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Day 8: Sixth Tale
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Decameron, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Love and Sex
Men and Women
Moderation and Excess
Intelligence
Class and Character
Faith vs. Religion
Summary
Analysis
The company appreciates the pig prank but feels that the chickens go too far, and they pity Calandrino. Pampinea says that her tale will offer a warning about deceiving others. Sometimes the victim of a deception manages to get “just retribution” for it.
The brigata’s reaction to the extortion of the chickens, which takes the theft of the pig too far, points to an ongoing exploration of moderation and excess in this section of tales: which tricks are funny, and which are mean? Which are licensed and which are excessive? Pampinea claims that her tale will illustrate “just retribution,” or an exact repayment of a harm. Whether her tale will illustrate such moderation or not remains to be seen.
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Just a little while before the company came together, a very beautiful, proud, and gently bred widow named Elena lives in Florence. Swearing to never remarry, she has taken a “charming young man” of her choice as her lover. Around the same time, Rinieri, a young Florentine nobleman, returns from his studies in Paris. He falls desperately in love with Elena when he sees her at a banquet. In her vanity, Elena notices and toys with his attentions, thinking Rinieri is a “simpleton” she can lead “by the nose.”
The similarities between this tale (which also happens to be the longest one in The Decameron) and a later, semi-autobiographical work of Giovanni Boccaccio called the Corbaccio, have led many scholars to interpret Rinieri as a thinly veiled avatar of Boccaccio himself. In this way, the tale might be interpreted as playing out an emotional fantasy the book’s author has about Elena—whose real-life identity remains a mystery. Like Piccarda (VIII, 4), Elena’s widowhood gives her a modicum of freedom within the patriarchal (controlled by men) system, and by delaying or avoiding remarriage entirely and taking a lover, she prevents herself from falling back under the control of male authority. Even though the tale’s narrator is a woman, Pampinea, and despite Elena’s claim of sexual freedom, this tale is deeply rooted in antifeminist, misogynistic stereotypes about women, beginning with their vanity. Elena leads Rinieri on because she’s vain and because she has an inflated sense of her own intelligence.
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Believing Elena to be interested, Rinieri cultivates her maid as a go-between, and when the maid carries messages to her mistress, Elena wonders if Rinieri has left his wisdom in Paris. She toys with Rinieri, suggesting that his affections are returned but that she must be careful to protect her honor. While he sends gifts and she offers vague replies, she ridicules Rinieri to her lover. But her lover eventually becomes jealous of the scholar, which inspires Elena to play a particularly involved trick on Rinieri.
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Elena invites Rinieri to visit her after dark on the day after Christmas, and the maid admits him to a courtyard where he is locked in to wait. He quickly becomes cold due to the thick blanket of snow on the ground. But he suffers in patience, believing that his lady will soon reward him. Meanwhile, Elena has also invited her lover, and they watch from a window as the maid explains to Rinieri that Elena’s brother visited unexpectedly and is delaying her. He accepts this and says he’ll wait until she can come to him.
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Seeing Rinieri left outside to freeze to death nearly convinces Elena’s lover that she doesn’t care for the scholar at all. While they’re having sex all through the night, they mock the scholar. Meanwhile, Rinieri waits, becoming colder all the time. By the early morning hours, Elena’s cold treatment towards Rinieri has dispelled the chill of jealousy in her lover’s heart. They creep to the courtyard door to mock him further.
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Elena calls Rinieri through a crack in the door. He gratefully expects to be allowed in so he can warm up. But Elena says he should be used to the snow from his time in cold Paris. She answers his pleas to warm up inside with a claim that opening the door would alert her brother, who she says is still there. Rinieri asks her to prepare a nice big fire so he can warm up, but she retorts that she doesn’t understand how he can be cold now, since his love letters always claimed that he was burning up with passion. She returns to having sex and mocking Rinieri with her lover.
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Finally understanding that he’s been tricked, Rinieri tries to escape, but every door is locked. During the cold night, his “longstanding love [is] transformed into savage and bitter hatred” and he indulges in elaborate revenge fantasies. At dawn, the maid allows him to leave, maintaining the story about the brother’s visit. Rinieri hides his seething anger while he stumbles home, nearly paralyzed with cold. He nearly succumbs, but milder weather and the ministrations of physicians restore his strength.
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After some time, fortune gives Rinieri a chance to enact his revenge. Elena’s lover leaves her for another woman, and she’s heartbroken. Her maid thinks Rinieri may know some magic spells (thanks to his Parisian education) that would help her regain his affection. Without pausing to consider that if he did know any spells, Rinieri would have used them before, Elena asks for his help. Praising God that he now has a chance to “punish the wicked hussy,” Rinieri agrees to meet with her.
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Elena, forgetting how badly she mistreated him, pours out her troubles to Rinieri. Although magic displeases God and Rinieri vowed to avoid it, he pretends that his love for her outweighs his concern for sin. But he warns that she will have to be brave and secretive for the charm to work. “More a slave to love than a model of common sense,” Elena is willing to do anything.
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Rinieri describes the ritual. He will make a tin figure of her lover. Elena must wait for a dark night, then hold the figure in her hand while she undresses and immerses herself seven times in a flowing stream. Still naked, she must climb to a high, deserted place, then repeat a magic spell that he will give her. Two ladies will appear, and after she tells them her wish, she can descend, dress, and go home. By the next night, her lover will have returned. Elena plans to do the ritual at a remote farm she owns where there is a flowing stream and an abandoned tower. Although he claims ignorance, Rinieri recognizes the farm she describes.
