You must know, then, that according to the Provençals, there once lived in Provence two noble knights, each of whom owned several castles and had a number of dependants. The name of the first was Guillaume de Roussillon, whilst the other was called Guillaume de Cabestanh. Since both men excelled in feats of daring, they were bosom friends and made a point of accompanying one another to jousts and tournaments and other armed contests, each bearing the same device.
Although the castles in which they lived were some ten miles apart, Guillaume de Cabestanh chanced to fall hopelessly in love with the charming and very beautiful wife of Guillaume de Roussillon, and, notwithstanding the bonds of friendship and brotherhood that united the two men, he managed in various subtle ways to bring his love to the lady’s notice. The lady, knowing him to be a most gallant knight, was deeply flattered, and began to regard him with so much affection that there was nothing she loved or desired more deeply. All that remained for him to do was to approach her directly, which he very soon did, and from then on they met at frequent intervals for the purpose of making passionate love to one another.
One day, however, they were incautious enough to be espied by the lady’s husband, who was so incensed by the spectacle that his great love for Cabestanh was transformed into mortal hatred. He firmly resolved to do away with him, but concealed his intentions far more successfully than the lovers had been able to conceal their love.
His mind being thus made up, Roussillon happened to hear of a great tournament that was to be held in France. He promptly sent word of it to Cabestanh and asked him whether he would care to call upon him, so that they could talk it over together and decide whether or not to go and how they were to get there. Cabestanh was delighted to hear of it, and sent back word to say that he would come and sup with him next day without fail.
On receiving Cabestanh’s message, Roussillon judged this to be his opportunity for killing him. Next day, he armed himself, took horse with a few of his men, and lay in ambush about a mile away from his castle, in a wood through which Cabestanh was bound to pass. After a long wait, he saw him approaching, unarmed, and followed by two of his men, who were likewise unarmed, for he never suspected for a moment that he was running into danger. Roussillon waited until Cabestanh was at close range, then he rushed out at him with murder and destruction in his heart, brandishing a lance above his head and shouting: ‘Traitor, you are dead!’ And before the words were out of his mouth he had driven the lance through Cabestanh’s breast.
Cabestanh was powerless to defend himself, or even to utter a word, and on being run through by the lance he fell to the ground. A moment later he was dead, and his men, without stopping to see who had perpetrated the deed, turned the heads of their horses and galloped away as fast as they could in the direction of their master’s castle.
Dismounting from his horse, Roussillon cut open Cabestanh’s chest with a knife, tore out the heart with his own hands, and, wrapping it up in a banderole, told one of his men to take it away. Having given strict orders that no one was to breathe a word about what had happened, he then remounted and rode back to his castle, by which time it was already dark.
The lady had heard that Cabestanh was to be there that evening for supper and was eagerly waiting for him to arrive. When she saw her husband arriving without him she was greatly surprised, and said to him:
‘And how is it, my lord, that Cabestanh has not come?’
To which her husband replied:
‘Madam, I have received word from him that he cannot be here until tomorrow.’
Roussillon left her standing there, feeling somewhat perturbed, and when he had dismounted, he summoned the cook and said to him:
‘You are to take this boar’s heart and see to it that you prepare the finest and most succulent dish you can devise. When I am seated at table, send it in to me in a silver tureen.’
The cook took the heart away, minced it, and added a goodly quantity of fine spices, employing all his skill and loving care and turning it into a dish that was too exquisite for words.
When it was time for dinner, Roussillon sat down at the table with his lady. Food was brought in, but he was unable to do more than nibble at it because his mind was dwelling upon the terrible deed he had committed. Then the cook sent in his special dish, which Roussillon told them to set before his lady, saying that he had no appetite that evening.
He remarked on how delicious it looked, and the lady, whose appetite was excellent, began to eat it, finding it so tasty a dish that she ate every scrap of it.
On observing that his lady had finished it down to the last morsel, the knight said:
‘What did you think of that, madam?’
‘In good faith, my lord,’ replied the lady, ‘I liked it very much.’
‘So help me God,’ exclaimed the knight, ‘I do believe you did. But I am not surprised to find that you liked it dead, because when it was alive you liked it better than anything else in the whole world.’
On hearing this, the lady was silent for a while; then she said:
‘How say you? What is this that you have caused me to eat?’
‘That which you have eaten,’ replied the knight, ‘was in fact the heart of Guillaume de Cabestanh, with whom you, faithless woman that you are, were so infatuated. And you may rest assured that it was truly his, because I tore it from his breast myself, with these very hands, a little before I returned home.’
You can all imagine the anguish suffered by the lady on hearing such tidings of Cabestanh, whom she loved more dearly than anything else in the world. But after a while, she said:
‘This can only have been the work of an evil and treacherous knight, for if, of my own free will, I abused you by making him the master of my love, it was not he but I that should have paid the penalty for it. But God forbid that any other food should pass my lips now that I have partaken of such excellent fare as the heart of so gallant and courteous a knight as Guillaume de Cabestanh.’
