Fortuna

Fortuna is the book’s personification of the reversals that frustrate love, shaping both the lover’s sense of helplessness and the plot’s sharpest turns. It obstructs the paths by which grief might be expressed, converts Belisa’s concealed meeting with Arsileo into a double death, and later seems to reverse direction when Arsileo’s apparently extinguished hope returns. The idea is not simply that misfortune follows love: Fortuna gives and withdraws, making joy itself feel vulnerable to an abrupt reversal.

A force that obstructs expression

In a lyric lament, the speaker asks where freedom has gone and addresses the meadows, woods, and forests that once sustained a heart as free as their own. The natural world is invoked as witness, but cannot prevent the grave injury that has overtaken the speaker. The lament then names Fortuna as the power that afflicts and diverts the speaker, blocking the means, paths, and opportunities through which pain might be shown. Misfortune is therefore not only the suffering itself; it is also the obstruction of expression, the denial of a way to make suffering visible.

This emphasis on blocked means gives Fortuna a practical as well as emotional force. The speaker does not describe an abstract change of mood alone: roads and occasions that might have allowed grief to be communicated are diverted. In this image, the lover’s distress is intensified by frustrated action. Pain exists, but the ordinary channels for revealing it have been closed.

Belisa’s joy overturned

Belisa gives Fortuna its most devastating narrative work. She recounts that she and Arsileo had come to know that their love was mutual. His father, Arsenio, also pressed his suit to Belisa with messages and gifts. Belisa describes the simultaneous growth of her affection for Arsileo and Arsenio’s attachment to her, though the two affections were not of the same kind. She found Arsenio’s attention difficult to refuse, even as her happiness rested on being loved by Arsileo.

The catastrophe begins with a meeting arranged for night in her father’s garden. Arsileo was to climb a mulberry tree opposite the window of Belisa’s room so that they could speak at closer range. In retrospect, she sees how needless the danger was: he could have spoken with her in the fields, by the river, or in the grove when she took her cows out or brought them back. The lovers’ choice of the garden window and tree becomes the circumstance through which Fortuna’s reversal takes hold.

Arsenio regularly watched the street at night, but Belisa forgot this when she arranged the meeting. He saw her at the window and a man in the mulberry tree, yet did not recognize that the man was his son. In anger he returned home, armed a crossbow with an arrow tipped in poisonous herb, and shot Arsileo through the heart. Only when Arsileo spoke did Arsenio recognize his voice. Finding his son dead, Arsenio called himself the killer and stabbed himself through the heart with his own sword. The father’s mistaken recognition comes too late to avert either death.

Belisa presents the disaster as Fortuna ending the love that had made her happy, but her account also dwells on the missed warning and the avoidable exposure of Arsileo to danger. She remembers that she had feared the two men would encounter one another and that her joy could not last once Arsenio discovered the relationship. In her painful counterfactual, discovery might have led only to Arsileo’s banishment, an injury that time could heal. Instead, the encounter she dreaded ends in the deaths of both father and son. Fortuna names the overwhelming reversal, while Belisa’s recollection preserves the specific choices and circumstances through which it came about.

Grief, memory, and the limits of consolation

After witnessing the deaths, Belisa leaves her parents’ house and withdraws to a lonely place. By the time she tells her story, she says she has spent six months there without seeing or speaking to anyone, and without seeking anyone out. Her account makes Fortuna’s work endure beyond the night of the killings: the sudden disaster is followed by prolonged isolation and grief.

Belisa’s mourning does not divide neatly between the two dead men. She grieves Arsileo, whose love and life were taken from her, but says that Arsenio’s death also pains her because of the affection, goodness, and devotion he had shown. She even admits that she might have married Arsenio had his son not come to that land. The confession complicates the catastrophe without excusing the killing: the affection she had not returned in the same way becomes part of what she mourns after both men are gone.

When the nymphs urge Belisa to leave the place where she expects to weep and die, she initially regards it as a suitable setting for ending her life. She nevertheless agrees to go with them. Her decision does not erase the loss or promise that time will cure it; it marks a limited movement out of solitude. Fortuna’s injury has changed her life, but it has not wholly removed her capacity to accept the company and guidance of others.

Reversal and the return of hope

Later, the language of Fortuna accompanies a striking counter-turn in Arsileo’s story. Polidora tells him that Belisa’s sadness may become great joy, while acknowledging her fear that Fortuna might again frustrate the outcome he desires. She praises him as fortunate to have been loved in life in such a way that he was not forgotten in death. She then leaves to bring Belisa to him, asking him to remain where he is.

While he waits beneath the alders, Arsileo sings that love and Fortuna are turning back, strengthening and confirming a hope that had seemed dead or faint. The song gives Fortuna a different aspect from the force named in Belisa’s account: it can participate in the revival of hope as well as its destruction. Yet the scene offers an immediate prospect, not proof that every consequence of the earlier tragedy has been undone. Its force lies in the change from apparent finality to expectation. Across these episodes, Fortuna marks how precarious love’s fortunes are: happiness can be broken by a single mistaken encounter, and a hope believed dead can return, though neither reversal makes the pain that came before unreal.