Tofano—Madam Ghita

Tofano and Madam Ghita’s marriage becomes a contest over suspicion, secrecy, and who controls the story their neighbors will believe. In Lauretta’s tale, Tofano’s jealousy begins without a known cause; Ghita answers it not by submitting to his scrutiny but by exploiting his drinking and, when discovered, turning his attempted exposure back upon him. Their reconciliation does not restore the marriage to its former terms: Tofano promises to stop being jealous and allows her to do as she pleases, provided she acts discreetly.

Marriage and the Growth of Suspicion

Tofano is a rich man of Arezzo who takes Madam Ghita, a very fair woman, as his wife. The narrative supplies no particular act by her that could explain his rapid jealousy: he cannot give her a reason beyond vague generalities. His suspicion is therefore established as baseless before the affair begins, a distinction that shapes the story’s judgment of both spouses. Ghita resents being accused without cause and decides to make his feared betrayal real, choosing a young man who already longs for her and discreetly reaching an understanding with him.

The story presents this decision as a response to an existing imbalance in their marriage, not as an isolated encounter. Tofano’s jealousy places Ghita under suspicion while giving her no reasonable account of what she has done to deserve it. Her response is to turn knowledge of his habits into an advantage. She knows that he likes to drink, and begins not merely to tolerate that habit but to encourage it artfully. The more readily he drinks, the more reliably his intoxication can create the privacy she needs.

An Affair Organized Around Drink and Deception

Once Tofano is drunk and asleep, Ghita meets her lover. The arrangement becomes familiar enough that she trusts it: she sometimes brings the young man into her own house, and sometimes spends a large part of the night at his nearby home. Tofano’s drinking, which he treats as pleasure, becomes the cover for the very conduct his jealousy fears. Ghita herself does not drink along with him, a difference in their habits that eventually gives him a clue.

To test his suspicion, Tofano one evening abstains from drinking but performs drunkenness in both speech and manner. Ghita takes the performance for the real thing, judges that he needs no more wine, and leaves for her lover’s house. This is the hinge of the conflict: the stratagem that had repeatedly protected her now gives Tofano an opportunity to observe her departure. He locks the doors from inside and waits at a window for her return, intending to confront her and make the affair known to her family and neighbors.

Ghita comes home around midnight and finds herself shut out. She first pleads with Tofano to let her in, falsely saying that she has been keeping vigil with a female neighbor because the nights are long and she cannot sleep alone. When pleading fails, she threatens to throw herself into a nearby well. She warns that if she is found dead, people will believe her husband, drunk and angry, threw her in; he would then face banishment or execution as her murderer. The threat makes the danger of public accusation run both ways: Tofano has set out to expose her, but she makes him imagine that his own conduct could be exposed as a capital crime.

The Well, the Neighbors, and the Reversal

Tofano remains unmoved, so Ghita stages the appearance of suicide without entering the well. In the darkness she takes a large stone beside it and drops it into the water. The splash convinces Tofano that she has leapt in. He rushes outside with a bucket and rope to rescue her, leaving the house unguarded; Ghita, who has hidden near the door, slips inside and locks him out. From the window she can now address him from the protected side of the threshold, while he stands in the position in which he had placed her.

The deception changes its audience when Tofano returns to the door and demands entry. Ghita raises her voice so the neighbors will hear and portrays him as the drunkard who comes home late, rather than herself as a wife caught returning from her lover. Tofano tells them what actually happened, but his account also exposes the episode he wanted to keep under his control. Ghita challenges his credibility by presenting him as a man who has been drinking and behaving badly; the neighbors blame him, and the story spreads from one household to another until her relatives arrive. Her performance does more than secure a way indoors: it makes the community’s first judgment fall on her husband.

Ghita’s relatives take her belongings and carry her away, while beating Tofano so severely that, in the tale’s comic exaggeration, they break every bone in his body. The punishment reverses the physical and social power of the night: Tofano had locked his wife outside and threatened to summon public shame against her, but her account draws the neighbors and family into the dispute on her side. The stone, the rope, and the bucket are not incidental props; together they turn a threatened accusation into a convincing rescue attempt and give Ghita time to seize the house and control what the onlookers hear.

Reconciliation and the Terms of Their Bond

The separation does not last. Tofano is in a bad way after the beating, and he still loves Ghita; through friends who intercede for him, he manages to make peace with her and bring her home. He promises that he will never again be jealous. He also gives her leave to do as she pleases, on the condition that she conduct herself discreetly enough for him not to know about it.

Their settlement is consequently neither a confession by Ghita nor a return to the original arrangement. The story does not say that Tofano learns the truth about her affair or that Ghita abandons it. Instead, the condition of peace is that he stop policing her and that her actions remain concealed from him. He suffers the consequences of his attempt to expose her, then accepts a domestic compromise that protects his ignorance as well as her freedom to act. The marriage continues, but its apparent order rests on discretion rather than mutual candor.

Narrative Significance

Lauretta introduces the episode as an example of the devices Love can teach, and the sequence makes that claim concrete: Ghita reads Tofano’s habits, improvises a false account, uses the dark and a stone to stage a crisis, and turns a locked door into a public defense. Her ingenuity is effective because she understands both her husband’s weakness and the neighbors’ likely response to a loud domestic quarrel. The plot’s reversals invite the audience to measure Tofano’s jealous control against the harm it brings upon him, rather than treating his suspicions as proof of Ghita’s wrongdoing.

The episode also belongs to the collection’s wider attention to the unequal constraints placed on women. Its broader framing recalls that women may be confined to domestic spaces and denied the diversions and mobility available to men; the particular tale makes no claim that every woman’s circumstances are identical, but gives Ghita’s constrained marriage a sharply comic outcome. Her agency appears through concealment and performance, not through formal authority: she cannot prevent Tofano from locking her out, but she can make the neighbors hear a different explanation and enlist her relatives in the aftermath. The ending’s joke is also the relation’s final condition: Tofano keeps his wife by surrendering the demand to know everything she does.