Father Valenlonggo

The Parish Priest of Varlungo is a village cleric whose pursuit of Mistress Belcolore makes his religious office a cover for appetite, bargaining, and self-serving tricks. In a story presented as a comic warning not to trust priests in everything, he moves easily between Sunday piety and private seduction; when the affair threatens to cost him more than he wants to pay, he finds a way to reclaim his pledge and leave Belcolore with the grievance. His eventual return to her company makes the episode less a tale of repentance than one of an unstable bargain repeatedly renewed.

Identity and Public Role

The priest serves in Varlungo, a village close to Florence. Though he is not especially learned and knows little of reading, he entertains his parishioners on Sundays with pious sayings beneath an elm. He also makes a show of pastoral attentiveness: he visits women when they go out, brings them small gifts, and carries holy water or the remains of candles to their houses. The combination of religious office and practical familiarity gives him regular opportunities to approach parishioners while preserving an appearance of service.

His attentions to Belcolore are particularly revealing. When he sees her at church, he performs the Kyrie and Sanctus with conspicuous musical ambition, sounding less like a master of sacred music than an ass braying. If she is absent, he hurries through that part of the service. His devotion, in the story’s comic presentation, rises and falls with the prospect of seeing the woman he desires. He is not exposed by a public confession or formal investigation; his conduct instead makes the gap between clerical display and private purpose the engine of the joke.

Courtship of Belcolore

Among his parishioners, Belcolore pleases him above all. She is the wife of Bentivegna del Mazzo, a husbandman, and the story presents her as a lively, capable countrywoman: she can work at the mill, play the tambourine, sing, and lead dances. The priest sends her gifts such as garlic from the garden he cultivates himself, peas, chives, and scallions. He also catches opportunities to ogle her or make a friendly jest. Belcolore outwardly maintains a demure reserve, and at first he cannot obtain what he wants.

His opportunity comes when he meets Bentivegna setting off for Florence on business connected with a summons from a court judge. The priest learns that Belcolore’s husband will be away and promptly goes to her house. She has been picking over cabbage seed in the absence of her husband. The priest makes clear that he wants an affair, but Belcolore does not accept mere promises or small presents as sufficient payment. She asks for five crowns so that she can redeem her blue gown and Sunday girdle from pawn and go decently to Florence on Saturday. The request turns his pursuit into a negotiation: she is willing to meet him, but expects a substantial, specific benefit in return.

The Cloak and the Mortar

The priest says he does not have the money with him, but offers his blue-cloth cloak as security. To persuade Belcolore of its worth, he boasts that the cloth is of Douay—or, as his increasingly extravagant wordplay has it, even finer—and that it cost him seven crowns. She wants the cloak in hand before agreeing. He gives it to her; she then leads him to the barn, where they are unlikely to be disturbed. There he embraces and kisses her, spends a long time with her, and leaves wearing only his cassock, as though returning from officiating at a wedding.

Afterward, he regrets having left the cloak. He calculates that even the candle-ends he receives in offertory over an entire year would not amount to half the five crowns he had promised. Rather than pay the sum or surrender the pledge, he devises a way to get the garment back. The next day, a holiday, he asks Belcolore to lend him her stone mortar, claiming that he needs it to prepare sauce for guests. She sends it to him. Near dinner, when he knows Bentivegna and Belcolore are eating together, the priest has his clerk return the mortar with a message demanding the cloak as the token left with it.

The scheme exploits the household’s assumptions about the priest. Bentivegna hears that his wife has taken a pledge from the cleric and angrily orders her to return it, threatening to strike her and insisting that she should not refuse the priest anything he asks. Belcolore gives the cloak back, but sends word that he will never again pound sauce in her mortar and that the encounter has done her no honor. The priest answers with a matching joke about withholding his pestle if she withholds her mortar. The banter lets him pretend that their disagreement is a trivial exchange of household implements, while Belcolore understands that he has recovered his cloak at her expense.

Quarrel, Return, and Narrative Significance

Bentivegna assumes his wife’s message is merely a reaction to his own scolding and pays it no heed. Belcolore, however, bears the priest a grudge and keeps him at a distance until vintage time. The estrangement therefore does not end in public exposure or a lasting break. The priest threatens to have her sent into the mouth of Lucifer; frightened by the threat, she makes peace with him over must and roasted chestnuts. They resume making merry together on later occasions.

Belcolore never receives the five crowns. Instead, the priest has new parchment fitted to her tambourine and adds a set of hawk’s bells. This final exchange gives the story its measure of both the affair’s persistence and its imbalance: the priest recovers the costly cloak, while Belcolore must accept a lesser, different form of compensation. The episode was introduced by Pamfilo as a village love affair whose conclusion is more amusing than its length, and as a lesson that priests are not always to be believed. The Parish Priest of Varlungo embodies that warning through small, concrete reversals: the holy water and Sunday sayings sit beside the private gifts; the pledge meant to secure Belcolore’s payment becomes a garment he tricks her into returning; and the priest’s talk of mortar and pestle turns a real grievance into a joke. His story makes clerical hypocrisy comic not by denying his religious position, but by showing how readily he uses its respectability to pursue his desires and escape their cost.