Girolamo Dies Beside Salvestra

Girolamo Dies Beside Salvestra is the fatal culmination of a love begun in childhood and interrupted by separation. When Girolamo secretly enters the married Salvestra’s bedchamber, she refuses to betray her husband, though she permits him to lie beside her. He dies without touching her; later, seeing his body, Salvestra is overcome by grief and dies as well. The tale makes the lovers’ reunion brief and their separation irreversible, while giving Salvestra’s husband a humane role in the aftermath.

Separation and Return

Girolamo and Salvestra had been lovers when they were young, but Girolamo’s family sent him to Paris, intending to end the attachment. His mother rebuked him for being so enamoured, then used coaxing and persuasion to secure his consent to go. He agreed to remain in France for a year, but was kept there for two. The delay did not diminish his love: he returned more passionately attached than before.

By the time he came back, Salvestra had married an honest young tentmaker. Girolamo saw that there was no simple way to recover the life they had shared. He nevertheless began passing by her, hoping she remembered him as he remembered her. She either no longer remembered him or concealed that she did, and he soon understood that these encounters had not changed her conduct. His disappointment led him to resolve to speak to her directly, even at the risk of his life.

The Night Encounter

Learning from a neighbour how Salvestra’s house was arranged, Girolamo entered it secretly one evening while she and her husband were away keeping vigil with neighbours. He hid behind tent cloths and waited until the couple returned and went to bed. When he believed the husband asleep, he approached Salvestra and touched her breast. She was awake and began to cry out, but he identified himself and begged her to remain silent.

Salvestra immediately urged him to leave. She recalled that their childhood love belonged to a time when such an attachment was not forbidden; now she was married and, she insisted, owed her regard to her husband. She also made the danger concrete: if her husband discovered Girolamo, she could lose the peace and affection she currently enjoyed in her marriage. Her refusal was not merely a rejection of an old lover. It was an effort to protect the life she had made and the trust of the man who loved her.

Girolamo answered with pleas and promises, invoking their past and the constancy of his love through absence. When none of this persuaded her, he asked for one limited concession: to lie beside her and warm himself, without speaking further or touching her, then leave. Salvestra felt some compassion and agreed on those terms. Girolamo lay beside her without touching her, but the closeness sharpened the contrast between his enduring love, her present refusal, and his lost hope. He resolved to die, clenched his hands, and died beside her without a word or movement.

Discovery and Concealment

After waiting for him to leave, Salvestra wondered why he had not gone and assumed he had fallen asleep. When she reached out to wake him, she found him cold. A closer attempt to rouse him confirmed that he was dead. Shocked and unsure what to do, she sought a way to learn her husband’s judgment without immediately revealing her own involvement. She woke him and presented the event as though it had happened to someone else, asking what that woman should do.

Her husband replied that the dead man should be carried quietly to his own house and left there, and that the woman should not be blamed because she appeared to have done no wrong. Salvestra then disclosed that this was what they ought to do and made him touch Girolamo’s body. Confounded, the husband rose, lit a light, dressed the body in its own garments, carried it on his shoulders, and left it at the door of Girolamo’s house. His response follows the counsel he has just given: he does not accuse Salvestra or turn the death into a public charge against her.

Two Deaths and the Meaning of the Ending

At daybreak, Girolamo was found dead outside his own home. Physicians examined him and searched his body but found no wound or bruise. The people generally concluded that he had died of grief, which the narration confirms. The absence of physical injury distinguishes his death from a killing: the fatal force in the episode is the despair produced by the return of an unchanged love to a changed life.

Girolamo’s mother and other women gathered at the church where his body was carried, lamenting him. The tentmaker suggested that Salvestra cover her head, go among the women, and listen for any accusation; he would listen among the men. He also gave her a chance to see Girolamo’s body. Salvestra had refused him when he was alive, but grief now overcame the restraint she had maintained. Veiled, she pressed through the crowd, reached the body, and fell face downward upon it with a cry. The sight and touch of Girolamo dead overwhelmed her, and she died there.

The sequence turns the lovers’ reunion into a double ending: Girolamo dies in the bed beside Salvestra, and Salvestra dies beside his body after it has been carried away. Her earlier compassion allowed him physical closeness but not renewed intimacy; her final grief arrives only when that distinction can no longer be changed. The husband, meanwhile, neither exposes nor punishes her. His practical kindness enables her to reach the body, inadvertently bringing the story to its second death. The tale’s force rests on this stark reversal: the living Salvestra protects her marriage from the past, while the dead Girolamo and the sight of him make that past inescapable.