Martellino lay there motionless for a while, with all eyes fixed upon him to see what would happen. Then, like the skilled performer that he was, he began to go through the motions of straightening out one of his fingers, then a hand, then an arm, and so on until he had unwound himself completely. When the people saw this, they applauded Saint Arrigo so rowdily that a roll of thunder would have passed unnoticed.
Now it happened that there was a Florentine standing nearby, and although he was very well acquainted with Martellino, he had failed to recognize him when he was first led in, because of the grotesqueness of his appearance. But when he saw him standing up straight, he knew at once who it was, and he burst out laughing and said:
‘God damn the fellow! Who would have thought, to see him arriving, that he was not really paralysed at all!’
‘What?’ exclaimed a number of Trevisans, who had overheard the Florentine’s words. ‘Do you mean to say he was not paralysed?’
‘Heaven forbid!’ the Florentine replied. ‘He has always stood as straight as the rest of us. But as you could see just now, he has this extraordinary knack of disguising himself in any manner he chooses.’
There was no need to say any more, for on hearing this they forced their way to the front, and began to shout:
‘Take hold of that blaspheming swindler! He comes here pretending to be a cripple, poking fun at our Saint and making fools of us when he wasn’t really crippled at all!’
And so saying, they seized him and dragged him away; then they took him by the hair, tore every stitch of clothing from his back, and started to punch and to kick him. In fact, everybody within sight was bearing down upon him, or so it seemed to Martellino.
‘Mercy, for the love of God!’ he cried, defending himself as best he could. But it was of no use, for more and more people were piling on top of him every minute.
When Marchese and Stecchi saw what was happening, they began to have serious misgivings. Fearing for their own safety, they dared not go to Martellino’s assistance, but on the contrary they yelled ‘Kill him!’ as loudly as anybody else, at the same time trying to devise some way of rescuing him from the hands of the mob.
And he would certainly have been killed but for a quick piece of thinking on the part of Marchese, who made his way as swiftly as possible to the captain in charge of the watch, drawn up in strength outside the church, and said to him:
‘For God’s sake, come quickly! There’s a villain over here who has cut my purse, and robbed me of a hundred gold florins at the very least. Arrest him! Please don’t let him run off with my money!’
On hearing this, a dozen or more of the officers rushed over to the place where poor Martellino was having his brains beaten out, and after forcing their way through the crowd with enormous difficulty, they removed him all bruised and battered from their clutches, and hauled him off to the magistrate’s palace.
A number of people followed him all the way, still angry with him for hoodwinking them, and when they heard he had been arrested as a cutpurse, they too began to claim that he had stolen their purses, thinking this as fair a way as any of making life unpleasant for him. The magistrate, who was of a harsh disposition, no sooner heard these accusations than he took him aside and began to interrogate him on the matter. But Martellino gave him facetious answers, as though quite unconcerned at his arrest. This upset the judge, who had him fastened to the strappado, and ordered him to be given a series of good hard blows, with the intention of extracting a confession from him before having him hanged. When they let him down, and the judge asked him whether the accusations brought against him were true, he replied, since a straight denial would have been useless:
‘Sir, I am ready to confess the truth. But make each of my accusers say when and where I cut his purse, and I will tell you whether or not I did it.’
‘A good idea!’ said the judge, and he ordered several of them to be summoned. One of them claimed that his purse had been stolen a week before, another said six days, another four, and some of them said they had been robbed that very day. Whereupon Martellino retorted:
‘Sir, they are all a lot of bare-faced liars, and I can prove it to you, because I only arrived in this city for the first time a couple of hours ago. I wish to God I had never set foot in it at all! As soon as I arrived, I went to have a look at the body of this Saint, where I had the ill-luck to be given a good drubbing, as you can see for yourself. Ask the customs officer at the city gates, consult his register, ask my landlord, and they will all bear out what I have told you. And if you find I am telling the truth, I beg you to listen no further to these vicious perjurers. Please don’t let me be tortured and put to death.’
Meanwhile, with the matter proceeding along these lines, word had reached Marchese and Stecchi that the judge was giving him a rough handling and had already put him on the strappado. ‘We have made a fine mess of things,’ they said, shaking with fright. ‘We have taken him out of the frying-pan, and dropped him straight in the fire.’3 Being determined to leave no stone unturned, they tracked down their landlord, and explained to him what had happened. The landlord, who was highly amused at their tale, took them to see a man called Sandro Agolanti, a Florentine living in Treviso who had considerable influence with the ruler of the city. Having acquainted him with all the facts, the landlord joined the other two in pleading with him to intervene on Martellino’s behalf.
Sandro laughed heartily, then he went off to see the prince, and persuaded him to send for Martellino. The men who were sent to fetch him found him still standing in front of the judge, wearing nothing but a shirt, and trembling all over with fear and dismay because the judge would not listen to anything that was said in his defence. Indeed, since he happened to have some sort of grudge against Florentines, he was quite determined to have him hanged, and stubbornly refused to hand him over until he was compelled to do so. When Martellino came before the ruler, he gave him a full account of what had happened, and begged him as a supreme favour to let him go about his business; for until he was safely back in Florence, he would always feel that he had a noose round his neck. The ruler went into fits of laughter to hear of such remarkable goings on and ordered each of them to be provided with a new suit of clothes. Thus all three emerged from this dreadful ordeal better than they ever expected, and returned home safe and sound.
