Isabetta and Dom Felice's Affair

Isabetta and Dom Felice's Affair turns a husband’s supposed path to holiness into cover for an adulterous relationship. Dom Felice uses Fra Puccio’s piety, trust, and household routine to arrange private access to Isabetta, while Isabetta recognizes the scheme and helps sustain it. The affair’s central irony is that the husband believes he is doing penance to win Paradise, even as his nightly discipline makes room for the monk and his wife to seek pleasure together.

Household and Circumstances

Fra Puccio, a wealthy and respectable man living near San Pancrazio, had devoted himself in later life to religious practice. He became a Franciscan tertiary and was known as Fra Puccio. With only a wife and a maid in his household, he did not need to pursue a trade; he spent his time in church, at sermons and Mass, in prayer, fasting, and mortification. The story describes him as ignorant and simple, and says that people even suspected he belonged to the Flagellants.

His wife, Isabetta, was about twenty-eight to thirty years old, young, attractive, and lively. Her husband’s piety shaped their intimate life as well as his own: when she wanted sleep or affection, he answered with accounts of Christ’s life, religious sermons, or the lamentations of Mary Magdalene. Because of his devotion, and perhaps his age, she also endured longer and more frequent fasts than she wished. The account makes this domestic mismatch the condition in which the affair becomes possible: Fra Puccio’s religious exercises leave Isabetta hungry for companionship and pleasure, while he assumes that his preferred routine is a shared spiritual good.

Dom Felice Gains Access

Dom Felice, a young and handsome Conventual monk of San Pancrazio, returned from Paris as a sharp-witted and learned man. Fra Puccio formed a close friendship with him because the monk could resolve his doubts and seemed to share his devout interests. Trusting him, Fra Puccio sometimes brought him home for meals. Isabetta, out of regard for her husband, also became familiar with the visitor and treated him courteously.

Dom Felice noticed Isabetta’s youth and appearance and inferred that she lacked the pleasure her husband did not provide. He gradually encouraged desire in her and then made known his own wishes. Isabetta was receptive, but would not risk being alone with him elsewhere; she trusted no place except her own home, where Fra Puccio was also present and never went outside the town. Her condition makes the domestic setting both the obstacle and the eventual instrument of their meetings: the husband’s presence prevents an ordinary rendezvous, so Dom Felice has to devise a way to keep him occupied under his own roof.

The Penance as a Cover

Dom Felice presents Fra Puccio with a secret, supposedly swift road to blessedness. He claims that church authorities know a form of penance they have kept from the laity, and makes his instruction conditional on Fra Puccio’s promise to practise it without revealing it. The invented regimen is exacting and absorbing: Fra Puccio must confess carefully, fast and abstain for forty days, and spend each night standing upright with his arms extended in the posture of a cross, gazing at the sky until Matins. He must say hundreds of prayers, attend Mass, return to church in the evening, and repeat the nightly vigil.

Fra Puccio believes the proposal is manageable and resolves to begin on Sunday. With Dom Felice’s permission, he tells Isabetta the details. She understands what the monk’s instructions will accomplish, agrees that she is pleased by her husband’s good work, and says she will fast alongside him—but no more. Her answer signals her knowledge of the plan without exposing it to her husband. The penance’s religious language is therefore not merely a disguise imposed on her: she recognizes its practical use and accepts the arrangement that will let the affair proceed.

Parallel Nights and Isabetta’s Part

Once the penance begins, Dom Felice comes to dine with Isabetta on most evenings, bringing good food and drink. After supper he stays with her until Matinsong, while Fra Puccio performs his vigil nearby. The place Fra Puccio chooses adjoins his wife’s chamber, separated from it by only a thin wall. One night, when the lovers’ activity makes the floor shake, Fra Puccio pauses his prayers and calls to ask what Isabetta is doing.

Isabetta answers playfully that she is tossing as much as she can. When he asks what she means, she turns his own saying about anyone who does not sup at night having to toss until morning into an explanation: he assumes that fasting has kept her from sleeping and made her turn restlessly in bed. She reassures him that she knows what she is about, and he returns to his prayers. The exchange shows the unequal knowledge sustaining the affair: Isabetta speaks in a joke that gestures toward the truth, but Fra Puccio interprets it through the innocent explanation he already expects.

After that night, Dom Felice and Isabetta arrange a bed in another part of the house. The monk leaves at the same hour each night, Isabetta returns to her own bed, and Fra Puccio comes back from his vigil shortly afterward. Their coordinated movements preserve the appearance of ordinary household order while the husband’s devotional schedule gives them a recurring interval together. The affair thus depends not on the removal of Fra Puccio from the house but on turning his chosen religious practice into a reliable cover.

After the Forty Days

When Fra Puccio completes the penance, the affair does not end. Isabetta continues to find opportunities to meet Dom Felice elsewhere, and the two take care to use discretion; the story says their pleasure lasts for a long time. The conclusion extends the deception beyond the temporary forty-day scheme: the monk’s device creates the initial opportunity, but Isabetta’s continued participation carries the relationship forward after its original cover has expired.

The tale closes by reversing Fra Puccio’s expectation. He believes his vigil and abstinence will win Paradise for him, but the narrator says that, through the penance, he has put Dom Felice and Isabetta there instead. The joke depends on the double meaning of salvation and sexual gratification, but it also sharpens the story’s criticism of religious authority: Dom Felice invents spiritual instruction for selfish ends, and Fra Puccio’s credulity allows the performance to pass as holiness. Isabetta, meanwhile, is not simply a hidden object of the monk’s design; she understands its mechanism, makes a pointed joke within it, and helps turn the household’s strict routine to her own advantage.