‘The Angel Gabriel asked me to tell you that he had taken such a liking to you that he would have come to spend the night with you on several occasions except for the fact that you might have been frightened. He now charges me to inform you that he would like to come to you on some night in the near future and spend a little time in your company. But since he is an angel and would not be able to touch you if he were to come in his own angelic form, he says that for your own pleasure he would prefer to come in the form of a man. He therefore desires that you should let him know when, and in whose form, you would like him to come, and he will carry out your instructions to the letter. Hence you have every reason to regard yourself as the most blessed woman on earth.’2
Lady Noodle said she was delighted to hear that the Angel Gabriel was in love with her, for she herself was greatly devoted to him and never failed to light a fourpenny candle in his honour whenever she came across a painting in which he was depicted. So far as she was concerned, he would be welcome to visit her whenever he pleased, but only if he promised not to desert her for the Virgin Mary, of whom it was said that he was a great admirer, as seemed to be borne out by the fact that in all the paintings she had seen of him, he was invariably shown kneeling in front of the Virgin. As for the form in which he should visit her, she would leave the choice entirely to him so long as he was careful not to give her a fright.
‘You speak wisely, madam,’ said Friar Alberto, ‘and I shall certainly arrange for him to do as you suggest. But I want to ask you a great favour and one that will cost you nothing, namely, that you should instruct him to use this body of mine for the purpose of his visit. The reason is this, that when he enters my body, he will remove my soul and set it down in Heaven, where it will stay for the whole of the time he remains in your company.’
‘What a good idea!’ said Lady Birdbrain. ‘It will make up for the blows he gave you on my account.’
‘Very well, then,’ said Friar Alberto. ‘Now remember to leave your door unlocked for him tonight, because otherwise, since he will be arriving inside a human body, he will be unable to get in.’
The woman assured him that it would be done, and Friar Alberto took his leave of her. As soon as he had gone, she strutted up and down sticking her head so high in the air that her smock rose clear of her bottom, and thinking that the hour for the Angel Gabriel’s visit would never come, so slowly did the time seem to pass.
Meanwhile, Friar Alberto, working on the assumption that his role would be that of a paladin rather than an angel during the night ahead, began to gorge himself on sweetmeats and various other delicacies so as to ensure that he would not be easily thrown from his mount. And as soon as darkness had fallen, having received permission to be absent, he departed with a companion and went to the house of a lady-friend which he had used as his base before when setting out to sow his wild oats. At what he judged a suitable hour, he made his way thence, suitably disguised, to Monna Lisetta’s house; and having let himself in, he transfigured himself into an angel with the aid of certain gewgaws that he had brought along for the purpose. Then he climbed the stairs and strode into her bedroom.
When she saw this pure white object advancing towards her, the woman fell upon her knees before it. The Angel gave her his blessing, helped her to her feet, and motioned her to get into bed. This she promptly did, being only too ready to obey, and the Angel lay down at his votary’s side.
Friar Alberto was a powerful, handsomely proportioned fellow at the peak of physical fitness, and his approach to the bedding of Monna Lisetta, who was all soft and fresh, was altogether different from the one employed by her husband; hence he flew without wings several times before the night was over, causing the lady to shriek with delight at his achievements, which he supplemented with a running commentary on the glories of Heaven. Then, shortly before dawn, having made arrangements to visit her again, he collected his trappings - and returned to his companion, with whom the mistress of the house had generously bedded down for the night so that he would not be afraid of the dark.
After breakfast, the lady went with her maidservant to call upon Friar Alberto and brought him tidings of the Angel Gabriel, describing what he was like, repeating all the things he had told her about the glories of the Life Eternal, and filling out her account with wondrous inventions of her own.
‘Madam,’ said Friar Alberto, ‘I know not how you fared with him. But I do know that when he came to see me last night and I gave him your message, he immediately took my soul and set it down amid a multitude of flowers and roses, more wonderful to behold than anything that was ever seen on earth. And there I remained until matins this morning, in one of the most delectable places ever created by God. As for my actual body, I haven’t the slightest idea what became of it.’
‘But that’s exactly what I am telling you,’ said the lady. ‘Your body spent the whole night in my arms with the Angel Gabriel inside it. And if you don’t believe me, take a look under your left breast, where I gave the Angel such an enormous kiss that it will leave its mark there for the best part of a week.’
‘In that case,’ said Friar Alberto, ‘I shall undress myself later today – which is a thing I have not done for a very long time – in order to see whether you are telling the truth.’
The woman chattered away for a good while longer before returning once more to her own house, which from then on Friar Alberto visited regularly without encountering let or hindrance.
One day, however, Monna Lisetta was chatting with a neighbour of hers, and their conversation happened to touch upon the subject of physical beauty. She was determined to prove that no other woman was as beautiful as herself, and, being a prize blockhead, she remarked:
‘You would soon cease to prattle about the beauty of other women if I were to tell you who has fallen for mine.’
At this, her neighbour’s curiosity was thoroughly aroused, and, well knowing the sort of woman with whom she was dealing, she replied:
‘You may well be right, my dear, but you can hardly expect to convince me unless I know who it is that you are talking about.’
