Madam Sismonda—Ruberto

Madam Sismonda—Ruberto is a clandestine affair shaped by the conflict between a young woman’s desire and her husband’s jealous control. Its central device is a cord running from Sismonda’s bed to a window above the street: Ruberto can tug it to announce his arrival, and her response tells him whether he can enter. When Arriguccio discovers the signal, the scheme turns into a chase through the night and a deception inside the household, with the maid bearing the violence intended for Sismonda.

The Relationship and Its Constraints

Arriguccio Berlinghieri is a very rich merchant who, in the story’s account, has married Sismonda in the hope of ennobling himself. She is a young gentlewoman whose social standing does not, the narrator says, suit his. The marriage therefore begins with an unequal match of rank and expectation: Arriguccio has wealth, while Sismonda brings a gentler birth and a different position in the household.

Arriguccio’s business takes him abroad and keeps him away from home for much of the time. Sismonda falls in love with Ruberto, a young man who has courted her for a long time, and the two establish a private relationship. The narration does not present their affair as an isolated chance encounter. It has a prior history of courtship and develops into a continuing intimacy, while the husband’s absences initially leave them some opportunity to meet.

That opportunity contracts when Arriguccio becomes intensely jealous. Whether he has perceived something or has become suspicious for some other reason, he abandons his ordinary pursuits and devotes himself almost entirely to watching his wife. He refuses to sleep until he has felt her enter the bed beside him. His vigilance makes the marriage’s domestic space a place of surveillance: even after Ruberto’s courtship has become mutual, the lovers cannot simply arrange to meet.

The Cord as a Secret Signal

Sismonda answers this restriction by studying Arriguccio’s sleeping habits. He is slow to fall asleep but, once asleep, sleeps soundly. She devises a signal that can distinguish those two states without requiring a spoken exchange or a visible meeting at the door. She hangs a twine from the window of her bedchamber, arranging it so that it is difficult for anyone to notice. One end comes close to the ground; the other crosses the floor and is hidden beneath the bedclothes, where she can fasten it to her great toe.

Ruberto is instructed to pull the cord when he arrives around midnight. If Arriguccio is asleep, Sismonda will release it and go to let her lover in. If her husband is still awake, she will hold the cord and draw it toward herself, warning Ruberto not to wait. The line thus carries a message in either direction: his tug announces him, while her response communicates whether the household is safe for him to enter.

The arrangement succeeds intermittently rather than guaranteeing a meeting. Ruberto comes often, and sometimes Sismonda can join him, sometimes not. That alternation matters: her cleverness creates a narrow opening, but it does not remove Arriguccio’s power to determine whether she can move freely. The secret depends on timing, silence, and the husband’s sleep; a single accidental touch can expose the whole design.

Discovery and the Failed Pursuit

One night, while Sismonda is asleep, Arriguccio stretches out his foot and feels the cord. He follows it, finds it attached to his wife’s toe, and realizes that it may be a trick. After tracing it to the window, he cuts it free without waking her and ties it to his own toe, intending to discover what it signals. When Ruberto tugs, the line comes loose because Arriguccio has not fastened it securely. Ruberto takes that failure as the agreed warning to wait rather than enter.

Arriguccio instead leaps up, takes his arms, and hurries to the door. He opens it less cautiously than Sismonda would have done, and Ruberto recognizes that the man at the door is the husband. He runs; Arriguccio pursues him a long way, and the two, both armed, finally exchange blows. Neighbors are roused by the noise and berate them. Fearing that he will be recognized, Arriguccio lets Ruberto go without learning who he is or injuring him. The pursuit therefore exposes the lovers’ danger without giving the husband the certainty or revenge he sought.

Substitution and the Cost of Concealment

Meanwhile, Sismonda wakes as Arriguccio leaves the bedchamber and sees that the cord has been cut from her toe. She understands that her device has been discovered and realizes that her husband has gone after Ruberto. Anticipating what may happen when Arriguccio returns, she calls her maid, who knows about the affair, and persuades her to take her place in the bed. Sismonda puts out the light, leaves the chamber, and hides elsewhere in the house.

Arriguccio comes back furious after Ruberto escapes. In the dark, he takes the maid for his wife and beats her with his fists and feet, then cuts off her hair while insulting the woman he thinks he has caught. The maid weeps and pleads for mercy, but her sobbing voice does not alert him that he has seized the wrong person. Sismonda’s substitution protects her from the beating, but only by transferring it to a servant who has been drawn into the lovers’ secret and is now made to suffer its immediate consequences.

Significance of the Affair

The episode sets two forms of control against one another. Arriguccio watches the bed, restricts Sismonda’s chance to meet Ruberto, and turns suspicion into a pursuit through the street. Sismonda, in turn, converts the very intimacy he monitors—the shared bed and the movement of a foot beneath the covers—into a concealed signaling system. The cord’s smallness makes the stratagem possible, but its vulnerability also gives the discovery its force: the husband need only feel it once.

The story’s treatment of the affair belongs to a wider discussion of jealous husbands and women’s restricted leisure. In another tale, a speaker describes wives as confined at home by household duties and jealous men as making their holidays more miserable still. That context sharpens the stakes here without making Sismonda’s actions costless or universally representative: her ingenuity secures meetings with Ruberto for a time, yet the scheme places the maid in danger when concealment fails. Their relationship is therefore defined not only by desire and secrecy, but by the unequal household conditions that make secrecy necessary and by the harm that can fall on someone else when the husband’s surveillance breaks through.