Gabriotto Dies Suddenly in Andreuola’s Arms

Gabriotto’s sudden death in Andrevuola’s arms turns a private garden idyll into a scene of grief, public scrutiny, and threatened coercion. In Neifile’s embedded tale, two lovers dismiss dreams that seem to foretell disaster; when Gabriotto dies beside a fountain, the images they laughed away acquire a terrible force, though the physicians later identify a natural cause.

Background and Secret Marriage

The story begins in Brescia, where Andrevuola, young, unmarried, and beautiful, is the daughter of Messer Negro da Ponte Carraro. She falls in love with Gabriotto, a neighbour of lower social standing, whom the tale nevertheless presents as courteous, handsome, and agreeable. With the help of a household maid who knows their secret, Andrevuola brings him repeatedly into her father’s garden.

The lovers do not regard their meetings as a passing affair: they secretly marry, hoping that nothing but death can part them. That wish gives the scene of Gabriotto’s death its particular weight. The garden that has sheltered their marriage becomes both the place of their last meeting and the first setting of its consequences.

The Dreams and Their Dismissal

Before Gabriotto dies, Andrevuola dreams that she is holding him in the garden when a dark, dreadful presence emerges from his body, tears him from her embrace, and carries him underground. She wakes in grief and fear, then feels relieved that the scene was only a dream. When Gabriotto asks to visit the following night, she tries to prevent his coming; but, afraid that refusal might make him suspect another cause, she receives him after all.

At the garden fountain, amid the white and red roses of the season, she tells him what she has seen. Gabriotto laughs at the idea that dreams should be trusted, attributing them to eating too much or too little. He answers with a dream of his own: in a beautiful wood he has captured a snow-white hind, put a golden collar around her neck, and held her on a golden chain. As she rests with her head in his bosom, a hungry, coal-black greyhound comes at him. He offers no resistance as it thrusts its muzzle into the left side of his chest, reaches his heart, and tears it away. He wakes in pain, checks his side, finds nothing wrong, and dismisses the vision as no more meaningful than his earlier frightening dreams.

The dreams do not disclose a literal cause of death, but their images establish a pattern of separation and bodily violence before the fatal moment occurs. Andrevuola hears Gabriotto’s account while already afraid. She conceals that fear so as not to distress him, yet watches his face more intently than usual and scans the garden for anything dark. His confidence in the emptiness of dreams and her increasingly alert attention form a sharp contrast: one treats the warnings as folly, while the other cannot keep them from shaping the evening.

Gabriotto’s Death

As they embrace and kiss, Gabriotto suddenly sighs and asks Andrevuola for help, saying, “Alas, my soul, help me, for I die!” He falls onto the grass. Andrevuola raises him into her lap and asks what is wrong, but he cannot answer. Panting and sweating, he dies shortly afterward.

The death is immediate, but its recognition unfolds through touch. Andrevuola weeps and calls to him repeatedly; then she examines his body, finds him cold everywhere, and understands that he is dead. The intimate gestures of their meeting—her holding him, kissing him, and finally supporting him in her lap—become the gestures by which she confronts his irreversible absence. The dream’s image of a beloved torn from her embrace has become real in outcome, though no supernatural agent is shown.

The Body, the Investigation, and Andrevuola’s Resolve

Andrevuola summons the maid who has shared their secret. In her grief she says she means not to go on living, but first wants to preserve her honour, keep their love secret, and secure burial for Gabriotto. The maid urges her not to kill herself, arguing that suicide would endanger her soul as well as her life. She proposes either burying Gabriotto discreetly in the garden or leaving his body outside so that his family will find him and arrange his burial. Andrevuola listens despite her continuing tears.

The following events draw the secret into public view. Andrevuola and the maid carry Gabriotto’s body towards his house, but officers of the provostry encounter them. Andrevuola does not try to flee. She agrees to appear before the Seignory and explain what happened, while insisting that no one touch her or remove anything from the body. The scene shifts the story from private mourning to an official inquiry, without making her account an admission that she killed him.

The Provost orders physicians to examine Gabriotto. They find no poisoning or other violent injury: an abscess near his heart has burst and suffocated him. That finding gives the death a physical explanation, distinct from the dark figures in the lovers’ dreams. Yet the inquiry exposes another danger. The Provost offers to release Andrevuola if she will consent to his sexual demands, then tries to force himself on her when she refuses. She resists with indignation and proud words, defending herself rather than submitting to the authority that controls her custody.

When Messer Negro arrives with friends, the Provost discloses what has happened and asks that Andrevuola be returned to her father. He praises her constancy and, confessing his own attempted violence, says he wishes to marry her if she and her father agree. Andrevuola falls at her father’s feet and asks pardon for having secretly married the man she loved. Her plea is not that her life be spared, but that she may die as his daughter rather than as his enemy. The episode thus ends not with the dreams’ mystery resolved, but with Andrevuola’s secret marriage brought into the open and her fidelity tested against grief, public power, and family authority.

Narrative Significance

The episode’s reversal is built from the difference between forewarning and explanation. Both lovers dream of a dark force that threatens the beloved’s body; Gabriotto then dies in the very garden where Andrevuola has dreamed he will be taken from her. But the physicians’ diagnosis grounds the death in a ruptured abscess, so the tale makes the dreams ominously resonant without establishing them as its cause.

The garden also changes meaning as the action proceeds. It first offers the lovers privacy and a place to live out their secret marriage; after Gabriotto dies there, it becomes the setting of Andrevuola’s grief and the starting point of a public investigation. Her effort to protect their secret does not prevent its exposure, but her conduct remains consistent: she acknowledges the marriage, refuses the Provost’s coercion, and seeks her father’s pardon without repudiating the man she chose.