‘My good woman,’ retorted Monna Lisetta, who was quick to take offence, ‘I should not be telling you this, but my admirer is the Angel Gabriel, who loves me more than his very self. And he informs me that it is all because I am the most beautiful woman on the face of the earth, and the face of the water too.’
Her neighbour wanted to burst out laughing there and then, but being eager to draw Monna Lisetta out a little further on the subject, she continued to keep a straight face.
‘God bless my soul!’ she exclaimed. ‘If your admirer is the Angel Gabriel, my dear, and if he tells you this, then it must be perfectly true. But I never imagined the angels did this sort of thing.’
‘That is where you are mistaken,’ said the lady. ‘I swear to you by God’s wounds that he does it better than my husband, and he informs me that they do it up there as well. But he has fallen in love with me because he thinks me more beautiful than any of the women in Heaven, and he is forever coming down to keep me company. So there!’
On leaving Monna Lisetta, her friend could scarcely contain her eagerness to repeat what she had heard, and at the earliest opportunity, whilst attending a party with a number of other ladies, she recounted the whole of the story from beginning to end. These ladies passed the tale on to their husbands and to various of their female acquaintances, and thus within forty-eight hours the news was all over Venice. Unfortunately, however, the brothers of Monna Lisetta’s husband were among those to whose ears the story came, and they firmly made up their minds, without breathing a word to the lady herself, to run this angel to earth and discover whether he could fly. And for several nights running they lay in wait for his coming.
Some tiny hint of what had occurred chanced to reach the ears of Friar Alberto, who, having called upon the lady one night with the intention of giving her a scolding, had scarcely stripped off his clothes before her brothers-in-law, who had
seen him arrive at the house, were hammering at the door and trying to force it open. Hearing the noise and guessing what it signified, Friar Alberto leapt out of bed, and seeing that there was nowhere to hide, he threw open a window overlooking the Grand Canal and took a flying leap into the water.
Friar Alberto was a good swimmer, and because the water was deep he came to no harm. Having swum across the canal, he dashed through the open door of a house on the other bank, and pleaded with its tenant, an honest-looking fellow, to save his life for the love of God, spinning him some yarn to account for his arrival there at such a late hour in a state of nudity.
The honest man took pity on him, and since he was in any case obliged to go and attend to certain affairs of his, he tucked the Friar up in his own bed and told him to stay there until he returned. And having locked him in, he went about his business.
On forcing their way into her room, the lady’s in-laws discovered that the Angel Gabriel had flown, leaving his wings behind. They were feeling discountenanced, to say the least, and bombarded the woman with a torrent of violent abuse, after which they left her there, alone and disconsolate, and returned home with the Angel’s bits and pieces.
Meanwhile, in the clear light of morning, the honest man happened to be passing through the Rialto district3 when he heard people talking about how the Angel Gabriel, having gone to spend the night with Monna Lisetta, had been discovered there by her in-laws, whereupon he had hurled himself into the canal in a fit of terror, thereafter vanishing without trace. The man immediately realized that the person in question was none other than the one he was sheltering under his roof, and having returned to the house, he persuaded the Friar, after turning a deaf ear to a string of tall stories, to admit that this was indeed the case. The man then insisted on being paid fifty ducats in exchange for keeping the Friar’s where-abouts secret from the lady’s in-laws, and the two of them devised a way for the payment to be made.
Once the money had been handed over, Friar Alberto was anxious to get away from the place, and the honest man said to him:
‘There is only one way of doing it, but it won’t work unless you are willing to cooperate. Today we are holding a carnival, to which everyone has to bring a partner wearing some form of disguise, so that one man will be dressed up as a bear, another as a savage, and so on and so forth. To round off the festivities, there is to be a sort of fancy-dress hunt, or caccia, in Saint Mark’s Square, after which all the people disperse, going off wherever they choose and taking their partners with them. Now if, instead of lying low here until someone gets wind of your whereabouts, you were to let me take you along in one of these disguises, after the ceremony I could leave you off wherever you wished. Apart from this, I can think of no other way for you to escape from here without being recognized, because the lady’s in-laws have realized that you must have gone to ground somewhere in this part of the city, and their men are keeping watch over the whole neighbourhood, ready to seize hold of you the moment you appear.’
Although he baulked at the notion of going about the streets in a disguise of this sort, Friar Alberto was so terrified of the lady’s in-laws that he allowed himself to be persuaded, and he told the fellow where he wanted to be taken, leaving him to work out the actual details.
The man applied a thick layer of honey to the Friar’s body, after which he covered him with downy feathers from head to foot. He then tied a chain round his neck, put a mask over his face, and placed a club in one of his hands, whilst to the Friar’s other hand he tethered two enormous dogs which he had collected earlier from the slaughterhouse. Meanwhile, he sent an accomplice to the Rialto to announce that anyone wishing to see the Angel Gabriel should hurry along to Saint Mark’s Square – which goes to show how far you can trust a Venetian.
