Fra Alberto Disguises Himself as the Angel Gabriel to Deceive Lisetta

Fra Alberto’s deception of Lisetta is a tale of religious fraud built from two performances: first, he claims that the Angel Gabriel has punished him for insulting her beauty; then he dresses as the angel and visits her in that guise. By joining Lisetta’s vanity to her devotion, he makes a fabricated miracle serve as permission for an illicit affair. The episode’s comedy depends on the gap between the sacred identity he presents and the bodily, self-interested conduct he conceals beneath it.

The Apology and the Invented Vision

After Lisetta has praised her own beauty, Fra Alberto rebukes her for vainglory, but he is himself overcome by desire. Several days later, he visits her with a trusted companion and privately asks her forgiveness for his earlier words. He explains his change of heart by inventing a supernatural punishment: during prayer, he says, a great light appeared in his cell, and a handsome youth carrying a stout cudgel seized and beat him until he could scarcely rise.

In Fra Alberto’s account, the youth identifies himself as the Angel Gabriel. The angel supposedly says that he struck the friar because he had dared disparage Lisetta’s celestial charms, and that he will beat him again unless she forgives him. Fra Alberto withholds the rest of the story until Lisetta grants that pardon. The sequence gives his request a religious urgency while making her vanity appear, to her, confirmed by heaven itself: the angel has not merely noticed her beauty but allegedly defended it.

Fra Alberto then enlarges the fiction into a promise of intimacy. He claims the Angel Gabriel has often wanted to spend the night with Lisetta but feared frightening her, and now proposes to visit in human form so that she can touch him. Lisetta welcomes the supposed angel, while setting one condition: he must not prefer the Virgin Mary to her. Her devotion and rivalry are thus drawn into the same fantasy. Fra Alberto presents himself as a messenger conveying the angel’s desire, although the story he tells has been designed to secure his own access.

The Angel’s Visit

Fra Alberto adds a second deception to the first. He asks Lisetta to let the angel enter through her open door, explaining that the visitor will come in human form and cannot otherwise get inside. He also tells her that the angel will take Fra Alberto’s soul to Paradise and enter his body, so that the friar himself will be absent while the angel is with her. Lisetta readily agrees, accepting the invented exchange as a kindness to the man she believes has suffered on her account.

That night Fra Alberto prepares for the encounter by fortifying himself with confections and other food. He first goes to the house of a woman friend, where his companion remains, then disguises himself in the angelic trappings he has brought and makes his way to Lisetta’s house. Seeing the white-clad figure, Lisetta kneels before him. He blesses her, raises her, and signals that she should go to bed; she obeys, and he lies down beside her.

The supposed visitor is Fra Alberto, not a celestial being. The tale stresses the contrast between the angelic costume and his vigorous physical conduct: he proves a more satisfying bedfellow than Lisetta’s husband, while also telling her stories about the glories of heaven. Before dawn, he arranges his departure, removes the disguise, and returns to his companion. The sacred appearance has served as both entrance and cover; Lisetta’s belief allows the friar to turn an invented heavenly visit into a real sexual encounter.

The Story Continued and the Secret at Risk

The next day Lisetta goes to Fra Alberto with her waiting-woman and recounts the angel’s visit, including what she says she learned about eternal life. She also adds marvelous details of her own invention. Fra Alberto sustains the fraud by claiming that the angel carried his soul among roses and other flowers, where it remained until morning, while he himself cannot say what happened to his body. Lisetta supplies the answer: the body, she insists, lay in her arms all night. As proof, she points to a kiss she gave beneath his left breast and says that its mark should remain for days. Fra Alberto pretends to need to inspect himself before acknowledging her claim.

He continues visiting her in the angel’s guise, and the deception becomes an ongoing arrangement rather than a single night’s exploit. Lisetta, meanwhile, is not content to keep the supposed favor entirely private. In an argument with a gossip about women’s beauty, she boasts that the Angel Gabriel loves her more than himself and considers her the fairest woman in the world. She claims that he visits her often and speaks of their intimacy as proof of her superiority. Her confidence makes the affair vulnerable to discovery: a secret sustained through private instructions and disguises is now being disclosed as a boast to another person.

Clerical Fraud and Dramatic Irony

The episode makes the friar’s religious role part of the mechanism of deception. Fra Alberto first approaches Lisetta as a confessor, rebuking her for vanity; later he returns as a supposed penitent, claiming that divine punishment has compelled him to seek pardon. He then impersonates an angel and uses the language of prayer, forgiveness, Paradise, and heavenly favor to authorize his own desire. Religious signs do not merely decorate the trick: they give Lisetta a story through which she can mistake a sexual visit for a unique spiritual privilege.

The narrative’s irony rests on the difference between what Lisetta believes and what the reader knows. She sees an angel who favors her, while the reader has watched Fra Alberto invent the angel’s rebuke, arrange the open door, prepare for the night, and arrive in costume. Lisetta’s imagined confirmation of her beauty is therefore inseparable from the friar’s calculated performance. Her later boasting repeats the lie in public, exposing how readily a private fraud can acquire a life beyond its maker’s control. The episode’s decisive target is not belief alone, but the exploitation of belief by a cleric who turns apparent holiness into a disguise for appetite.