SECOND STORY
Rinaldo d’Asti is robbed, turns up at Castel Guiglielmo, and is provided with hospitality by a widow. Then, having recovered his belongings, he returns home safe and sound.
Neifile’s account of Martellino’s adventures brought gales of laughter from the ladies and the young men, especially Filostrato, who, being seated next to Neifile, was bidden by the queen to tell the next story. He began straightway, as follows:
Fair ladies, the story that takes my fancy is one that contains a judicious mixture of piety, calamity and love. Possibly it has no more to recommend it than its usefulness, but it will be especially helpful to people wandering through the uncertain territories of love, where those who have not made a regular habit of saying Saint Julian’s paternoster,1 even though they have good beds, may find themselves uncomfortably lodged.
During the reign of the Marquis Azzo of Ferrara, a merchant whose name was Rinaldo d’Asti was returning home after dispatching certain business in Bologna. He had already passed through Ferrara, and was riding towards Verona, when he fell in with three men who, though they had the appearance of merchants, were in fact brigands of a particularly desperate and disreputable sort. With these he struck up conversation, and rashly agreed to ride along in their company.
On seeing that he was a merchant, who was probably carrying a certain amount of money with him, these men resolved to rob him at the earliest opportunity. But in order not to arouse his suspicions, they assumed an air of simplicity and respectability, restricting their conversation to the subject of loyalty and other polite topics, and went out of their way to appear humble and obliging towards him. He conseq
uently thought himself very fortunate to have met them, for he was travelling alone except for a single servant on horseback. As they went along, with the conversation passing as usual from one thing to another, they got on to the subject of the prayers that people address to God, and one of the bandits turned to Rinaldo and said:
‘What about you, sir? What prayer do you generally say when you are travelling?’
‘To tell the truth,’ Rinaldo replied, ‘in matters of this kind I am rather simple and down-to-earth. I am one of the old-fashioned sort who likes to call a spade a spade, and I don’t know many prayers. All the same, when I am travelling it is my custom never to leave the inn of a morning without reciting an Our Father and a Hail Mary for the souls of Saint Julian’s father and mother, after which I pray to God and the Saint to give me a good lodging for the night to come. On many a day, in the course of my travels, I have met with great dangers, only to survive them all and find myself at nightfall in a safe place and a comfortable lodging. Now I firmly believe this favour to have been obtained for me from God by Saint Julian, in whose honour I recite my prayer; and if on any morning I neglected to say it, I would feel I could do nothing right the whole day, and would come to some harm before the evening.’
‘Did you say it this morning?’ said the man who had asked him the question.
‘I did indeed,’ replied Rinaldo.
The man, who by this time knew what was going to happen, said to himself: ‘A fat lot of good it will do you, for I reckon you are going to have a poor night’s lodging if all goes according to plan.’ Then he turned to Rinaldo and said:
‘I too have travelled a great deal, and although I have heard many people speak highly of this Saint, I have never prayed to him myself. Nevertheless, I have always managed to find good quarters. Perhaps we shall see this evening which of us is the better lodged: you, who have said the prayer, or I, who have not said it. Mind you, I do use another one instead, either the Dirupisti or the Intemerata or the De Profundis, all of which are extremely effective, or so my old grandmother used to tell me.’
And so they went along, talking of this and that, with the three men biding their time and waiting for a suitable place to carry their villainous plan into effect. The day was drawing to a close when, at a concealed and deserted river-crossing on the far side of the fortress-town called Castel Guiglielmo, the three bandits took advantage of the lateness of the hour to launch their attack and rob him of everything he possessed, including his horse. Before leaving, they turned to him as he stood there in nothing but his shirt, and called out:
‘Now see whether the prayer you said to Saint Julian will give you as good a night’s lodging as our own saint will provide for us.’ They then crossed the river, and rode off.
Rinaldo’s wretch of a servant did nothing to assist his master on seeing him attacked, but turned his horse round and galloped all the way to Castel Guiglielmo without stopping. It was already dark by the time he entered the town, so he conveniently forgot the whole business, and put up for the night at an inn.
Rinaldo, bare-footed and wearing only a shirt, was at his wits’ end, for the weather was very cold, it was snowing hard the whole time, and it was getting darker every minute. Shivering all over, his teeth chattering, he began to look round for a sheltered spot where he could spend the night without freezing to death. But since there had been a war in the countryside2 a short time previously and everything had been burnt to the ground, there was no shelter to be seen anywhere, and so he set off for Castel Guiglielmo, walking at a brisk pace on account of the cold. He had no idea whether his servant had fled to the fortress or to some other town, but he thought that, once inside the walls, God would surely send him some sort of relief.
