Rinieri's Revenge on Elena

Rinieri’s Revenge on Elena turns a flirtation built on deliberate humiliation into a calculated reversal: Elena makes the scholar suffer through a freezing night for her amusement, and later Rinieri uses her desperation to leave her exposed and helpless on a tower. Their relationship moves from his ardent pursuit and her manipulative game to resentment, revenge, and a final withdrawal from the habits that helped create their conflict.

Identity and Background

Elena is a young, beautiful widow in Florence, of gentle lineage and with sufficient fortune to live without remarrying. She has chosen a handsome young lover and, aided by a maid she trusts, enjoys their private meetings. Her attention to how others regard her is central to the early imbalance between her and Rinieri: she takes pleasure in attracting men and treats their desire as confirmation of her beauty, rather than as a promise of intimacy.

Rinieri returns to Florence after studying in Paris. His learning is presented as serious inquiry into the nature and causes of things, not merely preparation to sell knowledge, and he is respected for both nobility and scholarship. At an entertainment he sees Elena, dressed in the black customary for widows, and becomes convinced that winning her love would make him fortunate. He resolves to spend his efforts pleasing her. The story thus places a learned man’s aspiration for knowledge beside his sudden susceptibility to desire—and then makes that susceptibility the means by which Elena can mislead him.

Courtship and the First Deception

Elena notices Rinieri watching her and interprets his interest as another conquest. She privately regards him as a man whose learning will not protect him from being ensnared. When he discovers where she lives, he repeatedly passes her house under various pretexts. Elena encourages his attention, while her maid becomes the intermediary through whom Rinieri declares his love and asks for her favor.

Elena tells the maid to report that she loves Rinieri even more than he loves her, but must preserve her honor and reputation among the other ladies. The performance is designed to make him prize her more highly, and she accepts his letters and gifts while giving him only vague replies. Her actual purpose is to keep him in suspense and to demonstrate to her existing lover that she is not betraying him. She eventually arranges a supposed meeting on the evening of the Feast of the Nativity, presenting the promised tryst as proof that she has no real interest in Rinieri’s rival.

The meeting becomes a carefully staged humiliation. Elena has Rinieri brought by her maid into a courtyard and locked inside. After it has snowed heavily, the maid tells him that Elena is delayed by a brother who has come to visit and dine. Rinieri believes her and waits. Elena watches unseen with her lover, who is pleased by the evidence she has arranged, while she makes the scholar’s patience part of their amusement. When Rinieri asks to come inside, Elena pretends that opening the door would alert her brother and promises to return after sending him away. Instead, she goes back to bed with her lover. Rinieri spends the night pacing the courtyard, unable to sit or take shelter as the snow and damp intensify his cold.

From Desire to Revenge

At dawn, Elena’s maid opens the door and continues the deception, expressing apparent sympathy and suggesting that Rinieri may yet have another opportunity. He conceals his anger, leaves without openly threatening anyone, and returns home nearly stiff with cold. Doctors treat the damage to his arms and legs; recovery takes time, and the coming of warm weather helps him regain his health. The experience changes the direction of his attachment. His ardent love becomes fierce hatred, and he begins seeking a way to make Elena pay for the injury and humiliation.

Rinieri keeps that hatred hidden and continues to appear more enamored than before. His opportunity comes when Elena’s chosen lover falls in love with another woman and refuses to see or please her. Elena grieves, and her maid, unable to console her, imagines that Rinieri may know how to use necromancy to bring the deserter back. Elena accepts the proposal and promises that she will do whatever Rinieri wants in return. The very woman who once controlled his hopes through promises now approaches him in need, but she does not recognize the danger in asking the man she once left freezing to manage her desires.

The Tower and the Reversal

Rinieri agrees to meet Elena alone at Santa Lucia del Prato. He claims that he learned necromancy in Paris and explains that restoring a lost lover requires an ordeal performed by the person seeking him. His instructions send Elena out at night, alone and naked: she is to bathe seven times with a pewter image in a running stream, then climb an isolated tower, face north, and repeat a conjuration. He tells her that two beautiful women will appear and asks her to state her desire correctly. The elaborate ritual gives Rinieri a way to turn Elena’s confidence in his supposed expertise into obedience to a plan whose real purpose is revenge.

Elena carries out the directions at her farm. Near the tower by the Arno River, she hides her clothes under a bush, bathes seven times with the image, and climbs up naked to perform the spell. Rinieri has concealed himself with a servant among trees and willows nearby, where he can watch without being seen. Her appearance briefly stirs his physical desire and compassion, but he remembers the courtyard, his suffering, and the person who caused it; he stays with his plan. He then quietly removes the ladder to the upper room. Elena finishes the conjuration, waits for the promised visitors, and remains there as dawn approaches and the night’s supposed magic fails.

When Elena realizes she may be suffering the same kind of treatment she inflicted on Rinieri, she asks to be rescued. She admits the earlier trick, appeals to his honor, and begs him to let her recover her clothes and descend, arguing that he has already avenged himself. Rinieri refuses to help. He recalls her refusal to offer him even a little shelter on the snowy night and rejects the flattering language with which she now tries to move him. His response makes the reversal explicit: Elena once held the power to end his discomfort and chose not to use it; now he controls her escape and chooses to leave her to the consequences of the ordeal.

Consequences and Narrative Significance

A husbandman eventually helps Elena, and his wife and brothers return to the tower with a plank to carry the injured maid. The husbandman comforts Elena and brings her to her chamber; the women then arrange for Elena and her maid to be taken to Florence. Elena invents a different account for her family and others, claiming that diabolical enchantments caused what befell them. Physicians treat her serious fever, while her maid recovers from a broken thigh. Rinieri hears of the maid’s injury and considers his revenge complete, but says nothing about what happened.

Elena’s experience ends her former pattern of conduct: she forgets her lover and thereafter refrains from both making sport of others and pursuing love. Rinieri, meanwhile, does not seek a renewed relationship or public vindication; he remains silent and considers the balance settled. Their story links courtship to a contest over who can control another person’s exposure, waiting, and vulnerability. Elena first exploits Rinieri’s hope and leaves him physically endangered by the cold; later, Rinieri exploits her hope of recovering her lover and leaves her in danger on the tower. The parallel makes her earlier cruelty the measure of his retaliation, while her changed behavior supplies the final consequence of their encounter.