The Divine Comedy

Dante's Inferno, circle by circle

Before the first circle there is a vestibule, full of people who never took a side in life. The first circle is Limbo, where good pagans and unbaptised babies live without pain but without hope. Homer, Horace, Ovid and Lucan are there, and they welcome Dante as one of them. The next four circles punish sins of appetite. The lustful are in the second, the gluttonous in the third, the misers and the wasters in the fourth, and the angry and the sullen in the fifth, sunk in the muddy river Styx.

Below the Styx stands the walled city of Dis. Inside it the sixth circle holds the heretics in burning tombs. The seventh holds the violent, in three rings: those violent against other people, against themselves, and against God. The eighth circle, Malebolge, is ten stone ditches for the many kinds of fraud, from flatterers and fortune-tellers to corrupt politicians and forgers. The ninth is the frozen lake of Cocytus, where traitors are locked in ice.

In canto XI, Virgil explains the plan while they wait to get used to the stench rising from below. Sins of weak appetite are punished higher up. Sins of violence come next. Fraud is punished lowest, because fraud is “man’s peculiar vice” and displeases God most. Betraying someone who trusted you is worst of all, so traitors fill the ninth circle, with Judas, Brutus and Cassius in Lucifer's mouths.

Paris inside the poem

In the Paradiso, Paris appears through a single street. In canto X, Thomas Aquinas points out the last of twelve lights in the heaven of the Sun. “It is the light eternal of Sigier,” he says, “Who, reading lectures in the Street of Straw, / Did syllogize invidious verities.” Dante's Italian is Vico de li Strami. Charles Eliot Norton's note to his 1892 translation identifies the man as Siger of Brabant, who lectured at Paris in the thirteenth century, in the Rue du Fouarre.

Invidious verities means truths that earned him hatred. Norton explains that Siger applied logic to questions of theology. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes teachers influenced by Siger, active at Bologna, who held that human reason could reach happiness by its own powers. How far Dante shared those views is still debated among Dante scholars.

Paris turns up in other places too. In the same canto of the Paradiso, Richard of Saint-Victor, a twelfth-century prior of the monastery of Saint-Victor in Paris, shines among the lights. On the first terrace of the Purgatorio, Dante meets the manuscript painter Oderisi of Gubbio and praises him as the honour of “that art / Which is in Paris called illuminating.” On the fifth terrace, Hugh Capet, who calls himself the root of the royal house of France, introduces himself with the words “I was the son of a Parisian butcher.”

Did Dante study in Paris?

Two fourteenth-century Florentines say he did. Giovanni Villani, a Florentine merchant and chronicler who called Dante “our neighbour”, wrote a short notice of him soon after his death. Villani says that after the exile Dante “went to the university at Bologna, and afterwards at Paris, and in many parts of the world.”

Giovanni Boccaccio tells more. In his life of Dante, he writes that when every road home was closed, Dante crossed the mountains into France and “made his way as best he could to Paris.” There, Boccaccio says, he gave all his time to philosophy and theology. He also tells a story that Dante once answered fourteen questions in a public debate in the Paris schools of theology. According to Boccaccio, Dante repeated every question in order, with all the arguments for and against, and then answered each one.

No document from Paris records Dante there, so the visit remains a tradition rather than a known fact. Edmund Gardner, writing on Dante for the Catholic Encyclopedia, put it carefully: Dante “is said to have gone to Paris some time between 1307 and 1309, but this is open to question.” The street in Paradiso X is the kind of detail a man who had been there might use. The street is not proof that he was.

The Comedy in Paris: Delacroix, Doré and Rodin

Three Paris artists built major work on the Inferno. Eugène Delacroix was twenty-four when he showed The Barque of Dante at the Salon of 1822. The painting shows Dante and Virgil crossing the Styx in the fifth circle while the damned claw at their boat. The French state bought it straight from the exhibition, and it now hangs in the Musée du Louvre.

Gustave Doré published his illustrated Inferno with Hachette in Paris in 1861. The Bibliothèque nationale de France calls it a turning point in his career. The same year he showed three large paintings after the Divine Comedy at the Salon. He finished the Purgatorio and the Paradiso in 1868. Project Gutenberg's copy of Henry Francis Cary's translation carries Doré's plates.

In 1880 Auguste Rodin began The Gates of Hell, a bronze door for a museum in Paris that was never built. The Musée Rodin says the seated figure above the doors was first called The Poet. The figure was Dante, author of the Divine Comedy that had inspired the doors, leaning forward to look down into the circles of hell. The world now knows him as The Thinker. A cast of the Gates stands at the Musée Rodin.

Why Dante wrote it in Italian

Serious poems in Dante's time were written in Latin. Boccaccio says readers in his own day still asked why Dante chose Florentine instead. He gives two reasons. In Latin the poem would have helped only the learned, while in the everyday language it could reach everyone. And the great men who paid for poetry had stopped reading Latin poets at all.

Boccaccio also quotes three lines of Latin verse that he says were Dante's first attempt at the poem, beginning “Ultima regna canam”, meaning “I will sing of the furthest kingdoms.” According to Boccaccio, Dante then gave up. Feeding such a poem to modern readers would be like putting crusts of bread in the mouths of babies still at the breast. He started again in Italian. No manuscript of the Latin opening survives, so the lines rest on Boccaccio's word alone.