Lothario

Lothario is Anselmo’s intimate friend and the unintended agent of the experiment that destroys their friendship, Camilla’s marriage, and ultimately all three lives. He understands from the outset that Anselmo’s request—to court Camilla so that her resistance might certify her virtue—turns friendship into an instrument of betrayal. His first effort is to dissuade Anselmo; his eventual consent, meant at first to avert a greater wrong, becomes the opening through which desire and deception take hold.

Identity and Moral Position

Lothario and Anselmo have known each other since childhood, and their friendship is presented as a bond with obligations that exceed mere compliance. Lothario argues that a friend must not violate divine duty for the sake of another, especially when the requested favor endangers both men’s honor. In his view, Anselmo’s test threatens to make Lothario the means by which Anselmo loses the very good he claims to be testing. His resistance is therefore not simply reluctance to participate in courtship: he identifies the plan as a moral contradiction, one in which a husband invites the destruction of his marriage in order to prove its strength.

Anselmo does not accept this warning. He insists that Lothario’s efforts need only appear to be a courtship, and that he will be satisfied once the trial begins. He also promises to provide opportunities for private conversation and the means to make the advances persuasive, including money and jewels, music, and verses. Faced with Anselmo’s fixed determination and the prospect that he might entrust the scheme to another person, Lothario agrees. He does so with a private intention different from Anselmo’s: to satisfy his friend without corrupting Camilla. This initial resolve makes his later conduct a reversal, not the fulfillment of an unbroken design.

From Staged Courtship to Affair

Anselmo arranges the first opportunity by leaving Lothario alone with Camilla after a meal and asking his wife not to leave their guest. Camilla treats Lothario warmly because she knows her husband’s affection for him; she has no knowledge of the test. Lothario, meanwhile, is troubled by the undertaking and thinks of a way to deceive Anselmo without harming her. Yet as the private encounters continue, the boundary between performance and real pursuit erodes. Lothario presses his suit with tears, promises, appeals, and praise of Camilla’s beauty. Her resolve begins to waver, and she eventually yields to him.

The change is decisive for both the affair and the friendship. Lothario has been asked to enact a false courtship, but he becomes Camilla’s lover in earnest. He does not tell her that Anselmo created the opportunity or that the advances began as an experiment. He fears that knowing this would diminish her regard for his love, making it seem accidental or merely performed. Leonela, Camilla’s attendant, becomes the only person who knows of the affair. When Anselmo later returns, he fails to recognize what has changed, while Lothario is already living with the consequences of the arrangement he had once hoped to contain.

Jealousy and the Counterplot

A separate secret in Anselmo’s household brings Lothario’s judgment to another crisis. Leonela has been bringing her own lover into the house at night. Lothario sees a man leaving at daybreak but does not understand that the visitor is Leonela’s. Instead, he assumes Camilla has been unfaithful to him as well. His suspicion turns into jealous anger, and he goes to Anselmo with a report that Camilla has accepted his advances and intends to meet him in the closet where the jewels are kept. He urges Anselmo to hide there during a feigned absence and observe her for himself.

Almost immediately, Lothario recognizes that his accusation was rash and that he has exposed Camilla to a cruel test of his own making. When he tells her what he has arranged, she is alarmed and reproaches him for the decision. She nevertheless devises a performance to take advantage of Anselmo’s concealment: Lothario is to behave as if he has come to claim a promised reward, while she addresses him as a woman who has always rejected his advances. She draws a boundary before him and speaks as though defending her fidelity and her husband’s honor. Lothario understands the plan and plays his part, helping make their false appearance of virtue more convincing than the truth.

Ending and Narrative Significance

The performance completes the pattern of Lothario’s involvement: he first agrees to deceive Anselmo in order to protect Camilla, then becomes her lover, and finally collaborates with her in a deception designed to restore Anselmo’s confidence. Friendship, love, and honor repeatedly appear in his decisions, but each becomes entangled with concealment. His first moral objection correctly anticipates the danger; his subsequent choices do not escape it, but deepen it.

The affair ends in separation and death. Anselmo dies after his experiment has brought about his own dishonor, leaving a partially written note that forgives Camilla and acknowledges that he should never have required her to perform miracles of virtue. Camilla enters a convent and does not take the veil immediately. Lothario, too late repentant, has gone to the Kingdom of Naples, where he is killed in a battle involving M. de Lautrec and the Great Captain Gonzalo Fernandez de Cordova. After hearing of his death, Camilla takes the veil and dies not long afterward, worn down by grief. The story’s narrator links the end of all three to a thoughtless beginning: Lothario’s character is central to that chain of consequences, but Anselmo’s original experiment, rather than Lothario’s first intention, sets it in motion.