None (canonical hour)

None (canonical hour), also called Nones, appears at two distinct points in the narrative as a practical marker of when people act. It places the storytelling company’s return to its appointed gathering within the day and sets the timing of Catella’s journey to the bathhouse, where a deception is about to unfold.

Meaning and Scope

None (canonical hour) is the canonical hour named in the text’s phrase “the hour of none.” The supplied passages do not define its exact clock-time or provide a general account of the system of canonical hours. Its significance here is contextual: the reference anchors an action in the day, while the surrounding events give that time its narrative force.

The Storytelling Gathering

At the garden, the company’s activities move from leisure toward the day’s storytelling. After a meal by the fountain, music, dancing, and a period in which some read or played chess while others slept, the sleepers rise and refresh themselves. Once the hour of None has passed, everyone gathers on the lawn beside the fountain at the queen’s command, ready to tell stories on the proposed subject. The hour thus marks a transition from recreation and rest to the organized routine of narration.

Catella’s Journey to the Bathhouse

In another story, the arrival of the hour of None prompts Catella to go to the bathhouse with her waiting-woman. She has accepted Ricciardo’s account of a planned meeting there and believes she is going to catch her husband, Filippello, with another woman. The bathhouse keeper directs her into a dark chamber, where Ricciardo is waiting instead. Catella enters with her head covered and, afraid her voice will reveal her, embraces him without speaking. The time reference places her arrival at the threshold of the deception; the darkness and her mistaken expectation, rather than the hour itself, shape the encounter.

Narrative Use

These two appearances give None different functions. In the garden, it helps mark a collective transition into a repeated storytelling practice; at the bathhouse, it fixes the moment when Catella acts on suspicion and walks into Ricciardo’s trap. In neither passage does the hour become the subject of attention. It serves as a discreet temporal hinge, connecting the rhythms of a day to the changes in expectation that propel each scene.