And rising to her feet, she retreated a few steps to an open window, through which without a second thought she allowed herself to fall.
The window was situated high above the ground, so that the lady was not only killed by her fall but almost completely disfigured.
The spectacle of his wife’s fall threw Roussillon into a panic and made him repent the wickedness of his deed. And fearing the wrath of the local people and of the Count of Provence, he had his horses saddled and rode away.
By next morning the circumstances of the affair had become common knowledge throughout the whole of the district, and people were sent out from the castles of the lady’s family and of Guillaume de Cabestanh to gather up the two bodies, which were later placed in a single tomb in the chapel of the lady’s own castle amid widespread grief and mourning. And the tombstone bore an inscription, in verse, to indicate who was buried there and the manner and the cause of their deaths.
TENTH STORY
The wife of a physician, mistakenly assuming her lover, who has taken an opiate, to be dead, deposits him in a trunk, which is carried off to their house by two money-lenders with the man still inside it. On coming to his senses, he is seized as a thief, but the lady’s maidservant tells the judge that it was she who put him in the trunk, thereby saving him from the gallows, whilst the usurers are sentenced to pay a fine for making off with the trunk.
Now that the king had finished, only Dioneo was left to address the company. Knowing this to be so, and having already been asked by the king to proceed, he began as follows:
These sorrowful accounts of ill-starred loves have brought so much affliction to my eyes and heart (to say nothing of yours, dear ladies) that I have been longing for them to come to an end. Unless I were to add another sorry tale to this gruesome collection (and Heaven forbid that I should), they are now, thank God, over and done with. And instead of lingering any longer on so agonizing a topic, I shall make a start on a better and rather more agreeable theme, which will possibly offer some sort of gui
de to the subject we ought to discuss on the morrow.
Fairest maidens, I will have you know that in the comparatively recent past there lived in Salerno a very great surgeon called Doctor Mazzeo della Montagna,1 who, having reached a ripe old age, married a beautiful and gently bred young lady of that same city. No other woman in Salerno was kept so lavishly supplied as Mazzeo’s wife with expensive and elegant dresses, jewellery, and all the other things a woman covets; but the fact is that for most of the time she felt chilly, because the surgeon failed to keep her properly covered over in bed.
Now, you may remember my telling you about Messer Ricciardo di Chinzica, and of the way he taught his wife to observe the feasts of the various Saints. This old surgeon did much the same thing, for he pointed out to the girl that you needed heaven knows how many days to recover after making love to a woman, and spouted a lot of similar nonsense, all of which made her wretchedly unhappy. But as she was a woman of considerable spirit and intelligence, she resolved to put the family jewels in cotton wool and wear out some other man’s gems. Having gone out into the streets, she cast a critical eye over a number of young bloods, eventually finding one who was exactly to her liking, and she made him the sole custodian of her hopes, heart, and happiness. On perceiving her interest in him, the young man was powerfully smitten, and wholeheartedly reciprocated her love.
His name was Ruggieri d’Aieroli, and he was of noble birth. But he led such a disreputable life, and mixed with so many undesirable characters, that he had alienated all his friends and relatives, none of whom wished him any good or wanted anything to do with him. He was notorious throughout Salerno for his acts of larceny and for other highly unsavoury activities, about which the lady was more or less indifferent because she liked him for other reasons. Using a maidservant as a go-between, she so arranged matters that she and her lover were united, but after they had been making love together for a while she began to censure his way of life and to entreat him for her sake to reform his ways. And in order to make it worth his while to do so, she furnished him from time to time with various sums of money.
Taking good care not to be discovered, they had been meeting in this fashion for some time when it happened that a man with a diseased leg was placed under the doctor’s care. Having examined the ailment, the doctor informed the man’s kinsfolk that unless he removed a gangrenous bone in the patient’s leg, it would have to be amputated altogether, otherwise he would die. At the same time, whilst the removal of the bone offered every chance of a cure, there was no guarantee that the operation would be successful. The man’s family accepted the surgeon’s advice along with the reservations he had expressed, and handed the patient into his keeping.
The operation was to be performed towards evening, and that same morning, realizing that the invalid would be unable to with-stand the pain unless he were doped beforehand, the doctor issued a special prescription providing for the distillation of a certain liquid which he intended to administer to the patient in order to put him to sleep for as long as the pain and the operation were likely to last. And having had it delivered to his house, he put it down on a window-ledge in his bedroom without bothering to tell anyone what it was.
That evening, just as the surgeon was about to go to his patient, a messenger arrived from some very close friends of his in Amalfi,2 telling him that he was to abandon everything and go there at once because of a serious brawl in which a number of people had suffered injury.
Postponing the operation on the leg until the following morning, the surgeon got into a boat and went to Amalfi, whereupon the lady, knowing that he would be away from home for the rest of the night, secretly sent for Ruggieri in her usual way and showed him into her bedroom, locking him inside until certain other people in the house had retired for the night.