Once these preparations were complete, the man waited a little longer and brought the Friar forth, getting him to lead the way whilst he held on to him from behind by means of the chain. Eventually, having stirred up a great commotion along the route and provoked the question ‘Whoever is it?’ from all the people he met, he drove his captive into the square. And what with all the crowds following in his wake, and those who had flocked from the Rialto after hearing the announcement, there were so many people in the square that it was impossible to count them. Upon his arrival, the man had tied his savage to a pillar in an elevated and conspicuous position, and was now pretending to wait for the mock-hunt, or caccia, to begin, whilst the Friar, since he was smeared with honey, was being pestered by hordes of gnats and gadflies.
When he saw that the square was more or less filled to capacity, the man stepped towards his savage as though to release him. But instead of setting him free, he tore the mask from Friar Alberto’s face, proclaiming:
‘Ladies and gentlemen, since the boar refuses to put in an appearance, there is not going to be any caccia. But so that you will not feel that your coming here was a waste of time, I want you to see the Angel Gabriel, who descends by night from Heaven to earth to amuse the women of Venice.’
As soon as his mask was removed, Friar Alberto was immediately recognized by all the onlookers, who jeered at him in unison, calling him by the foulest names and shouting the filthiest abuse ever to have been hurled at any scoundrel in history, at the same time pelting his face with all the nastiest things they could lay their hands upon. They kept this up without stopping, and would have gone on all night but for the fact that half-a-dozen or so of his fellow friars, having heard what was going on, made their way to the scene. The first thing they did on arriving was to throw a cape over his shoulders, after which they set him free and escorted him back, leaving a tremendous commotion in their wake, to their own quarters, where they placed him under lock and key. And there he is believed to have eked out the rest of his days in wretchedness and misery.
Thus it was that this arch-villain, whose wicked deeds went unnoticed because he was held to be good, had the audacity to transform himself into the Angel Gabriel. In the end, however, having been turned from an angel into a savage, he got the punishment he deserved, and repented in vain for the crimes he had committed. May it please God that a similar fate should befall each and every one of his fellows.
THIRD STORY
Three young men fall in love with three sisters and elope with them to Crete. The eldest sister kills her lover in a fit of jealousy; the second, by giving herself to the Duke of Crete, saves her sister’s life but is in turn killed by her own lover, who flees with the eldest sister. The murder is imputed to the third lover and the third sister, who are arrested and forced to make a confession. Fearing execution, they bribe their gaolers and flee, impoverished, to Rhodes, where they die in penury.
On finding that Pampinea had reached the end of her story, Filostrato brooded for a while, then turned to her and said:
‘The ending of your story was not without a modicum of merit, from which I drew a certain satisfaction. But there was far too much matter of a humorous kind in the part that preceded it, and this I would have preferred to do without.’
He then turned to Lauretta, and said:
‘Madam, pray proceed with a better tale if possible.’
‘You are being much too unkind toward lovers,’ she replied, laughing, ‘if all you demand is an unhappy ending to their adventures. However, for the sake of obedience I shall tell you a story about three lovers, all of whom met an unpleasant fate before they were able to enjoy their separate loves to the full.’
Then she began:
Young ladies, as you are perfectly well aware, all vices can bring enormous sorrow to those who practise them, and in many cases they also bring affliction to others. But it seems to me that the one that leads us into danger more swiftly than any other is the vice of anger. For anger is nothing more than a sudden, thoughtless impulse, which, set in motion by a feeling of resentment, expels all reason, plunges the mind’s eye into darkness, and sets our hearts ablaze with raging fury. And although men are not immune from this particular vice,
and some men are more prone to it than others, nevertheless it has been observed to produce its most catastrophic effects among the ladies, for they catch fire more easily, their anger burns more fiercely, and they are carried away by it without offering more than a token resistance.
Nor is this fact surprising, for if we examine the matter closely, we shall see that fire, by its very nature, is more likely to be kindled in those things which are light in weight and soft in texture than in harder and heavier objects. And if the gentlemen will forgive me for saying so, we are invariably more delicate than they are, as well as being much more capricious.
Bearing in mind, then, that we have a natural propensity to fly into a temper, that our cheerfulness and mildness of manner have a pleasing and very soothing effect upon our menfolk, and that anger and fury can bring about so much peril and anguish, I intend to strengthen our will to resist this vice by telling this story of mine, which, as I have already said, concerns the love of three young men and three young women, and which shows how, through the anger of one of these latter, their happiness was transformed into complete and utter misery.
Marseilles, as you know, is an ancient and illustrious city on the coast of Provence, and it used to boast a larger number of wealthy citizens and great merchants than appears to be the case nowadays. One of these was a certain N’Arnald Civada, who, despite his exceedingly humble origins, had built himself a firm reputation as an honest merchant and amassed a huge fortune, both in money and capital goods. His wife presented him with a number of children, of whom the eldest three were girls, whilst all the rest were boys. Two of the girls were fifteen-year-old twins, the third was fourteen, and marriages had been arranged for all three by their kinsfolk, who were simply waiting for the return of N’Arnald from Spain, whither he had gone with a consignment of merchandise. The names of the first two girls were Ninetta and Maddalena; the third was called Bertella.
Tales From the Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio Page 53