The Varlungo Parish Priest’s Ruse to Retrieve His Blue Cloak

The Varlungo Parish Priest’s Ruse to Retrieve His Blue Cloak is a compact tale of clerical opportunism, household authority, and the comic afterlife of a failed bargain. The priest gives Mistress Belcolore his blue cloak before going with her to a barn, then regrets the gift and contrives to recover it without paying. A borrowed mortar, a message delivered while her husband is present, and the husband’s anger turn the cloak into the prize of a small domestic deception.

The Bargain and the Cloak

Mistress Belcolore does not simply accept the priest’s proposal: she wants assurance that he will bring her money. To make her believe him, he offers his blue-cloth cloak as security. When she questions its value, he boasts that it is fine cloth from Douay, even embellishing the name with a joke about its supposed quality and price. He claims that it cost seven crowns only a fortnight earlier and that an acquaintance who knows cloth judged it a bargain. Belcolore accepts the cloak first; only then does she agree to go with him to the barn, where she considers privacy assured.

The encounter gives the priest what he wanted, but the cloak immediately becomes a source of regret. Back at the parsonage, he reckons that all the candle-ends he receives in offertory over an entire year are worth less than half of five crowns. The comparison makes his loss concrete: a valuable garment has been surrendered for a liaison, and he decides to get it back without expense. His ingenuity serves not to undo the affair but to reverse its material cost.

The Mortar as Pretext

The next day is a holiday. The priest sends a neighbor’s boy to ask Belcolore to lend him her stone mortar, claiming he needs it to make sauce for a dinner with Binguccio dal Poggio and Nuto Buglietti. She lends it. The request appears ordinary, but the mortar gives the priest a reason to send someone to her house again—and to arrange for the return message to arrive at a moment useful to him.

Near dinner, after noticing that Bentivegna del Mazzo and Belcolore are eating together, the priest sends his clerk back with the mortar. The clerk is to request the cloak, described as the token the boy left behind. The message recasts the garment: what Belcolore had treated as security for the priest’s promised money is now presented as something that should simply be returned with the borrowed kitchenware. The priest does not confront her himself. Instead, he relies on the clerk’s public delivery and her husband’s presence to shift the pressure onto the household.

Bentivegna’s Intervention

Belcolore is about to answer when Bentivegna rebukes her for taking a pledge from the priest. He threatens to strike her and orders her to return the garment, adding that in future she must not refuse the priest anything he asks for, even their ass. His response overwhelms her chance to defend the original bargain: she retrieves the cloak from the chest and hands it to the clerk. The priest has recovered the garment not by proving any right to it, but by arranging circumstances in which her husband treats its return as an obligation.

Belcolore nevertheless sends a pointed message back with the cloak. She says that the priest will never again pound sauce in her mortar, a refusal that makes clear she understands the trick and is angered by it. The priest answers in kind, declaring that if she will not lend the mortar, he will not lend her his pestle. The exchange turns kitchen implements into comic counterspeech: the mortar and pestle stand in for the intimacy and favors through which the two have been dealing, while each pretends that the dispute is merely about household equipment.

Reconciliation on New Terms

Bentivegna mistakes Belcolore’s remark for resentment over his own scolding and pays it no mind. Belcolore, however, continues to bear the priest a grudge and keeps him at a distance until vintage-time. The priest threatens to send her into the mouth of Lucifer, and fear finally brings her to make peace with him over must and roast chestnuts. They resume their merry meetings, but the original five-crown expectation is not met: instead, the priest has new parchment fitted to her tabret and adds a set of hawk’s bells, which she accepts.

The ending does not erase the priest’s manipulation or restore the first bargain. It shows the pair returning to their dealings after a quarrel, with a modest, tangible payment replacing the money Belcolore had sought and the cloak the priest had taken back. The humor rests on the repeated conversion of one thing into another: a cloak becomes a pledge and then a supposedly misplaced token; a borrowed mortar becomes the means of reclaiming it; a domestic rebuke becomes a weapon; and, at last, parchment and bells settle the account. The priest’s clerical standing gives his request force within Bentivegna’s household, while the tale’s comic balance lets Belcolore answer the deception with her own sharp words and a period of refusal.