Danteo marries Andresa

Danteo marries Andresa after pledging himself to Duarda, who had trusted his promise and refused to elope with him. Recounted by Duarda to Armia and overheard by Felismena, the marriage is not presented as an isolated change of affection: it marks the breach between a private commitment and a choice Danteo made under his father’s authority. When he later seeks Duarda again, she treats the marriage—and the short life of his wife—as no warrant for renewing their former bond.

Background and Promise

Before the marriage, Danteo had told Duarda that he intended to make her his wife. At the fountain, as Duarda recalls it, he asked whether she would marry him secretly, before their parents could intervene. She refused that course, telling him she was his and could be no one else, while asking him to be content with the promise he had already given her. Her refusal was not, in her telling, a withdrawal of love; it was a refusal to secure their future by an act she believed would be improper. She expected the promise to hold while they waited.

Danteo’s own explanation, as Armia relays it, begins with a different exchange. At a grove near Fermoselle, he told Duarda that his father wanted him to marry and asked what he should do. Duarda answered that he could follow what his own will and his father’s obligation required. Danteo’s defense depends on taking those words as permission. Armia adds that Duarda’s manner was so unlike her usual way of speaking that the change should have been apparent to him; Duarda later insists that he was not so ignorant of her face and bearing that he could mistake her meaning.

The Marriage and Conflicting Accounts

Duarda describes the decisive sequence as a reversal within days. After the private conversation in which she had affirmed their bond but refused to marry in secret, Danteo told her that his father wished him to marry and asked her leave to do so. Within three days, he had married Andresa. For Duarda, the speed of the decision makes the earlier promise impossible to dismiss as a misunderstanding: she had trusted his pledged word, and he proceeded with another marriage almost at once.

The accounts differ over what Duarda’s answer meant, not over the fact that Danteo married Andresa. In Armia’s version, her reply at Fermoselle gave him reason to obey his father. Duarda counters that her response was not what she truly wished to say, and that Danteo should have understood this from the contrast with her ordinary conduct. She also sets that disputed answer against her clearer declaration at the fountain: she had told him she was his, but had asked him not to press her into a secret marriage. The episode therefore leaves the question of permission contested while keeping the consequence plain: Danteo married another woman, and Duarda regarded the act as a betrayal.

Aftermath and Later Confrontation

By the time Felismena hears the conversation, Andresa has died. Duarda says that not even a month has passed since her burial, and that Danteo has already begun to return to her with renewed attentions. He reportedly argues that, since his wife is dead, he can now marry Duarda. She refuses to treat Andresa’s death as a remedy for the earlier breach. In her judgment, Danteo cannot recover what he lost through his own fault merely because his circumstances have changed.

Duarda’s refusal is expressed as a claim to regained freedom: she says that she belongs to herself now and cannot be Danteo’s. Her words answer both his former request for permission to marry and his present attempt to reopen their courtship. The marriage has altered the terms of their relationship irreversibly for her; his new availability does not restore the trust that his decision destroyed.

Narrative Significance

The episode is conveyed through a dispute among characters rather than through an impartial account of Danteo’s decision. Armia gives his defense, Duarda supplies her own memory, and Felismena intervenes in sympathy with Duarda’s reasoning. That arrangement preserves the distinction between Danteo’s claimed understanding of Duarda’s answer and Duarda’s account of what she meant. The marriage is certain; the fairness of his appeal to her apparent consent remains part of the argument.

The conflict also sets parental authority beside private vows without resolving the tension in the abstract. Danteo invokes his father’s wishes and Duarda’s reply, while Duarda points to the promise she had trusted and to the restraint she exercised by refusing a secret marriage. Her account measures fidelity not by what a lover can later say he understood, but by what he chose to do. In the pastoral scene beside the Fields of Mondego, the marriage thus serves as the concrete cause of Duarda’s rejection: she does not deny their former love, but insists that his actions have ended her obligation to him.