The Love Affair of Girolamo and Salvestra

The Love Affair of Girolamo and Salvestra is a tragedy of love that survives separation but cannot survive the lives arranged around it. In Neifile’s tale, a wealthy merchant’s son and his tailor-neighbor’s daughter grow up devoted to each other; the effort to remove them from one another does not extinguish their bond, but turns it into a fatal reunion. Their deaths make the story’s central irony stark: the love that could not secure them a life together finally joins them in the same tomb.

Childhood Love and Family Ambition

Girolamo is the son of Lionardo Sighieri, a very rich merchant. After Lionardo dies, the boy’s mother and guardians manage his affairs. Growing up among the neighborhood children, Girolamo becomes especially close to Salvestra, the tailor’s daughter, who is his own age. As they grow older, familiarity becomes ardent love: he is uneasy whenever he cannot see her, and she loves him no less. Their attachment is mutual and begins in childhood, before either family has arranged a different future for them.

Girolamo’s mother sees the attachment as a threat to the advantageous marriage she hopes to make for her wealthy son. She fears that, left to his own choice, he may marry Salvestra without the family’s knowledge; she also fears that if Salvestra is married to someone else, he will waste away. Rather than accept the possibility that the two might choose each other, she urges his guardians to send him away and later match him with a well-born bride. The plan treats distance as a remedy for love and rank as a safeguard for family interest.

The guardians enlist Girolamo’s cooperation by presenting a stay in Paris as an education in business, manners, and the company of nobles. He refuses at first, saying he can do as well in Florence, but his mother eventually persuades him to go for a year. In practice, he is kept abroad for two years. The separation is therefore not a brief visit of his own choosing: it is the outcome of a family decision intended to redirect his future.

Separation and the Failed Return

Girolamo comes back to Florence more deeply in love than before. But while he has been away, Salvestra has married an honest young tent-maker. The same separation that was meant to make Girolamo forget her has instead left him returning to a changed household and a love with no legitimate place in her life. He watches for her and passes before her, hoping she remembers him as he remembers her. She appears not to recognize or remember their former intimacy—or, if she does remember, she gives him no sign of it. He soon understands that these attempts have failed, but cannot make himself give up hope of speaking to her.

At last he learns the arrangement of her house. One evening, while Salvestra and her husband are away visiting neighbors, Girolamo enters secretly and hides behind tent-cloths. He waits until the couple have returned and the husband is asleep, then approaches Salvestra in bed and softly addresses her as the beloved of his youth. She is awake and initially would cry out; when he identifies himself, she trembles and tells him to leave. Her refusal is grounded in her present circumstances: she is married, regards fidelity to her husband as her duty, and fears that even if no violence follows, her husband’s discovery would destroy the peace in which they live.

The Last Night Together

Girolamo recalls their past and pleads with Salvestra, but she will not resume their former relationship. He then asks only to lie beside her and warm himself, promising not to touch or speak to her and to leave as soon as he is warm. Salvestra feels enough compassion to grant this limited request, on those conditions. Girolamo lies beside her without touching her. The scene holds their intimacy and its impossibility together: they share a bed once more, but the terms of the encounter forbid the lovers from returning to the life they once imagined.

As he lies there, Girolamo gathers his long-standing love, Salvestra’s refusal, and his lost hope into a single resolve to die. He clenches his hands and dies beside her without a word or movement. The narration describes him as drawing his vital spirits inward; whatever the precise bodily mechanism, the account makes his death the consequence of the despair that has overtaken him during this reunion. The woman he has pursued is beside him, yet the past cannot be recovered and his presence has become a danger to her marriage.

After a while, Salvestra wonders why he has not left. She first thinks he has fallen asleep, then touches him and finds him cold. Recognizing that he is dead, she is overcome by grief and does not know what to do. She wakes her husband by describing the situation as though it had happened to another woman, and asks what such a woman should do. He answers that the dead man should be quietly taken home and that the woman should not be blamed, since she appears to have done no wrong. Salvestra then makes him touch Girolamo’s body. He dresses the dead youth, carries him on his shoulders to the door of Girolamo’s house, and leaves him there.

Recognition, Death, and Burial

When Girolamo is found dead outside his home, the absence of any wound or bruise leads people to conclude that he has died of grief. His body is taken to a church, where his mother and other women mourn him. Salvestra’s husband sends her, veiled, to hear whether anyone is speaking against them. She also wants to see Girolamo, now that she has refused to give him even a kiss while he was alive. At the church, the sight of his dead face brings back the love that his living presence and pleas had not restored. She pushes through the women, throws herself face down upon his body, and dies from grief as she touches him.

The women at first do not recognize her. When they lift her and see that she too is dead, the mourning deepens. Salvestra’s husband weeps and tells those gathered what happened between his wife and Girolamo during the night, making the cause of both deaths public. Her body is dressed and laid beside Girolamo’s on the same bier. After the pair have been mourned, they are buried in one tomb. Neifile closes the tale on the reversal that defines their relationship: life could not unite the lovers, but death gives them an inseparable resting place.

The Relationship’s Tragic Shape

The story follows the lovers through sharply different conditions: childhood intimacy, imposed separation, Salvestra’s marriage to another man, and a final encounter in which affection survives but cannot safely be acted upon. Girolamo’s family attempts to control his attachment by managing his movements and future marriage; Salvestra’s married life, meanwhile, gives her a reason to refuse his return. The tale does not present their final reunion as a simple restoration. Her compassion allows him to lie beside her, but she maintains the boundary required by her marriage, and his presence ends in death rather than renewed partnership.

Neifile introduces the story as a warning against presuming that love can be removed by contrary counsel. The effort to redirect Girolamo’s affection succeeds only in separating the pair long enough for Salvestra to marry elsewhere; it does not make him forget her. The ending then turns delayed recognition into its own cruel pattern: Salvestra appears unresponsive while Girolamo is alive, but his death releases the grief that his return could not awaken. Their shared tomb is not a happy marriage restored after adversity. It is the final, irreversible union of two people whom family strategy, social circumstance, and the passage of time had kept apart.