Chrysostom’s unrequited love for Marcela

Chrysostom’s unrequited love for Marcela becomes a public dispute over who is responsible for a rejected lover’s suffering. He dies after loving her, according to village report, but the account later complicates that explanation: Chrysostom chose to separate himself from Marcela, and she says she had plainly declared her intention to live in solitude. Marcela’s defense turns the episode from a tale of beautiful cruelty into a question of consent, responsibility, and the difference between refusing love and causing harm.

The Story the Village Tells

The first account reaches Don Quixote and his companions as village news. Chrysostom is described as a famous student who had taken up the shepherd’s life; the rumor says that he died for love of Marcela, the daughter of Guillermo the Rich, who also lives as a shepherdess. His burial arrangements deepen the dispute. He directed that he be buried in the fields, at the place where he first saw her, while the village clergy objected to instructions they considered improper. Ambrosio, Chrysostom’s close friend and fellow student shepherd, insists that the directions be carried out. The proposed funeral thus makes private grief a matter of communal argument before Marcela has appeared to answer for it.

The goatherd’s account places Marcela’s refusal within a longer history of choice. Her uncle described the qualities of the men who had sought her in marriage and invited her to choose according to her own preference. Marcela repeatedly said she did not yet wish to marry and considered herself too young for the responsibilities of matrimony. Her uncle stopped urging her, accepting that parents should not determine a child’s future against her will. Later, despite his and other villagers’ efforts to dissuade her, Marcela adopted shepherd’s dress and tended her own flock. Her decision brought her beauty into public view and drew still more suitors, among them Chrysostom.

Marcela’s independence does not, in the goatherd’s account, take the form of calculated encouragement. She is courteous in company, but gives no suitor even the smallest hope of winning her. When a man declares his intentions, including intentions framed as honorable marriage, she rejects him clearly. The account describes a countryside filled with rejected lovers’ laments: Marcela’s name and a crown are carved into beech trees, while shepherds sing, sigh, and keep vigil. That abundance of public expressions records the intensity of the suitors’ attachment, not a promise made by Marcela. The villagers nevertheless call her cruel and wonder who might eventually tame her, turning her refusal into a challenge to be overcome.

Chrysostom’s Absence and the Poem

At the burial, a lay attributed to Chrysostom seems to strengthen the accusations against Marcela. Its complaints invoke jealousy, suspicion, and absence, and the listener who hears it questions whether such charges fit the account of Marcela’s reserve. Ambrosio supplies a crucial circumstance: Chrysostom wrote the lay while away from her, having voluntarily separated himself to test the effect of absence. His fears and jealousies, Ambrosio explains, were imagined anxieties of a banished lover, not evidence that Marcela had betrayed or deceived him. The poem therefore preserves Chrysostom’s emotional experience without establishing that his suspicions were true.

Ambrosio’s explanation does not erase the depth of Chrysostom’s attachment. He had loved Marcela intensely, and the funeral, the poem, and the shepherds’ mourning all give that attachment a public form. But the account also separates the lover’s pain from proof of wrongdoing by the beloved. Chrysostom’s decision to withdraw and his own fears belong to his side of the relationship; Marcela’s conduct, as described by the goatherd and defended by Ambrosio, contains no encouragement that would make his hopes her responsibility. This distinction prepares the ground for Marcela’s appearance at the graveside, where she answers not only Ambrosio but the larger audience assembled to judge her.

Marcela’s Defense of Her Freedom

Marcela comes to the burial to defend herself against blame for Chrysostom’s death and the sorrow of her suitors. She challenges the assumption that being loved obliges a woman to return love. Beauty may attract attention, she argues, but attraction does not establish mutual inclination: even two people equally beautiful need not desire each other, and affection cannot be made voluntary by another person’s demand. Her argument treats love as a matter of choice rather than a debt incurred by being admired.

She also rejects responsibility for the beauty that has made her the object of attention. It was given to her, not chosen by her, and should not be treated as an offense for which she must compensate her admirers. In her account, modesty and virtue matter more than appearance, and a woman should not have to surrender them to gratify a man’s desire. She describes her beauty as something that need not injure anyone who keeps a proper distance. The image makes the boundary central: the danger lies not in her mere existence or appearance, but in the insistence that she must yield because others are drawn to her.

Marcela explains that she chose the solitude of the fields in order to live freely. She says that she had already told Chrysostom, at the very place where he would later be buried, that she intended to remain in perpetual solitude. If he persisted after that declaration, she maintains, his suffering cannot fairly be charged to her. She had neither promised him love nor deceived him, and she distinguishes direct refusal from cruelty. Her claim is specific to this relationship but also serves as a general answer to all her suitors: she will not be held responsible for a death or despair that follows when she has made no promise and offered no false hope.

Responsibility and the Meaning of Rejection

The story stages a conflict between public interpretation and the evidence of conduct. The village reads Chrysostom’s death through the visible intensity of his love and the mourners’ belief that Marcela’s beauty has power over them. His poem gives jealousy and absence the language of grievance, but Ambrosio’s account locates those suspicions in Chrysostom’s own separation and imagination. Marcela then supplies her stated reasons for that separation from the suitors: a settled preference for solitude, expressed openly and without deception.

The relation therefore ends without reciprocation, marriage, or a reconciliation. Chrysostom’s devotion is remembered in his burial place, his lay, and the shepherds’ mourning; Marcela leaves the gathering with her liberty asserted rather than surrendered to the demands of grief. The contrast does not deny that rejection can cause sorrow. It refuses to make sorrow proof of the rejecter’s guilt. By allowing Marcela to answer the accusations in her own speech, the episode shifts attention from the suffering lover’s claim to the rejected woman’s right to choose whether she loves at all.