Bartolomea Refuses to Return Home with Ricciardo

Bartolomea Refuses to Return Home with Ricciardo turns a husband’s attempt to recover his abducted wife into a reckoning over what their marriage had been. In Monaco, Bartolomea makes clear that she knows Ricciardo and understands his claim, but will not return to Pisa: the life he offers is not, in her judgment, a life she has reason to choose.

Abduction and a Changed Life

During a boating diversion, the corsair Paganino da Mare overtakes the boat carrying Bartolomea, the young wife of Messer Ricciardo di Chinzica, and takes her aboard in full view of her husband. Ricciardo is distraught, but his complaints in Pisa and elsewhere achieve nothing: he does not know who has taken her or where she has been carried. The abduction is the immediate cause of their separation, but the story soon shifts its attention from Ricciardo’s loss to Bartolomea’s experience of life with her captor.

Paganino, finding Bartolomea beautiful and having no wife, resolves to keep her. At first she weeps, and he tries to console her with kind words. By the time they reach Monaco, however, she has begun to live happily with him. Paganino treats her honourably as his wife, and the narrative presents their shared life as a striking contrast with her marriage in Pisa. Her change of circumstance is not merely a change of location: it gives her a basis for judging what she had lacked before.

The Ransom and the Test

When Ricciardo learns where Bartolomea is, he goes by sea to Monaco, prepared to spend whatever Paganino demands for her ransom. He approaches the corsair with civility and explains why he has come, asking him to name a price and restore his wife. Paganino does not acknowledge him as someone he knows. Instead, he says he has a young woman in his house, but cannot verify that she belongs to Ricciardo. He offers to bring them together: if she identifies Ricciardo as her husband and agrees to leave with him, Ricciardo may pay what he thinks fit; if she does not, he must not try to take her away.

Ricciardo accepts the condition confidently. He expects Bartolomea to recognize him at once and throw herself into his arms. When she enters the saloon, dressed and prepared to receive visitors, she greets him as she would any stranger who had arrived with Paganino. Ricciardo is bewildered and wonders whether grief has altered his appearance so much that she no longer recognizes him. He tells her who he is and explains that he has come to pay for her return.

Bartolomea continues the pretence in front of Paganino, saying she has never seen Ricciardo. Ricciardo takes her denial for fear of speaking openly before her captor and asks for a private conversation. Paganino permits them to speak alone, on the condition that Ricciardo not kiss her against her will. Once they are apart, Bartolomea drops the pretence: she knows perfectly well that he is her husband. The test has not exposed her ignorance or confusion; it has given her an opportunity to state her choice.

Bartolomea’s Case Against the Marriage

Bartolomea tells Ricciardo that he had failed to understand what a young, vigorous wife needed. His learning in law, she says, suited him better than marriage, while his careful knowledge of saints’ days, fasts, vigils, and other observances made him seem more a crier of religious dates than a husband. She extends the comparison to his lands: if the farmers had been allowed as many holidays as he allowed himself in their marriage, they would have harvested no grain. Her complaint makes the calendar more than a comic detail. In her account, it governed their intimacy so strictly that the marriage left her unsatisfied.

With Paganino, she says, no such holiday rules interrupt their life together. She describes them as working day and night, and insists that she intends to stay while she is young, leaving fasts and religious observances for old age. Her language is deliberately bawdy, but the argument is direct: Ricciardo’s offer to take her home cannot undo the neglect she says defined their former life. When he promises to make a new effort now that he knows what she wants, she rejects the promise as belated and doubts his capacity to fulfil it.

Ricciardo appeals to her family’s honour, her own reputation, and the danger that Paganino might tire of her and cast her aside. He presents himself as the safer choice, claiming that he would continue to cherish her and keep her mistress of his house. Bartolomea answers that her family showed little concern for her honour when it gave her to Ricciardo, and she will not now make their reputation her obligation. In her judgment, she is Paganino’s wife here, whereas in Pisa she had felt like Ricciardo’s whore. She also refuses the assumption that she must return to Ricciardo if Paganino later leaves her; she would seek her advantage elsewhere rather than resume a marriage that had brought her grief.

Departure and Consequences

Bartolomea finally tells Ricciardo to leave, warning that she will cry out if he tries to force her. He recognizes that he has no power to change her mind. The narrator describes him as belatedly recognizing the folly of taking a young wife when he was himself spent. He leaves Monaco sorrowful, having failed to ransom Bartolomea or secure her return, and goes back to Pisa alone.

Ricciardo’s defeat continues after the meeting. For some time, whenever anyone greets him or asks him a question, he answers only with the refrain that the ill hole will have no holidays. The line compresses his humiliation into the very language of religious observance that Bartolomea had used against him. He dies not long afterward. Paganino, learning of Ricciardo’s death and knowing Bartolomea’s attachment to him, marries her lawfully. The two live joyfully together without observing saints’ days, vigils, or Lent.

Narrative Significance

The episode’s reversal depends on the difference between recovering a person and recovering a marriage. Ricciardo arrives with money ready for ransom and assumes that his legal and marital claim will determine Bartolomea’s return. Paganino instead makes her consent decisive, and Bartolomea uses that opening to explain why she prefers her present life. Her refusal does not erase the coercive circumstances of the original abduction; it does, however, give her the decisive voice in the encounter that follows.

The comic force comes from the collision between Ricciardo’s habitual rule-keeping and Bartolomea’s account of its consequences. His calendar of holy days, which he may have treated as a sign of devotion, becomes in her telling a measure of marital failure; after losing her, he is reduced to repeating the sexual joke embedded in that same complaint. The story closes by returning to the contrast between his abstentions and her chosen life with Paganino, making the refusal to go home the point on which the episode’s satire and resolution converge.