“Never mirror thyself in the glass”

“Never mirror thyself in the glass” is Fresco da Celatico’s compact reply to his niece Ciesca, who complains that the people she encounters are intolerable. Its force comes from turning her judgment back upon her: the reflection she refuses to consider is the source of the very disagreeableness she condemns. Ciesca misses the rebuke, making the saying both a neat piece of comic wit and a measure of her vanity.

The Complaint Behind the Retort

Ciesca is described as comely, but excessively pleased with her appearance and convinced of her own importance. She habitually criticizes men, women, and whatever she sees, while nothing seems to meet her approval. When she comes home early on a holiday, making faces and sighing, she tells Fresco that the streets are full of disagreeable and tiresome people. She claims that no woman could find such company more irksome than she does, and says she returned simply to avoid seeing them.

A Reversal in the Mirror

Fresco answers by making Ciesca’s own standard the basis of his advice. If disagreeable people are as distasteful to her as she claims, he tells her, she should never look at herself in a mirror if she wants to live happily. The joke depends on an unspoken comparison: her vanity and habitual fault-finding make her one of the people she cannot stand. Rather than argue over the strangers in the streets, Fresco redirects her attention to the one person she has excluded from her criticism.

Ciesca’s Failure to Understand

The retort succeeds as a joke but not as correction. Ciesca does not grasp Fresco’s intended meaning; she says instead that she chooses to look in the mirror like other women. The narrator presents this incomprehension as part of her folly: she imagines herself exceptionally clever, yet cannot recognize the criticism embedded in her uncle’s advice. The tale closes by saying that she remained in that folly. Her literal-minded answer thus completes the reversal: the mirror is offered as a way to expose her self-regard, but she accepts it only as an ordinary object of vanity.