After the fire had somewhat roared according to its fashion, the
sharp point moved this way and that, and then gave forth this
breath: "If I could believe that my answer might be to a person
who should ever return unto the world, this flame would stand
without more quiverings; but inasmuch as, if I hear truth, never
from this depth did any living man return, without fear of infamy
I answer thee.

"I was a man of arms, and then became a cordelier, trusting, thus
girt, to make amends; and surely my trust had been fulfilled but
for the Great Priest,[1] whom may ill betide! who set me back
into my first sins; and how and wherefore, I will that thou hear
from me. While I was that form of bone and flesh that my mother
gave me, my works were not leonine, but of the fox. The wily
practices, and the covert ways, I knew them all, and I so plied
their art that to the earth's end the sound went forth. When I
saw me arrived at that part of my age where every one ought to
strike the sails and to coil up the ropes, what erst was pleasing
to me then gave me pain, and I yielded me repentant and
confessed. Alas me wretched! and it would have availed. The
Prince of the new Pharisees having war near the Lateran,[2]--and
not with Saracens nor with Jews, for every enemy of his was
Christian, and none of them had been to conquer Acre,[3] nor a
trafficker in the land of the Soldan,--regarded in himself
neither his supreme office, nor the holy orders, nor
in me that cord which is wont to make those girt with it more
lean; but as Constantine besought Sylvester within Soracte to
cure his leprosy,[4] so this one besought me as master to cure
his proud fever. He asked counsel of me, and I kept silence,
because his words seemed drunken. And then he said to me, 'Let
not thy heart mistrust; from now I absolve thee, and do thou
teach me to act so that I may throw Palestrina to the ground.
Heaven can I lock and unlock, as thou knowest; for two are the
keys that my predecessor held not dear.' Then his grave arguments
pushed me to where silence seemed to me the worst, and I said,
'Father, since thou washest me of that sin wherein I now must
fall, long promise with short keeping will make thee triumph on
the High Seat.' Francis[5] came for me afterwards, when I was
dead, but one of the Black Cherubim said to him, 'Bear him not
away; do me not wrong; he must come down among my drudges because
he gave the fraudulent counsel, since which till now I have been
at his hair; for he who repents not cannot be absolved, nor can
repentance and will exist together, because of the contradiction
that allows it not.' O woeful me! how I shuddered when he took
me, saying to me, 'Perhaps thou didst not think that I was a
logician.' To Minos he bore me; and he twined his tail eight
times round his hard back, and, after he had bitten it in great
rage, he said, 'This is one of the sinners of the thievish fire.'
Therefore I, where thou seest, am lost, and going thus robed I
rankle." When he had thus completed his speech the flame,
sorrowing, departed, twisting and flapping its sharp horn.

[1] Boniface VIII.

[2] With the Colonna family, whose stronghold was Palestrina.

[3] Not one had been a renegade, to help the Saracens at the
siege of Acre in 1291.

[4] It was for this service that Constantine was supposed to have
made Sylvester "the first rich Father." See Canto xiv. His
predecessor, Celestine V., had renounced the papacy.

[5] St. Francis came for his soul, as that of one of the brethren
of his Order.


We passed onward, I and my Leader, along the crag, far as upon
the next arch that covers the ditch in which the fee is paid
by those who, sowing discord, win their burden.



CANTO XXVIII. Eighth Circle: ninth pit: sowers of discord and
schism.--Mahomet and Ali.--Fra Dolcino.--Pier da Medicina.
-Curio.--Mosca.--Bertrau de Born.

Who, even with words unfettered,[1] could ever tell in full of
the blood and of the wounds that I now saw, though many times
narrating? Every tongue assuredly would come short, by reason of
our speech and our memory that have small capacity to comprise so
much.

[1] In prose.


If all the people were again assembled, that of old upon
the fateful land of Apulia lamented for their blood shed by the
Trojans,[1] and in the long war that made such high spoil of the
rings,[2] as Livy writes, who erreth not; with those that, by
resisting Robert Guiscard,[3] felt the pain of blows, and the
rest whose bones are still heaped up at Ceperano,[4] where every
Apullan was false, and there by Tagliacozzo,[5] where without
arms the old Alardo conquered,--and one should show his limb
pierced through, and one his lopped off, it would be nothing to
equal the grisly mode of the ninth pit.

[1] The Romans, descendants of the Trojans.



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