Whether because of having had a tiring day or because he had eaten food containing a lot of salt or because of some peculiarity of his constitution, Ruggieri, whilst he was waiting in the bedroom for his mistress, suddenly felt enormously thirsty. And catching sight of the bottle of medicine which the doctor had left on the window-ledge, he mistook it for drinking water, raised it to his lips, and drank it down to the last drop. Almost at once he was filled with a feeling of great drowsiness, and shortly afterwards he fell fast asleep.
At the earliest opportunity, the lady came up to the bedroom, and on finding Ruggieri asleep she began to prod him and whisper to him to get up. But it was no use; he neither answered nor moved a muscle. And so the lady, growing somewhat impatient, gave him a more violent shove, saying:
‘Get up, lazybones. If you wanted to sleep, you should have gone to your own house to do it instead of coming round here.’
The lady’s shove toppled Ruggieri from the chest on which he was lying, and he fell to the floor, showing no more sign of life than if he were a corpse. The lady was rather frightened, and she began to try and raise him, then shook him more vigorously and tweaked his nose and pulled his beard. But it was all to no purpose: he was sleeping like a log.
The lady now began to fear that he was dead, and in her panic she started pinching him viciously and holding a lighted candle against his skin, but it was no use. And hence, being no physician herself even though she was married to one, she was quite convinced that he must be dead. Since there was nothing in the world that she loved so much, her distress can readily be imagined. Not daring to make any noise, she began to weep in silence over his body and lament her ghastly misfortune.
After a while, however, being afraid that she might lose her reputation on top of losing her lover, the lady saw that she must immediately devise some means for getting his body out of the house. Having no idea how she should go about it, she called out softly to her maid, showed her the dilemma she was in, and asked her what they ought to do. The maid was greatly astonished, and she too began shaking and pinching him, but when she saw that he was without any feeling, she agreed with her mistress that he really was dead, and said that he would have to be put out of the house.
‘But where on earth can we leave him,’ inquired the lady, ‘so as to prevent people suspecting, when he is discovered in the morning, that this was the house from which he was taken?’
‘Ma’am,’ replied the maid, ‘late this evening I caught sight of a trunk standing outside the shop of our neighbour, the carpenter. It was not a very large trunk, but if it is still there it will come in nice and handy, because we can put the body inside, stab him two or three times with a dagger, and leave him there. No matter who finds him in the trunk, they will have no reason for supposing that he came from here rather than from somewhere else. In fact, since he was such an unruly sort of youth, they will think that he was murdered by one of his enemies as he was about to commit some crime or other, and then stuffed inside the trunk.’
The lady said that no power on earth would persuade her to stab him, but that otherwise the maid’s proposal seemed to her a good one, and she sent her to see whether the trunk was still in the same place. Having confirmed that it was, the maid, who was a sturdy young woman, lifted Ruggieri on to her shoulders with the help of her mistress. And with the lady walking on ahead to make sure no one was coming, they got him to the trunk, put him inside, closed the lid, and left him there.
Now, a few days earlier, two young men had moved into a house a little further along the street. They were money-lenders, always on the lookout for ways of making pots of money and saving a few coppers, and since they were short of furniture and had noticed the trunk lying there the previous day, they had agreed that if it was still there after dark, they would carry it off to their own house.
In the dead of night they came out of their house, found the trunk, and without stopping to examine it closely (though it did seem a little heavy), they carried it quickly back to their house and dumped it in the first convenient place, which happened to be immediately beside a room where their womenfolk were sleeping. And without bothering to see that it was in a secure position, they left it there
and went off to bed.
Ruggieri slept for a very long time, but eventually he digested the potion, its effects wore off, and just before matins he woke up. But although he had emerged from sleep and recovered the use of his senses, his mind was still blurred, and in fact it was some days before he shook off his state of bewilderment. On opening his eyes and finding that he could not see anything, he groped about with his hands and discovered that he was inside this trunk, whereupon he began to ponder and mutter to himself, saying: ‘What’s all this? Where am I? Am I asleep, or awake? I have a clear recollection of entering my lady’s bedchamber this evening, and now I appear to be inside some sort of chest. What does it mean? Can it be that the doctor returned home, or that something equally unexpected happened, causing my mistress to conceal me here whilst I was asleep? Why of course, that’s the explanation, that’s it exactly.’
And so he kept quiet and listened to see whether he could hear anything. But after remaining stock-still for some considerable time, feeling rather uncomfortable inside the trunk, which was none too big, and getting a pain in the side on which he was lying, he decided to turn over. This operation he performed with such a degree of skill that in pressing his back against one of the sides of the trunk, which had not been placed on an even keel, he caused it to topple over and fall with a resounding crash, waking up the women who were asleep in the adjoining room and giving them such a fright that they hardly dared to breathe, let alone open their mouths.
Ruggieri received quite a shock when the trunk toppled over, but on finding that it had burst open in falling, he preferred to clamber out rather than stay where he was, just in case anything worse was about to happen to him. Being at his wits’ end, and not knowing where he was, he began to fumble his way round the premises in order to see whether he could find a door or a staircase that would offer him a means of escape.