The Discovery of Pietro di Vinciolo’s Wife’s Affair

The Discovery of Pietro di Vinciolo’s Wife’s Affair turns a household exposure into a comic reversal of judgment. A clandestine lover is found not by deliberate investigation but because a thirsty ass steps on his fingers beneath a hen-coop. Yet the discovery does not end in punishment: Pietro recognizes the young man as someone he himself has long pursued, while his wife turns the moment against her husband by condemning his neglect of her. Dioneo’s tale leaves the precise terms of their settlement unstated, but its final meal makes retaliation, rather than chastity or vengeance, the governing logic of the episode.

The Affair and Its Concealment

Pietro’s wife has been arranging meetings with young men through an old woman who acts as her intermediary. The wife describes a particular young man to the go-between, who brings him privately to her chamber; she has indulged her desires when opportunity allows, though she remains afraid of her husband. On the evening of the discovery, Pietro is expected to dine elsewhere with his friend Ercolano. His wife therefore asks the old woman to bring a handsome young man from Perugia, and the two sit down to supper together.

Their privacy is interrupted when Pietro returns home unexpectedly. His wife has little time to improvise: she cannot send the visitor away or find another hiding place, so she makes him crouch beneath a hen-coop in a shed adjoining the chamber and covers him with the sacking of an emptied pallet bed. The hiding place depends on stillness and concealment, but it also leaves the lover exposed to whatever moves through the shed.

Pietro explains that his own supper has scarcely begun. At Ercolano’s table, repeated sneezing had drawn attention to a closed space beneath a stair; opening it released a powerful sulphur stench. Ercolano’s wife had accounted for the smell by saying that she had been bleaching veils with sulphur. Pietro recounts this episode on entering his own house, unaware that his wife has concealed a man only a short distance away. The tale’s parallel between suspicious signs and improvised explanations gives the wife’s predicament a comic echo, though her cover is soon undone by a more physical accident.

The Accidental Discovery

Some farm workers have arrived with goods and put their asses in a small stable beside the shed without watering them. One thirsty animal slips its head from its halter and wanders out, searching for water. The hidden lover has to remain on all fours beneath the coop; he has stretched the fingers of one hand beyond it. The ass plants a hoof on them and keeps pressing down. Unable to bear the pain, the young man cries out.

Pietro hears the noise from inside and goes into the shed to investigate. Following the sound, he lifts the hen-coop and finds the young man trembling with fear, his fingers still crushed beneath the ass’s hoof. The discovery is thus neither planned nor achieved through the husband’s suspicion: an animal’s thirst, the lover’s posture, and the exposed hand bring the concealed affair into view. The coop, intended as a refuge, becomes the instrument that reveals him.

Pietro asks what the young man is doing there and why he has been hidden. The visitor begs him not to harm him and explains the circumstances. Pietro recognizes him as someone he himself has long pursued for sexual purposes. That recognition alters the balance of the scene: the husband is not simply an outraged guardian of marital fidelity, but a participant in the same pursuit of the young man whom he has just discovered in his wife’s company.

Reproach, Supper, and Reversal

Pietro takes the young man by the hand and brings him into the chamber, where his wife waits in terror. Instead of immediately attacking either of them, he recalls her recent denunciation of Ercolano’s wife, whom she had condemned as deserving death for adultery. He accuses his wife of judging another woman for conduct like her own and treats her condemnation as an attempt to cover her own actions by exposing someone else’s.

His wife answers with an accusation of her own. Pietro, she says, would condemn women while pursuing them himself. She contrasts her fine clothes and shoes with the lack of affection in their marriage, telling him that she would rather go barefoot and poorly dressed than continue without sexual attention from him. She claims the right to desire what other women desire and argues that, since Pietro has not given her what she wants, he has no standing to reproach her for seeking it elsewhere. Her defense does not deny the affair; it redirects the argument toward the conditions of their marriage and Pietro’s double standard.

Pietro declines to settle the dispute through immediate punishment or to answer every accusation at once. He asks instead that she arrange food, since neither he nor the young man has eaten. She has the prepared supper brought back to the table, and all three dine together. The narrator does not disclose what Pietro devised afterward to satisfy them all; he reports only that the young man was escorted back to the public place the next morning, uncertain whether he had been more wife or husband that night. The deliberate withholding makes the ending depend on comic implication rather than a described resolution.

Dioneo’s Framing and the Tale’s Reversal

Dioneo closes by turning the incident into a principle of answering like with like: if someone treats another in a certain way, the other may return the treatment, even if the opportunity comes later. The advice fits the wife’s defense, but the story does not present her retaliation as a simple triumph. Pietro’s own desire, his wife’s account of neglect, and his decision to share supper with her lover leave the household arrangement unresolved. The comic outcome comes instead from the collapse of Pietro’s claim to moral superiority and from the unexpected conviviality that follows exposure.

The company laughs less than usual, Dioneo says, more from embarrassment than from lack of pleasure. That response marks the tale’s edge: its comedy rests on adultery, sexual dissatisfaction, and a husband whose own pursuit compromises his outrage. The accidental discovery exposes not only the concealed lover but also the uneven standards Pietro applies to his wife. In place of a clean moral verdict, the story offers a meal, a promise to deal with matters later, and a final image of roles unsettled.