“Phantom, phantom that goest by night”

“Phantom, phantom that goest by night” is the refrain of Mistress Tessa’s improvised conjuration, a comic verbal device that disguises a lover’s midnight visit as a supernatural disturbance. Its mock-pious language lets her manage both Gianni’s suspicions and Federigo’s presence outside the door, while the supposed exorcism ultimately points Federigo toward supper.

The Conjuration as a Cover Story

When Federigo knocks softly at the door, Gianni hears him; Mistress Tessa has heard the knock more clearly but pretends to wake only after her husband nudges her. She calls the visitor a phantom that has frightened her for several nights, making the knock seem part of an established haunting rather than a summons to her lover. Gianni answers that he has already said prayers and crossed the bed in the name of the Trinity, but Tessa insists that they must exorcise the apparition. She claims that an anchoress taught her an effective prayer at the Pardon in Fiesole, and says she would not have dared test it alone. The story gives her a ready-made reason to rise with Gianni and approach the door together.

Her plan also serves Federigo: she fears that he may suspect something and become angry, so she needs him to know that Gianni is with her. At the door she tells her husband when to spit, then delivers the conjuration beginning, “Phantom, phantom that goest by night.” Its opening addresses the apparition as though it had arrived with its tail upright; the command sends it away to the foot of the great peach tree, where it is promised a fattened capon, eggs, and wine. Gianni participates by spitting on cue, unaware of the sexual joke embedded in the ritual. Outside, Federigo hears the whole performance and, though vexed, nearly bursts out laughing; his under-the-breath wish that Gianni’s teeth might take the spit makes the farce’s private audience explicit.

The Supper and the Story’s Competing Versions

After Mistress Tessa has conjured three times, she returns to bed with Gianni Lotteringhi, while Federigo di Neri Pegolotti—who had come hoping to sup with her—goes to the garden. At the foot of the great peach tree he finds the capons, wine, and eggs named in the conjuration, takes them home, and eats at his ease. The joke therefore works on two levels: it conceals the lovers’ arrangement from Gianni, yet gives Federigo a literal direction to food and drink. When he later meets Mistress Tessa, the two laugh together over the exorcism.

The narrator then offers another account, linked to the donkey-skull signal. In this version, Mistress Tessa had turned an ass’s skull toward Fiesole to summon Federigo, but a passing husbandman struck it with a stick, turning it toward Florence instead. Federigo consequently mistook the signal and came to the wrong place. The conjuration in this telling is an explanation to send him away: Tessa insists that she had not turned the skull, says that she is in bed with Gianni, and invokes God’s judgment on the person who did. Federigo leaves without supper or lodging.

A very old neighbor, reporting what she had heard as a child, says that both versions were true, but that the ass’s-skull episode concerned another man: Gianni di Nello, who lived at Porta San Piero and was no less a fool than Gianni Lotteringhi. Rather than resolve the discrepancy, the narrator leaves the ladies free to choose whichever prayer they prefer, or to learn both. The expression thus survives as more than a single fixed incantation: its comic force comes from the mismatch between solemn exorcism and practical deception, while the competing tellings make the story itself as variable as the ritual it recounts.

The Incantation’s Double Language

The conjuration’s joke depends on words that can pass as supernatural ritual while carrying meanings legible to an audience beyond Gianni. Its “tail upright” describes the phantom in terms that the accompanying gloss identifies as an erect penis; the “anointed twice-anointed one” is a richly larded capon, and the “hundred turds” of the sitting hen are eggs. The prayer is therefore not simply a pious disguise: its language braids sexual innuendo with the practical inventory of a meal, turning the exorcism into a coded message whose apparent spiritual solemnity protects its earthly purposes.

That double address gives the expression its particular comic force. Gianni follows the ceremony without understanding its bawdy register, while Federigo, listening from outside, catches both the innuendo and the directions to the food. The same utterance can thus sustain the husband’s belief in a phantom, alert the lover to what is meant, and entertain the reader who recognizes the mismatch. The refrain’s supernatural surface is less a claim about the presence of spirits than a performance that lets different listeners hear different things.

Transmission and Reuse

The account closes by making its uncertainty part of its circulation. The narrator reports the peach-tree conjuration, then a separate version involving the donkey’s skull, and finally introduces a very old neighbor who says she heard in childhood that both incidents occurred, though the second belonged to Gianni di Nello rather than Gianni Lotteringhi. The variants are not forced into a single definitive episode: the neighbor’s recollection instead gives each a place in the story’s remembered history.

That open ending turns the conjuration from a one-time trick into usable lore. Addressing the ladies, the narrator invites them to choose whichever orison pleases them—or to keep both—and recommends that they learn them by heart in case they prove useful. The phrase therefore belongs at once to an intimate deception and to a chain of retelling: its words can be adapted, remembered, and redeployed, while the story leaves its audience to decide which version to carry forward.