Danteo's Love for Duarda, Rejected

Danteo’s love for Duarda, once answered by her devotion, becomes a story of broken trust and refusal when he marries Andresa despite their promise of a future together. His later appeals cannot undo the choice: Duarda acknowledges how deeply she loved him, but insists that his actions forfeited her affection and that her recovered freedom is now her own.## Background and the Broken Promise The account emerges during Felismena’s travels through Lusitania. Resting by the Mondego River, she overhears Duarda and her companion Armia discussing Danteo, whose renewed courtship Duarda rejects. Their exchange reconstructs a relationship that had once seemed secure: Duarda says she loved Danteo, gave him no reason to doubt her, and treated the sheep he tended as if they were her own. She would even watch from a hill to make sure his flock could graze safely. Her care was not merely a declaration; it was woven into the daily work of pastoral life. The breach begins with a promise of marriage. At a fountain, Danteo asked Duarda to marry him secretly, before their parents could intervene. She refused to take that step, saying that she was his and could never belong to another, and that his word that he would make her his wife was enough. She wanted their commitment honored without doing something she considered improper. Her trust rested on that promise, not on a willingness to disregard the consequences of a secret marriage.## The Marriage to Andresa The next day, Danteo told Duarda that his father wanted him to marry and asked her permission to follow his family’s wishes. Within three days he married Andresa. For Duarda, the speed of the decision makes the failure especially stark: after assuring her that she was his, he did not wait, renew his promise, or treat her earlier answer as a bond to be honored. Armia offers a different reading of the exchange. She recalls that when Danteo asked what to do about the proposed marriage, Duarda replied that he could follow his own and his father’s will, just as she would follow hers. Armia treats this answer as grounds for Danteo’s belief that he was free to marry. Duarda rejects that defense. She says Danteo knew her well enough to understand, from her face and manner, that the words were not what she truly wanted to say. More importantly, she distinguishes what she said from what she had done: her sustained care and earlier assurances, in her view, made her attachment plain. The disagreement turns on how love is to be read and what counts as responsibility. Armia stresses an apparently permissive answer; Duarda insists that Danteo should have recognized the difference between its surface and the feeling beneath it. Yet the story also records Duarda’s explicit refusal of secret marriage, making the encounter more complicated than a simple misunderstanding. She had declined to elope while relying on his promise, and he soon chose marriage to another. Her account presents his marriage as the decisive act, regardless of how he interpreted her words.## A Return After Loss At the time of Felismena’s encounter with the two women, Andresa has been dead for less than a month. Danteo has begun approaching Duarda again, arguing that because his wife has died he can now marry the woman he had once promised to wed. Armia urges Duarda to soften, even suggesting that Andresa’s death confirms Danteo was meant for her. Duarda refuses to treat another woman’s death as a restoration of her claim. Her answer is that she is now her own and cannot be Danteo’s. The change in Duarda’s position does not mean that the earlier love was false. She recounts how she suffered after Danteo’s marriage and admits that she once wished vengeance on him and Andresa. She also says that fate eventually made his fortune cease to pain her. The passage thus traces a movement from wholehearted attachment, through injury and anger, toward a hard-won independence. Danteo’s bereavement changes his circumstances, but it does not reverse the emotional consequence of his choice.## Duarda’s Answer and Danteo’s Appeal Danteo arrives while the women are speaking and addresses Duarda directly. He describes his tears and grief, asks only that his presence and sad verses not trouble her, and offers practical service: he will tend her flock, take her goats to drink, watch over her sheep, and spare her labor. His language presents love as labor and service, a promise to make her comfort his own concern. Duarda does not deny the history behind his appeal. She says that she truly loved him, that no other shepherd in the fields by the Mondego had received from her a reason to complain, and that when she could not see him her eyes found no pleasure. But she also names the sequence that has made reconciliation impossible for her: she trusted his promise, he married Andresa, and now he seeks her again after his wife’s death. She will not let present tears outweigh past conduct. Her refusal rests on the distinction between what Danteo says and what he did, and she explicitly rejects his attempt to regain what he lost through his own fault.## Narrative Setting and Significance The dispute is staged within an idealized pastoral landscape of riverbank, shade, flocks, and songs, but its central question is not pastoral simplicity. It concerns the difficult interpretation of promises, family authority, and a woman’s consent. Danteo cites his father’s wish to marry as part of the circumstances surrounding his decision; Duarda’s account makes clear that this pressure did not erase the commitment he had made to her. The lovers’ rural world supplies the setting for a conflict shaped by household power and marriage choices. Felismena listens as an observer already marked by her own unhappy experience. She supports Duarda’s insistence that conduct matters more than finely arranged words, reflecting that misfortune might be avoided if women did not credit eloquent declarations from fickle hearts. She regrets not having followed that counsel herself. Her response links Duarda’s judgment to the surrounding narrative’s broader contrast between declarations of devotion and the actions that test them. The encounter does not show Danteo winning Duarda back. Instead, it leaves the decisive boundary in place: his renewed service and grief cannot compel her consent, and her former devotion does not obligate her to return. The conversation is interrupted when Felismena and the others hear a fight nearby and go to investigate. Duarda’s rejection therefore remains the scene’s unresolved conclusion, while its sharpest reversal is already complete: the woman who once gave herself to Danteo now claims her freedom from him.