A Florentine Lady Uses Confession to Arrange a Tryst with Her Lover is a tale of calculated deception in which the sacrament of confession becomes an instrument of courtship. An unnamed gentlewoman recruits a credulous friar to carry messages without ever telling him the truth: his earnest attempts to protect her from an imaginary pursuer instead give her lover both proof of her affection and, ultimately, a route into her bedchamber. The tale’s comedy depends on the friar’s certainty that he is defending chastity, even as his rebukes make the lovers’ meeting possible.

A Marriage and a Concealed Desire

The story takes place in Florence, where Filomena introduces the woman as beautiful, richly endowed by nature, engaging in manner, and lofty in spirit. She is of high lineage but married to a wool merchant, a craftsman whose work and business she considers beneath her station. The narrator emphasizes the mismatch between her aristocratic self-conception and her husband’s occupation: she regards his concerns with cloth, yarn, and weaving as evidence that he is not a man worthy of a gentlewoman’s favor.

She consequently accepts her husband’s embraces only to the extent that she feels unable to refuse them. For her own satisfaction, she falls in love with a gentleman of good standing and middle age, loving him so ardently that, when she does not see him during the day, she cannot pass the night without unease. Her lover has not yet recognized her feelings. She is too cautious to send a message through a woman or write to him, fearing the dangers that either method might bring. Her desire is therefore real, but so is the need to act indirectly.

Confession Recast as a Message

The woman notices that her beloved often keeps company with a friar who, despite being dull, is widely reputed to live devoutly. She decides that this churchman can serve as an intermediary. At a suitable time she goes to the church, asks to confess, and presents herself as a wife devoted to a husband who loves her and grants her every wish. This account is a deliberate fabrication: it establishes the virtuous reputation she wants the friar to defend while concealing both her contempt for her husband and her own attachment to another man.

She then describes an unnamed, well-favoured and tall gentleman in sober, respectable clothes as a persistent pursuer. She claims that he appears whenever she approaches a door or window, though he has not in fact taken notice of her. She says she fears that his behavior may expose a virtuous woman to reproach, and that she has kept quiet rather than risk conflict by involving her brothers. Her request that the friar rebuke his friend sounds like an appeal for protection; in practice, it puts her lover’s name into the friar’s conversation and creates the first opportunity for him to learn of her interest.

The friar accepts her story as true, praises her supposed rectitude, and promises to intervene. He also recommends charitable works and almsgiving. The lady discreetly puts money into his hand for masses for her dead relatives, giving the performance of piety a material as well as a verbal form. When her lover arrives, the friar draws him aside and admonishes him for pursuing and spying on the woman. The gentleman is astonished: he has never even seen her and rarely passes her house. As the friar insists that the accusation came from the lady herself, however, the gentleman understands that the complaint must be a device intended to communicate her feelings.

The Friar’s Rebukes Become Courtship

Rather than expose the deception, the gentleman pretends to be abashed and promises to leave the woman alone. He then goes to her house. Waiting at a small window so that she can see him, the woman greets him with such evident pleasure that he recognizes the truth behind the friar’s account. From then on, he passes through her street under the appearance of attending to other business, cautiously turning the friar’s reprimand into an accepted means of approaching her.

Once she sees that her lover returns her affection, she returns to the friar with a second invented grievance. She claims that the gentleman has begun passing her house far more often and sent her a costly purse and girdle. She tells the friar that she rejected the gifts, then says she recovered them from the messenger so that they could not be falsely represented as accepted. In reality, she has kept the objects and brings them to the church, asking the friar to return them and to warn his friend again. The purse and girdle give her invented accusation something tangible for the friar to inspect; her complaint also gives her lover a visible token of the message she has arranged.

The friar believes her once more. He takes the gifts, accepts another florin for prayers for her dead mother and other kin, and promises to reprimand his friend. When the gentleman denies sending the purse and girdle, the friar shows them to him. The lover recognizes the woman’s purpose and admits the supposed offense rather than correcting the friar’s misunderstanding. The friar hands over the objects, satisfied that he has elicited a confession and secured a promise to stop. The gentleman, by contrast, leaves delighted both by the apparent certainty of his mistress’s love and by the gifts she has managed to place in his possession.

A Visit Through the Garden Window

The woman waits for her husband’s departure before completing the arrangement. When business sends him to Genoa, she goes to the friar and recounts a third invented offense: just before matins, she says, the gentleman entered her garden, climbed a tree to the window of her bedchamber, and began opening the lattice. She claims to have awakened, run naked to shut the window, and sent him away. The account is framed as a narrow escape from shame, and she appeals to the friar to deal with his friend one last time before she tells her husband and brothers.

The friar is furious and asks whether she is certain she recognized the man. She assures him that she did. He praises her for shutting the window and asks her to keep the matter from her relatives while he tries to restrain the supposed offender. His confidence in her innocence is so complete that he gives her his blessing and undertakes to confront the gentleman again. The woman has not simply made the friar repeat a message: by inventing an attempted entry, she has supplied her lover with a plan, a time, and a point of access.

When the gentleman arrives, the friar angrily calls him a traitor and demands to know where he was before dawn. The lover plays innocent until he has heard enough to understand what he needs to do. He makes ample promises to appease the friar, then waits until the next night. The woman leaves the lattice open; he enters her chamber by way of the garden tree. The route that the friar denounces as an attempt on her chastity becomes the route through which the lovers meet.

The Unwitting Go-Between

At their meeting, the woman welcomes the gentleman and credits the friar, in effect, with having taught him the way in. The lovers enjoy one another’s company, laugh at the friar’s simplicity, and make arrangements for future meetings. They continue to meet on many other nights without needing to return to him. The friar never learns that his warnings have carried the woman’s messages, confirmed her lover’s interest, and enabled the final approach.

The tale’s reversal is not that the friar consciously approves the affair, but that his sincere effort to police it supplies the lovers with the means to carry it on. Confession, admonition, returned gifts, and devotional alms all appear within a religious setting, yet each is bent to the woman’s practical purpose. Filomena presents the episode as a comic demonstration that a churchman’s reputation for devotion does not make him discerning: the friar is repeatedly fooled not by force or elaborate disguise, but by his readiness to believe a performance of virtue. The conclusion turns his failure into the lovers’ private joke and ends with the storyteller’s playful wish that God might lead her and other willing souls to similar joy.