But a neighbour of mine, a lady well advanced in years,
tells me that, by what she heard when she was a girl,
both stories are true; but that the latter concerned
not Gianni Lotteringhi but one Gianni di Nello, that
lived at Porta San Piero, and was no less a numskull
than Gianni Lotteringhi. Wherefore, dear my ladies,
you are at liberty to choose which exorcism you prefer,
or take both if you like. They are both of extraordinary
and approved virtue in such cases, as you have heard:
get them by heart, therefore, and they may yet stand
you in good stead.
— Her husband returning home, Peronella
bestows her lover in a tun; which, being sold by her
husband, she avers to have been already sold by herself
to one that is inside examining it to see if it be
sound. Whereupon the lover jumps out, and causes
the husband to scour the tun for him, and afterwards
to carry it to his house. —
Great indeed was the laughter with which Emilia’s
story was received; which being ended, and her orison
commended by all as good and salutary, the king bade
Filostrato follow suit; and thus Filostrato began:—Dearest
my ladies, so many are the tricks that men play you,
and most of all your husbands, that, when from time
to time it so befalls that some lady plays her husband
a trick, the circumstance, whether it come within your
own cognizance or be told you by another, should not
only give you joy but should incite you to publish
it on all hands, that men may be ware, that, knowing
as they are, their ladies also, on their part, know
somewhat: which cannot but be serviceable to
you, for that one does not rashly essay to take another
with guile whom one wots not to lack that quality.
Can we doubt, then, that, should but the converse that
we shall hold to-day touching this matter come to
be bruited among men, ’twould serve to put a
most notable check upon the tricks they play you, by
doing them to wit of the tricks, which you, in like
manner, when you are so minded, may play them?
Wherefore ’tis my intention to tell you in what
manner a young girl, albeit she was but of low rank,
did, on the spur of the moment, beguile her husband
to her own deliverance.
’Tis no long time since at Naples a poor man,
a mason by craft, took to wife a fair and amorous
maiden—Peronella was her name—who
eked out by spinning what her husband made by his
craft; and so the pair managed as best they might
on very slender means. And as chance would have
it, one of the gallants of the city, taking note of
this Peronella one day, and being mightily pleased
with her, fell in love with her, and by this means
and that so prevailed that he won her to accord him
her intimacy. Their times of forgathering they
concerted as follows:—to wit, that, her
husband being wont to rise betimes of a morning to
go to work or seek for work, the gallant was to be
where he might see him go forth, and, the street where