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Delighted at the thought of his impending revenge, Rinieri makes the tin figure and writes out some nonsense spell words, sending both to Elena. Then he takes a servant with him to a friend’s house near Elena’s farm. Elena also takes her maid to the country. Without telling the maid her plans, she steals out of her house at midnight. She undresses, dips into the stream, and walks to the tower. Hidden nearby, Rinieri is nearly overcome by the allure of her naked body when she passes by. Feeling pity and arousal, he wants to “seize her in his arms and take his pleasure of her, ” but he strengthens his resolve by recalling her cruel treatment of him.
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Elena climbs to the top of the tower and recites the spell while Rinieri silently dismantles the ladder. After the magical maidens fail to appear, she begins to suspect that he wants “to give [her] a night like the one [she] provided for him,” and she discovers that she is trapped when she prepares to descend, and the ladder is gone. Weeping and wailing, she repents of the trick she played on Rinieri and curses her fate. When people learn that she was found naked on the tower, they’ll reconsider her reputation. If she makes an excuse, she fears that Rinieri will expose her affair.
By the time the sun rises, Elena is so desperate she’s nearly suicidal. While searching around for help, she sees Rinieri. Lying down on the roof and putting her head through the trapdoor so he can’t see her nakedness, she chastises him for his trick, says that she’s learned her lesson, and appeals to his gentlemanly nature to end her sufferings. She took from him something that she can now return (her affections), but if he takes away her good name, he won’t be able to restore that to her. Her tears inspire sorrow in Rinieri, but he also feels pleasure in his revenge, and since “his passion [is] unequal…to his craving for revenge,” he refuses to help her.
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Rinieri tells Elena that she could have expected some compassion from him now if she had shown him any on that winter night. He mocks her concern for her good name now, since she didn’t care enough to avoid taking her lover before. Maybe, he suggests, she should ask the man in whose hands she’s already placed her reputation (her lover) to rescue her. Rinieri himself no longer wants the sexual favors she offers. And if he did, he would take them by force before she could offer them freely.
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Rinieri resents Elena’s attempt to avoid punishment “for [her] wickedness” by appealing to his “better nature.” Even if he were a charitable man, she isn’t the kind of woman who deserves it. And he disagrees that his trick is revenge (which exceeds the original wrong). He thinks that it is punishment for her attempt to murder him; taking her life or the lives of another hundred “foul and wicked” women wouldn’t be as bad as that. Although she’s pretty, she’s nothing more than a “miserable little whore” and her life is worth much less than his, since he’s a “gentleman…who can bring more benefit to humanity in a single day” than she could in thousands of years.
If Elena is so anxious to descend the tower, Rinieri suggests that she make him happy by committing suicide. She tries to argue that putting aside her initial hatred and confiding in him should have earned her some mercy. She tries to thank him for teaching her the error of her ways. She begs for his forgiveness, promises to forsake her lover, and submits herself to him as her “lord” even if he no longer wants her love. She also chastises him for criticizing her beauty, since “beauty…brings sweetness, joy, and solace to a man’s youth.”
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Rinieri retorts that Elena confided in him out of desperation, not respect. He brags that he could have punished her in a thousand other ways, although he’s glad she fell into this trap, because her shame and suffering are enhancing his pleasure. If she eluded all his traps, he could have punished her by publicly writing about her sins. He tells her that he doesn’t want her love since he has a better lady now, and he criticizes women generally for preferring young and handsome men to older, wiser, and more experienced ones. This is to their detriment—her lover left her because young men are never content with one woman. He implies that her lover hasn’t kept quiet about their affair, so her reputation is already lost.
Seizing on his new love, Elena asks Rinieri to pity her for the sake of his lady, and he pretends to go off to find her clothes. But, leaving his servant to guard the tower, he goes back to his friend’s house for a siesta. Elena tries to hide from the blazing sun in the insufficient shelter of the parapet wall. The sun burns her until her skin splits into “tiny cracks and fissures” and she can’t move without great pain. To make things worse, flies swarm around her bleeding flesh, further tormenting her. No one is around to help her since the day is so hot and no one is in the fields. Helpless, Elena turns into “the ugliest thing in the world” while she waits on the tower.
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Late in the afternoon, Rinieri returns. A weakening Elena bursts into tears and begs him in God’s name to end his unreasonably severe revenge, either with rescue or by killing her. At the very least she asks for some water. Rinieri feels a “modicum of pity” but doggedly sticks to his revenge, telling the “vile strumpet” that he will give her as much water to restore her from the heat as she gave him fire to restore him from the cold. He complains that fragrant waters cure burns while his hypothermia required being packed in animal manure. Elena wonders what punishment he could have imagined for even greater sins, like murdering his family and all his friends.
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Finally, as evening approaches, Rinieri feels that his revenge is complete—although he would like to punish her maid, too. He brings Elena’s clothes to her maid and has his servant take her to Elena. The maid arrives just as a swineherd has finally heard Elena’s cries. He reassembles the ladder, and after the maid brings Elena her clothes and the welcome news that no one knows about her trials, he carries Elena down. The maid unluckily misses the ladder and falls from the tower, breaking her leg. When Elena returns to Florence, she “[weaves] a completely fictious account” of the affair and successfully claims that her injuries and her maid’s are the work of evil spirits.
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Elena undergoes a lengthy and painful recuperation from her burns, shedding her skin several times over because it keeps sticking to her sheets. She doesn’t miss her lover, play tricks, or fall in love again. Rinieri, hearing that the maid broke her leg, considers his revenge complete and goes “happily about his business.” Thus, ladies should know to think twice before playing tricks, especially on scholars.
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