Dom Felice Induces Fra Puccio to Perform Nightly Penance

Dom Felice Induces Fra Puccio to Perform Nightly Penance is a tale of counterfeit holiness put to practical use: a monk invents an elaborate route to beatitude, and the devout husband who follows it unknowingly gives the monk nightly access to his wife. The joke depends on a precise division of the household’s hours and spaces. Fra Puccio keeps vigil beside a thin wall, while Dom Felice and Isabetta turn his supposed path toward Paradise into cover for their affair.

The Household and Its Devotional Routine

Fra Puccio is a rich, unlearned man living near San Pancrazio. In his later years he has devoted himself to religious observances and become a tertiary affiliated with the Order of Friars Minor, earning the name Fra Puccio. With only his wife and a maid in the household, he has no craft to occupy him: he goes frequently to church, says his prayers, attends sermons and mass, fasts, and mortifies himself. He is even rumored to belong to the Flagellants.

His piety shapes married life as well as his own routine. Isabetta, a young woman described as between twenty-eight and thirty, is made to endure fasts more frequent and longer than she wishes. When she wants sleep or intimacy, Fra Puccio instead recounts religious matter to her. The story thus establishes an imbalance that Dom Felice will exploit: a husband absorbed in spiritual exercises, and a wife whose ordinary desires have been subordinated to them.

Dom Felice, a Conventual monk of San Pancrazio, has recently returned from Paris. He is young, handsome, quick-witted, and learned. Fra Puccio becomes his close friend because the monk can resolve his doubts and presents himself as exceptionally devout. He is welcomed into the household for meals, and Isabetta also grows familiar with him. Dom Felice recognizes her unmet desires and, seeing that she will meet him only in her own home, devises a way to be with her there without arousing suspicion—even while her husband remains in the house.

The Fabricated Road to Beatitude

Dom Felice presents the scheme as a secret shortcut to sainthood, allegedly known to the Pope and other high prelates but concealed lest ordinary people stop giving alms to the clergy. He tells Fra Puccio that the prescribed penance will purge sins committed before it begins, while later sins will not count against him in the same way. The promise is tailored to a man eager for spiritual advancement, and its aura of privileged clerical knowledge makes the deception sound like instruction rather than invention.

The ritual is described in exact, demanding stages. Fra Puccio must first confess his sins diligently, then keep a strict fast and abstain for forty days from touching any woman, including his wife. At night he is to go to a place in his house open to the sky, stand against a broad plank with his feet on the ground, and stretch out his arms in the posture of a crucifix. He may rest his arms on pegs, but must remain there without moving until Matins. Because Fra Puccio is no scholar, Dom Felice assigns him three hundred Paternosters and three hundred Ave Marys, with meditation on God as creator and on the Passion. In the morning he may sleep, then must hear at least three masses and say fifty Paternosters and fifty Aves; he is also to return to church at evensong and follow further prayers supplied in writing before repeating the vigil.

The laborious schedule is the mechanism of the deception. Fra Puccio accepts it as manageable and announces that he will begin on Sunday. He repeats the instructions to Isabetta, with Dom Felice’s permission. She immediately understands what the monk’s nighttime vigil will enable. She tells her husband she will fast alongside him, but will do nothing more. Their different understandings of the same penance are central to the plot: Fra Puccio takes its outward form as spiritual discipline, while Isabetta recognizes its usefulness as a cover.

The Vigil as Cover

Once the penance begins, Dom Felice arranges to come to the house on most evenings, bringing good food and drink. After supper, he lies with Isabetta until the hour of Matins, when he leaves and Fra Puccio returns to bed. The husband’s vigil takes place beside the room where his wife sleeps, separated from it by only a slight wall. The arrangement brings the two activities into striking proximity: the prayers and the affair proceed under one roof, at the same nighttime hours.

One night the floor shakes as Dom Felice and Isabetta are together. Fra Puccio, having completed a hundred of his prayers, pauses without leaving his place and calls to ask what his wife is doing. Isabetta answers playfully that she is tossing as much as she can. When he asks what she means, she gives him a proverb he has often used, about someone who does not eat at night having to toss until morning. Fra Puccio accepts this explanation. He assumes fasting has made her restless and tells her to lie still, while warning that her movements are shaking the room. She assures him she knows what she is doing and urges him to continue his own task. His credulity protects the secret more effectively than a locked door could.

After that night, Dom Felice and Isabetta have a bed made in another part of the house. The monk still departs at the appointed hour, and Isabetta returns to her own bed before Fra Puccio comes back from his vigil. The change of location preserves the routine and reduces the risk of another disturbance. Fra Puccio continues his penance; his wife continues her pleasure with the monk, while the husband remains unaware of what the ritual has made possible.

The Penitential Joke and Its Aftermath

When the forty days are over, the affair does not end. Isabetta has become accustomed to the monk’s plentiful food after the long period in which her husband kept her on a low diet, and she finds ways to continue meeting Dom Felice elsewhere, discreetly. The penance therefore serves not merely as a temporary trick: it creates the opening for an arrangement that survives its stated term.

The tale closes by reversing the spiritual promise that began the scheme. Fra Puccio believes he is doing penance to win Paradise for himself, but his practice instead supplies the cover through which Dom Felice and Isabetta obtain their worldly pleasure. The narrator’s final irony recasts the monk, ostensibly the instructor in the speedy way to beatitude, as the beneficiary of the husband’s misplaced devotion; Isabetta, meanwhile, has used the very discipline imposed on her as part of her escape from domestic deprivation. Religious vocabulary, prayer schedules, and the posture of the crucifix are not discarded but repurposed as instruments of concealment. The story’s comedy rests on that collision between the solemn language of salvation and the practical ingenuity of adultery.