Mistress Tessa

Mistress Tessa is the clever, discreet wife of Gianni Lotteringhi, whose secret love affair with Federigo di Neri Pegolotti unfolds at a country house in Camerata. When an unexpected visit from her husband threatens to expose the lovers, she invents a phantom at the door and turns an awkward interruption into a comic escape. Her story makes domestic space both a site of surveillance and a resource she can manipulate: a vineyard signal, a garden, and a deliberately misread knock become parts of her private system of communication.

Household and Characterization

Tessa is introduced as the fair and lovable wife of Gianni, a wool-comber from the quarter of San Brancazio in Florence. She is Mannuccio dalla Cuculia’s daughter and is described as discreet and well advised. Her husband, by contrast, is a prosperous but simple-minded man who values his standing among the clergy. He often serves as captain of the Laudesi of Santa Maria Novella and governs their confraternity, offices for which he takes particular pride. His gifts to churchmen are repaid with prayers and devotional writings, which he treasures for the health of his soul.

This contrast shapes the comedy without making Tessa’s situation carefree. Gianni’s public piety and his domestic authority coexist with his lack of discernment; Tessa understands both his habits and how easily they can be turned to her advantage. Her ingenuity is practical rather than abstract: she arranges a meeting place, devises a signal, and, when the signal fails to protect her, improvises a convincing explanation in the moment.

The Affair and Its Signals

Tessa and Federigo are mutually enamored. With the help of her maid, Tessa arranges for him to visit the household’s country property, where she spends the summer. Gianni comes there only occasionally to dine and sleep before returning in the morning to his shop and his devotional duties. On the first appointed evening, he does not arrive, and Tessa and Federigo spend the night together. She teaches him several of her husband’s lauds while they are in one another’s arms, blending the language of Gianni’s religious observances with the lovers’ private intimacy.

They do not intend the meeting to be a single exception. To spare the maid from having to summon Federigo each time, they establish a signal at a neighboring vineyard: an ass’s skull, mounted on a vine pole, is to face Florence when Tessa is available. If its muzzle points toward Fiesole, Federigo is to stay away because Gianni is present. The arrangement gives the lovers a discreet means of coordinating their visits, but it depends on a sign that can be misread—and the tale’s final qualification will make that vulnerability part of its joke.

The Knock and the Phantom

One evening, Tessa expects Federigo and has two fat capons cooked for him. Gianni, who is not expected, arrives late instead. Tessa is vexed; she and Gianni eat a separate piece of boiled salt pork, while she has the maid carry the capons, newly laid eggs, and a flask of wine into the garden. The provisions are placed at the foot of a peach tree, where Tessa sometimes suppers with Federigo. In her distress, she forgets to tell the maid to wait and warn him that Gianni is there.

Federigo arrives and knocks softly. The door is near the bedchamber, so both spouses hear him. Tessa pretends to be asleep while Gianni wonders who is knocking. After Federigo knocks again, she pretends to wake and explains the sound as a phantom that has frightened her on other nights. Gianni answers with confidence in the prayers he has said and the religious signs with which he has protected the bed. Tessa nevertheless insists that the phantom should be exorcised while he is present. Her invented fear supplies a reason to leave the bed and reach the door, giving her a chance to communicate that Gianni is inside.

She says she learned an effective prayer from an anchoress during a visit to Fiesole and leads Gianni through the conjuration. Its comic details direct the supposed phantom to the garden, where a richly prepared offering awaits beneath the peach tree: the capons, eggs, and wine. She even tells Gianni when to spit, making him an unwitting participant in the performance. Outside, Federigo hears the ritual, understands that Tessa is warning him, and is so amused by the performance that he can scarcely keep from laughing. Once the couple returns to bed, he goes to the garden, finds the provisions, and carries them home to eat at his ease.

Aftermath and Narrative Form

The lovers meet again, and Tessa and Federigo laugh together over the conjuration. The story thus ends not with exposure or punishment but with the recovery of the evening’s provisions and the preservation of the affair. Tessa’s success rests on reading the people and objects around her: Gianni’s credulity, his trust in devotional forms, the knock at the door, and the food waiting in the garden all become elements in a single improvised deception.

The narrator complicates the episode with a second account of the donkey-skull signal. According to one version, a passing husbandman struck the skull with a stick, turning its muzzle toward Florence; Federigo then came, believing himself summoned, and Tessa had to explain that someone else had changed the sign while she was in bed with Gianni. In that telling, Federigo goes away without supper or lodging. A very old neighbor, the narrator adds, maintained that both conjurations were true, but that the mistaken skull belonged to another simple-minded husband, Gianni di Nello, who lived at Porta San Piero. This coda leaves the anecdote playfully unsettled: Tessa’s successful deception remains the central tale, while the disputed signal produces a second, less fortunate version of the same comic predicament.