Madam Piccarda

Madam Piccarda, a young noble widow in Fiesole, answers a rector’s repeated, unwanted advances with a plan that exposes his hypocrisy before the bishop and the town. Her story turns the domestic spaces he hopes to use for a secret affair into the setting of his public disgrace: rather than submit, appeal helplessly, or invite violence, she recruits her brothers and a servant to make the priest suffer the consequences of his own importunity.

Identity and Setting

Madam Piccarda is a woman of noble birth who lives near the cathedral in Fiesole. She owns an estate there, but is not especially well-to-do and spends most of the year in a modest, small house. Her two brothers, described as courteous and worthy young men, live with her. This household gives the story its practical geography: the brothers’ nearby bedchamber makes secrecy difficult, while their support gives Piccarda a way to resist the rector without confronting him alone.

She is young, beautiful, and agreeable, and regularly attends the cathedral. The rector becomes enamored of her and asks her to return his love. His desire is strikingly at odds with his position: he is her spiritual father, a priest, and already old, yet he is depicted as arrogant, presumptuous, ill-mannered, and unwelcome to almost everyone. Piccarda rejects him on grounds that invoke the restraint his office and age should require, as well as the discretion expected of a widow. She is clear that she does not want his advances.

Persistent Advances and Piccarda’s Counterplan

The first refusal does not deter the rector. He approaches her again and again, through letters, messages, and direct solicitation when he sees her at church. Piccarda regards this repeated pressure as an intolerable annoyance. Before acting, she tells her brothers both what the rector has been doing and what she intends to do; they give her full permission to proceed.

When the rector next accosts her, Piccarda changes the terms of their encounter. She receives him cheerfully, draws him aside, and pretends that his persistence has overcome her resistance. The performance is deliberate: she lets him believe that he has won consent, then makes his own demand for secrecy part of the trap. She agrees to meet that night but explains that her brothers sleep close by and that even a whisper might be heard. If he is willing to remain silent and in darkness, she tells him, the meeting can take place in her chamber. He eagerly accepts the inconvenience and urges her to arrange it that very evening.

Piccarda’s next move is to enlist her serving-wench, Ciutazza. The servant is physically described in unflattering detail, but Piccarda’s immediate concern is that she can take the widow’s place in the dark. Piccarda offers her a fine new shift in return for lying in the bed and keeping silent. Ciutazza accepts, even volunteering to lie with more than one man if necessary. The arrangement secures the servant’s cooperation through a concrete reward and gives the plan its comic reversal: the rector, certain that he is secretly enjoying the woman he pursued, will instead embrace the substitute Piccarda has chosen.

The Exposure in the Chamber

At night, the rector arrives as agreed. Piccarda’s brothers are in their adjacent room and make a point of being heard, helping sustain the appearance that the household is awake and that a silent, dark meeting is the only possible arrangement. The rector follows Piccarda’s instructions into her chamber, goes straight to the bed, and takes Ciutazza for the widow. He kisses her and lies with her without speaking, as Piccarda has arranged.

Meanwhile, Piccarda’s brothers carry the plan beyond the private household. They go to the great square, where they encounter the bishop, who has asked for them because the heat has made him wish to visit their house and drink with them. This coincidence gives the exposure an authority and audience that Piccarda could not have summoned as easily by herself. After the bishop has enjoyed their wine in the courtyard, the brothers invite him to see a small matter. One carries a lighted torch to Piccarda’s chamber; the bishop and the others follow.

The rector has hurried to take his pleasure and, despite the heat, has fallen asleep beside Ciutazza. The brothers show him to the bishop in that compromising position. Startled awake by the light and the assembled company, he hides beneath the bedclothes. The bishop makes him look at the woman beside him, forcing the rector to face the difference between the lover he imagined and the servant he actually embraced. The scheme converts his confidence in secrecy into evidence of his own conduct.

Consequences and Narrative Role

The bishop rebukes the rector and orders him to dress. Under guard, the priest is sent to his house to undergo penance for his offense. The bishop hears the brothers’ account of how Piccarda devised the trap and commends her and her brothers: rather than shed a priest’s blood, they have dealt with him as he deserved. Piccarda’s victory is therefore not merely private escape. It is publicly recognized as a proportionate response to an abuse of clerical position and persistent harassment.

The punishment continues beyond the formal forty days of penance. For a long while, whenever the rector goes out, children point him out as the man who lay with Ciutazza. The story stresses that this repeated public ridicule torments him even more than the prescribed penance. Piccarda, by contrast, succeeds in ending the rector’s importunity; Ciutazza receives the promised shift and enjoys the night’s unexpected turn.

Told by Emilia, the episode belongs to a recurring critique of priests and friars who press their desires upon women. Piccarda is presented not as passively rescued but as an alert strategist: she recognizes that a direct refusal has failed, consults allies, stages an apparent surrender, and arranges a discovery that protects her while bringing the rector’s behavior into public view. The joke depends on the gap between the priest’s self-image and his actual conduct, but its consequences are concrete: he is exposed before the bishop, subjected to penance, and left with a shame that follows him into the street.