He still had over a mile to go when night came on with a vengeance, and when he finally arrived it was so late that the gates were locked, the drawbridges were up, and he was unable to gain admittance. Feeling depressed and miserable, he looked round with tears in his eyes to see whether there was a place where he would at least find some protection from the snow, and he happened to catch sight of a house that jutted out appreciably from the top of the castle walls, so he decided to go and take refuge beneath it till daybreak. When he reached the spot, he discovered there was a postern underneath the overhang, and although the door was locked, at its base he heaped a quantity of straw which was lying nearby, and settled down upon it. He was thoroughly fed up, and complained at regular intervals to Saint Julian, saying that this was no way to treat one of his faithful devotees. Saint Julian had not lost sight of him, however, and before very long he was to see that Rinaldo was comfortably settled.
In the castle there was a widow, lovelier of body than any other woman in the world, with whom the Marquis Azzo was madly in love. He had set her up there as his mistress, and she was living in the very house beneath which Rinaldo had taken refuge. As it happened, the Marquis had arrived at the castle on that very day with the intention of spending the night with her, and had made secret arrangements to have a sumptuous supper prepared, and to take a bath in the lady’s house beforehand. Everything was ready, and she was only waiting for the Marquis to turn up, when a servant happened to arrive at the gate, bringing the Marquis a message requiring him to leave immediately. So he sent word to the lady that he would not be coming, then hastily mounted his horse and rode away. The lady, feeling rather disconsolate and not knowing what to do with herself, decided she would have the bath which had been prepared for the Marquis, after which she would sup and go to bed. And so into the bath she went.
As she lay there in the bath, which was near the postern on the other side of which our unfortunate hero had taken shelter, she could hear the wails and moans being uttered by Rinaldo, who sounded from the way his teeth were chattering as if he had been turned into a stork.3 She therefore summoned her maid, and said:
‘Go upstairs, look over the wall, and see who it is on the other side of this door. Find out who he is and what he is doing there.’
The maid went up, and by the light of the stars she saw him sitting there just as we have described him, bare-footed and wearing only his shirt, and quivering all over like a jelly. She asked him who he was, and Rinaldo, who was shaking so much that he could hardly articulate, told her his name and explained as briefly as possible how and why he came to be there. He then implored her, in an agonized voice, to do whatever she could to prevent his being left there all night slowly freezing to death.
The maid, feeling very sorry for him, returned to her mistress and told her the whole story. The lady too was filled with pity, and, remembering that she had a key for that particular door, which the Marquis occasionally used for his clandestine visits, she said to the maid:
‘Go and let him in, but do it quietly. We have this supper here, and no one to eat it. And we can easily put him up, for there’s plenty of room.’
The maid warmly commended her mistress’s charity, then she went and opened the door and let him in. Perceiving that he was almost frozen stiff, the lady of the house said to him:
‘Quickly, good sir, step into that bath whilst it is still warm.’
He willingly obeyed, without waiting to be bidden twice. His whole body was refreshed by its warmth, and he felt as if he were returning from death to life. The lady had him supplied with clothes that had once belonged to her husband, who had died quite recently, and when he put them on they fitted him to perfection. As he awaited further instructions from the lady, he fell to thanking God and Saint Julian for rescuing him from the cruel night he had been expecting, and leading him to what appeared a good lodging.
Meanwhile the lady had taken a brief rest, having first ordered a huge fire to be lit in one of the rooms, to which she presently came, asking what had become of the gentleman.
‘He’s dressed, ma’am,’ replied the maid, ‘and he’s ever so handsome, and seems a very decent and respectable person.’
‘Then go and call him,’ said the woman, ‘and tell him to come he
re by the fire and have some supper, for I know he has not had anything to eat.’
On entering the room, Rinaldo, judging from her appearance that she was a lady of quality, greeted her with due reverence and thanked her with all the eloquence at his command for the kindness she had done him. When she saw him and heard him speak, the lady concluded that her maid had been right, and she welcomed him cordially, installed him in a comfortable chair beside her own in front of the fire, and asked him what had happened and how he came to be there, whereupon Rinaldo told her the whole story in detail.
The lady had already heard bits of the story after the arrival of Rinaldo’s servant at the castle, and so she fully believed everything he told her. She in turn told him what she knew about his servant, adding that it would be easy enough to find him next morning. But by now the table was laid for supper, and Rinaldo, after washing his hands with the lady, accepted her invitation to sit down and eat at her side.
He was a fine, tall, handsome fellow in the prime of manhood, with impeccably good manners, and the lady cast many an appreciative glance in his direction. As she had been expecting to sleep with the Marquis, her carnal instincts were already aroused, and after supper she got up from the table and consulted with her maid to find out whether she thought it a good idea, since the Marquis had let her down, to make use of this unexpected gift of Fortune. The maid, knowing what her mistress had in mind, encouraged her for all she was worth, with the result that the lady returned to Rinaldo, whom she had left standing alone by the fire, and began to ogle him, saying:
‘Come, Rinaldo, why are you looking so unhappy? What’s the good of worrying about the loss of a horse and a few clothes? Do relax and cheer up. I want you to feel completely at home here. In fact, I will go so far as to say that seeing you in those clothes, I keep thinking you are my late husband, and I’ve been wanting to take you in my arms and kiss you the whole evening. I would certainly have done so, but I was afraid you might take it amiss.’