The Deaths of Gismonda and Guiscardo turn a secret love affair into a conflict between a father’s possessive authority and a daughter’s resolve to defend her choice. When Tancred discovers the lovers, he responds not only by killing Guiscardo but by making his heart a message to Gismonda. She answers that violence with deliberate mourning and suicide, and the story ends with the lovers united in burial after Tancred has too late repented his cruelty.

The Secret Discovered

Gismonda and Guiscardo have met repeatedly through a concealed passage connecting her chamber with a grotto. Guiscardo uses a knotted rope to descend into it, wearing a leather suit to protect himself from the brambles; Gismonda enters by a private door. Their practiced secrecy allows them to meet at length without discovery, until Tancred’s customary, private visit to his daughter’s room brings him into the scene by chance.

On this occasion Gismonda is in the garden with her women. Tancred enters the chamber unseen, finds its windows closed and the bed curtains drawn, and settles on a footstool at the bed’s end. He draws the curtain around himself and falls asleep. Gismonda returns, dismisses her women to the garden, and admits Guiscardo without noticing her father’s hiding place. The lovers go to bed as they have before. Tancred wakes and sees them together. Though he initially wants to cry out, he holds back, choosing secrecy so that he can act without exposing himself to greater shame.

When Guiscardo later leaves through the tunnel, Tancred has two men seize him and bring him, still in his leather suit, secretly before him. Tancred tells him that the kindness he had shown him has been repaid with an outrage against his own daughter. Guiscardo offers no elaborate defense: he answers that love can surpass the power of either man. Tancred orders him held under guard. The discovery thus changes the lovers’ private arrangement into a confrontation shaped by Guiscardo’s low position in the household and Tancred’s authority over both the young man and his daughter.

Gismonda’s Defense

The next day Tancred goes to Gismonda’s chamber and, after sending everyone else away, tells her that he had believed in her virtue and never imagined she would give herself to a man outside marriage. What pains him especially is that she chose Guiscardo, whom he describes as a youth of low condition, raised in his court almost as an act of charity from childhood. Tancred admits that he does not know what to do with her: paternal love inclines him toward pardon, while anger presses him toward harshness. He has already decided what to do with Guiscardo, but asks to hear her before deciding her fate.

Gismonda’s first response is inward rather than pleading. She is distressed that her secret has been exposed and fears that Guiscardo is already dead, but she masters the outward signs of grief and faces her father without asking him to spare her. She acknowledges that she loves Guiscardo and will continue to love him for as long as she lives. She attributes her choice not simply to desire but also to Tancred’s failure to arrange another marriage for her and to Guiscardo’s own worth.

Her defense challenges the assumption that a person’s birth determines merit. Poverty, she argues, does not remove nobility of character, just as wealth does not create it; people who now rule may once have been poor, while those who labor in humble occupations may once have possessed great riches. She also rejects any separation between herself and ordinary human nature: she is her father’s child, made of flesh and blood, young, and capable of desire. Rather than ask for leniency, she tells Tancred that if he kills Guiscardo without treating her the same way, she will take her own life. Her defiance makes clear that his decision can control their bodies, but cannot compel her to renounce the love she has chosen.

The Heart in the Golden Bowl

Tancred recognizes the strength of his daughter’s character, yet doubts that she will carry out her threat. Instead of punishing her directly, he decides that the suffering of another will cool her love. He orders Guiscardo’s two guards to strangle him quietly that night and bring him his heart. The next morning Tancred places it in a fine golden bowl and sends it to Gismonda through a trusted servant. The message presents the heart as consolation for the thing she loved most, turning the gift into a cruel parody of tenderness.

Gismonda has already prepared for this possibility. After Tancred leaves, she has gathered poisonous herbs and roots and reduced them in water, keeping the prepared liquid at hand in case her fear proves justified. When the servant arrives, she receives the bowl steadily. Seeing Guiscardo’s heart, she recognizes both the object and the meaning of her father’s message. She observes that a heart of such worth deserved no tomb less valuable than one of gold, and acknowledges that Tancred has chosen an appropriate vessel for it.

Her composure then gives way to grief expressed through ritual. She bends over the bowl and weeps so copiously that her women are overcome by compassion, although they do not understand whose heart it contains or what her words mean. She kisses the dead heart again and again. Once she has wept as much as she considers necessary, she says that she has fulfilled what she owed him and has nothing left but to join him. She pours the poison into the bowl, mingling it with her tears, and drinks it without fear.

Death, Burial, and Aftermath

After drinking, Gismonda climbs onto the bed, arranges herself as decently as she can, and presses Guiscardo’s heart against her own. Her women, alarmed by what they have witnessed, send word to Tancred. He hurries to her chamber, arriving as she lies on the bed, but his attempt to comfort her comes too late. She rebukes his tears as a lament for an outcome he himself has caused and asks him, as her final favor, to let her body rest openly beside Guiscardo’s wherever he has had the young man’s body placed.

Tancred cannot answer through his grief. Gismonda holds the heart to her breast, takes leave, closes her eyes, and dies. Her request transforms the lovers’ secret union into a public memorial: Tancred, after lamenting and repenting his cruelty too late, has both bodies honorably buried in the same tomb. The people of Salerno mourn with him. His authority has determined the manner of Guiscardo’s death and exposed the affair, but it cannot separate the lovers in the final resting place.

As a tale told within the larger storytelling frame, the episode makes a private discovery lead, step by step, to an irreversible public ending. The secret passage first enables the lovers’ repeated meetings; Tancred’s hidden presence turns it into the route by which he catches them; his order to kill Guiscardo makes the heart a final, material token of their bond. Against that imposed ending, Gismonda’s choice to die and her demand for shared burial assert a fidelity that survives the power used to punish it.