draw Guardestaing into his reach. He sent word of the event and invited his friend to come the next day so they could decide together whether and how to travel there. Guardestaing answered gladly that he would come to supper. Taking the promised visit as his opportunity, Roussillon armed himself, mounted with one servant, and waited in a wood about a mile from his castle, along the road Guardestaing had to take.

Guardestaing arrived unarmed, accompanied by two servants who were also unarmed, and showed no suspicion of the man waiting for him. When he reached the chosen spot, Roussillon burst from hiding on horseback with his lance in hand, crying, “Traitor, thou art dead!” The attack and the words came as one: he drove the lance into Guardestaing’s breast, leaving him no time to defend himself or even speak. Guardestaing fell from his horse and died soon afterward. His servants turned their horses and fled toward their lord’s castle without waiting to discover who had struck him.

Roussillon dismounted and opened the dead man’s breast with a knife. He tore out Guardestaing’s heart with his own hands, wrapped it in a lance pennon, and gave it to one of his men to carry. He then commanded those present not to speak of the deed, remounted, and returned to his castle after nightfall. The killing therefore ended not with a public accusation or a challenge between knights, but with the destruction of the body that had carried his friend’s life and the concealment of the heart that would become the instrument of a further, intimate disclosure.

The Heart Served at Supper

The lady had expected Guardestaing to arrive for supper and, as the evening wore on, wondered aloud to her husband why he had not come. Roussillon concealed the murder by telling her that Guardestaing had sent word he could not arrive until the next day. Then he summoned the cook and passed off the heart as that of a wild boar, ordering him to prepare it as a rich, delicate dish and send it to the table in a silver porringer. The cook minced the heart, seasoned it generously, and made the ragout with all his skill.

At supper Roussillon ate little, troubled by what he had done, but feigned a disorder that kept him from tasting the dish. Instead, he commended it to his wife and had it set before her. She was not squeamish: finding the ragout good, she ate all of it. Only then did Roussillon ask how she liked the dish. When she answered that she liked it exceedingly, he disclosed that she had eaten Guardestaing’s heart—the very heart he had torn from his friend’s breast with his own hands. The act of killing had been hidden from her; the meal turned that hidden violence into a revelation at the supper table.

Revelation and Significance

The lady hesitated, then asked what her husband had made her eat. The question marks the moment when the heart ceases to be merely the concealed object of the murder and becomes its proof: Roussillon has made his wife consume the bodily token of the love she shared with Guardestaing, then names what it was. The killing and the meal form a single act of vengeance, moving from an ambush in the woods to the domestic table where the lovers’ secret is forcibly exposed.

The deed’s force lies in the reversal of the knights’ former intimacy. Roussillon had invited Guardestaing under the pretense of discussing a tournament, exploiting the trust built through years of companionship; after the murder, he converts that trust’s physical emblem—the heart—into a dish for the woman who loved his friend. The story’s violence is thus at once public in its betrayal of knightly fellowship and private in the way it makes the wife encounter the consequence of the affair. The evidence here ends with Roussillon’s disclosure, leaving the heart’s revelation as the action’s culminating image.