Bergame

Bergame is the small Italian town that anchors Arlequin's personal history and the financial mystery governing the play. Before he became a wealthy father settled in Paris, Arlequin lived there in poverty with Nisida's mother. The town is therefore not merely a place remembered from the past: it is the setting in which his friendship with the Count of Valcourt began, the source of the fortune later carried across national borders, and the lost home against which his life in Paris is measured.

Definition and Early Setting

Bergame appears in Arlequin's account as a small town in Italy where he and Nisida's mother occupied an apartment and lived without wealth. Their circumstances were modest, but the household possessed a form of stability that later prosperity would not preserve. When the Count of Valcourt, a French nobleman, settled in Bergame and bought the house containing their apartment, he allowed them to remain there. This practical act of preservation created the first link between the poor local household and the foreign aristocrat whose estate would eventually transform its fortunes.

The town also establishes the contrast between Arlequin's social position then and later. He presents himself as a poor man rather than one of the people whom the rich conventionally call respectable. Yet his poverty does not prevent him from forming a deep friendship with the Count. Bergame thus separates moral worth from economic standing at the very moment when the plot begins to show how easily society confuses them.

The Count of Valcourt and the Fortune

Arlequin recalls that his friendship with the Count of Valcourt grew rapidly. The Count first showed him kindness, and Arlequin returned it wholeheartedly; after six months, the Count could no longer do without him. Their intimacy lasted twelve years. The relationship made Arlequin a trusted companion and finally the heir to everything the Count had brought into Italy, even though the Count's family history was divided between France and Bergame.

The inheritance had a troubled background. The Count had secretly married a very bad woman in France, and she behaved disgracefully. He eventually left her half of his fortune for herself and for a six-month-old son whom he had never acknowledged. The remaining property in Italy passed to Arlequin after the Count's death. Bergame therefore stands at the center of an inheritance whose material route is clear but whose human legitimacy is unstable: a French nobleman's wealth reaches an Italian friend while his son remains excluded and unknown.

Migration from Bergame to Paris

Arlequin's attachment to Bergame ends after a sequence of personal losses. Once he became rich, he says, troubles arrived: he lost Nisida's mother and his two sons. These deaths made him develop an aversion to his native country. He liquidated his assets and moved to Paris with Nisida, who was then no more than six years old. The movement from Bergame to Paris converts inherited wealth into a migrant household's new social position, but it also removes Arlequin from the community where everyone knew who he was.

In Paris, Arlequin admits that he became vain about his status. He explains that, had he remained in Italy, where his identity was known, he would have found it easier to approve Nisida's love for Cléante. In the French capital, however, his self-conscious concern with rank makes the decision harder. Bergame consequently represents more than a former residence: it is the place where Arlequin feels legible, while Paris is the city in which wealth, reputation, foreignness, and concealed origins become dangerous social forces.

Inheritance, Law, and Recognition

The connection between Bergame and the Count's estate resurfaces when Cléante reveals that his father was the Count of Valcourt. Cléante possesses proofs of the relationship and explains that, just as an old friend of his father was prepared to seek permission for him to visit, news arrived that his father had died in Italy and had left his fortune to a stranger. The revelation changes the meaning of Arlequin's prosperity: what had seemed a fortunate inheritance is exposed as property attached to a displaced heir.

Cléante nevertheless notes that his parents' marriage was never declared and that the law gives him nothing to claim. Arlequin rejects that legal shelter. He declares that the law cannot govern him when his heart tells him that the fortune does not belong to him, and he refuses to accept a situation in which he remains rich while his benefactor's son is poor. He therefore decides to return everything, asking only that Cléante ensure Nisida has the means to live. The moral force of Bergame's history finally outweighs formal legal advantage: the town's past becomes the ground for an act of restitution.

Narrative Significance

Bergame gives the play its transnational structure. Arlequin is an Italian-born father established in Paris; the Count is French but dies in Italy; Cléante's claim travels through a divided family and an estate that has crossed borders; Nisida's future depends on how these movements are interpreted. The town links geography to social identity, showing that a person may be known, trusted, or excluded differently according to the place in which his name is recognized.

Its recollected presence also sharpens the play's contrast between wealth and honesty. In Bergame, Arlequin's identity is secure enough for him to judge Cléante by character rather than appearance. In Paris, concern for status and reputation makes him expel a young man he still loves and esteems. When the truth about the Count is disclosed, Arlequin recovers the ethical clarity associated with his earlier life: he accepts poverty rather than keep wealth that conscience assigns to another. Bergame thus functions as the remembered origin of both the fortune and the standard by which that fortune is finally judged.