Madam Sismonda

Madam Sismonda is a young gentlewoman whose secret relationship with Ruberto survives her husband’s obsessive surveillance through a concealed signal and a carefully staged reversal. When Arriguccio Berlinghieri mistakes a servant for his wife and beats her, Sismonda converts the evidence he brings against her into a story of his own drunken misconduct. Her ingenuity protects her from immediate accusation, but the deception depends on another woman bearing the violence intended for her.

Identity and Marriage

Madam Sismonda is the wife of Arriguccio Berlinghieri, a very rich merchant who, in the story’s account, foolishly believed marriage to a young gentlewoman would ennoble him. The mismatch between his social ambitions and her birth helps establish a household already marked by unequal expectations. Arriguccio is frequently away on business and spends little time with her; Sismonda, meanwhile, has long been courted by Ruberto and falls in love with him. The narrative presents the affair as a response to the marriage’s conditions, but does not claim that those conditions excuse every consequence of her choices.

Arriguccio’s jealousy transforms his absences into a campaign of supervision. He gives up much of his usual activity to watch Sismonda and refuses to sleep until he has felt her get into bed. His vigilance makes private meetings with Ruberto difficult, and her distress is specifically tied to the confinement his suspicions create. The story’s frame, in which Neifile introduces another account of a jealous husband, places this household within a wider critique of jealousy that keeps wives more closely restricted than other people, even on days set aside for rest.

The Signal and Its Discovery

After considering how she might meet Ruberto, Sismonda devises a signal using a length of twine. She hangs one end from the window of her bedchamber, carries the other across the floor, and hides it beneath the bedclothes, where she can fasten it to her great toe. Ruberto is to pull the line when he arrives around midnight. If Arriguccio is asleep, she will release it and go to let him in; if her husband is still awake, she will hold the line and draw it toward herself, warning Ruberto not to wait.

The arrangement sometimes brings the lovers together and sometimes does not. Its vulnerability lies in the very device that makes it useful: the signal connects the street to the bed, and the bed is where Arriguccio insists on checking for his wife. One night, while Sismonda sleeps, he feels the twine, discovers that it is tied to her toe, and traces it to the window. He cuts it free and ties it to his own toe, waiting to learn what it means.

When Ruberto pulls the line, it slips loose from Arriguccio’s toe. Ruberto understands that he should wait, while Arriguccio rushes out armed to catch whoever is at the door. He opens it less cautiously than Sismonda would have done, and Ruberto recognizes the danger and flees. Arriguccio pursues him; the two men eventually exchange blows, but the noise rouses the neighborhood, whose inhabitants rail at them. Afraid of being recognized, Arriguccio lets Ruberto go and returns home without having discovered his identity or injured him.

The Substitution and Its Cost

Sismonda has already understood that her device is exposed. Waking as Arriguccio leaves the chamber, she sees that the twine has been cut from her toe and anticipates what may happen when her husband returns. She calls her maid, who knows about the affair, and persuades her to take Sismonda’s place in the bed. Sismonda asks the maid to endure whatever blows Arriguccio may deliver and promises to make amends; then she puts out the chamber light and hides elsewhere in the house.

Arriguccio comes back in a rage, believing his wife has extinguished the light to conceal herself. In the darkness he takes the maid for Sismonda, beats her with his hands and feet, and cuts off her hair. The maid pleads for mercy, but her broken voice and his fury keep him from recognizing that she is someone else. The device that saves Sismonda therefore does not prevent violence: it redirects it onto a dependent member of the household, who pays physically for the mistress’s escape.

Afterward, Sismonda comforts the badly bruised maid, has her privately tended, and rewards her with money taken from Arriguccio. She then restores her own bed, dresses as though she has not yet gone to sleep, lights a lamp, and sits sewing at the stairhead. These deliberate preparations give her the appearance of an untouched woman occupied with ordinary work, while the husband’s supposed proof is elsewhere: the hair he has cut from the maid.

Reversal Before the Family

Arriguccio goes alone to Sismonda’s brothers’ house and reports the twine, the pursuit, and the beating. As evidence, he gives them the hair he believes he cut from his wife. Her brothers set out with him, angry and prepared to act against her, while their mother follows and urges them not to accept the accusation without seeing more. Her caution creates the opening Sismonda needs: the family arrives before the staged appearance has been disturbed.

They find her seated and sewing, her face unmarked. Arriguccio remembers beating her repeatedly and cutting her hair, but cannot make that memory agree with what the brothers see. Sismonda denies that he spent the night in the house or struck her, and points to her intact face and unshorn hair. She then supplies a competing explanation: she says Arriguccio spends many nights drinking in taverns and consorting with other women, and suggests that he may have mistaken another woman for his wife while drunk. She asks her relatives to treat his charge as drunken talk and to pardon him, although the evidence presented so far does not establish how the larger dispute is ultimately settled.

Narrative Role and Significance

Sismonda’s defense works through more than a single lie. The twine, the maid’s substitution, the restored bed, the sewing, and the hair all become parts of a contest over which version of the night the family will believe. Arriguccio’s account appears persuasive when supported by the hair he carries, but the visible condition of Sismonda’s body contradicts it. The family must therefore judge not only his accusation but also the circumstances that make his certainty unreliable.

The tale’s treatment of Sismonda’s agency is inseparable from its account of constraint. Her husband’s watchfulness has made ordinary privacy difficult, and she answers surveillance with secrecy and quick improvisation. Yet the story does not make that ingenuity costless: the servant is beaten in her place, and Sismonda’s recovery of control requires care, concealment, and a payment afterward. Within Neifile’s story, this combination of cleverness and risk sharpens the criticism of jealous husbands: the struggle is not an abstract contest of wits, but one conducted in a household where a mistaken identity can leave a woman bruised and shorn.