V/4 It is no accident that in Hell proper Francesca is the first person to speak or that she is the only woman that speaks to the pilgrims throughout their visit to the underworld. Thus it is that Dante implies that she represents the first of all the sinners, Eve, though he never mentions her by name. Francesca's story also contains cunning parallels with the episode of the Temptation if one thinks of Gallehault as the Serpent acting upon the primal innocents. Sometime in 1978, the TLS reproduced the whole of the Sistine ceiling as a black and white line drawing and it is from that this quotation from Michelangelo of the figures of Adam and Eve is taken, the remagnification lending a suitably distancing crudeness to the scene. The moments of Temptation and Expulsion are combined against the background whirlwind of copulating lovers that make up Dido's flock. The word 'Eve' which here appears inside an apple is itself to be found magnified in Canto XXXIII to accompany the re-use of the Michelangelo heads (in a different orientation) thereby emphasising the huge thematic arch that joins one end of the book to the other, the couple locked in love to the couple locked in an embrace of hate. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.