Bruno and His Companions Trick Calandrino into Thinking He Is Pregnant

Bruno and His Companions Trick Calandrino into Thinking He Is Pregnant is a comic episode in which a coordinated deception converts Calandrino’s anxiety, credulity, and newly inherited money into a meal for his companions. Bruno, Buffalmacco, and Nello make him accept an impossible diagnosis; Master Simone gives the lie the appearance of medical authority; and Calandrino pays for his own humiliation while believing himself cured.

A prank framed for laughter

Filostrato introduces the episode after Elisa has finished her story, explaining that a judge in the previous day’s gathering had taken from him the tale he meant to tell about Calandrino and his companions. He turns to that familiar comic subject now because, as he presents it, another account of Calandrino can only add to the company’s merriment. The framing makes the episode a deliberate change of tone: its aim is not suspense about whether Calandrino will recover, but the accumulating pleasure of watching a falsehood become convincing through collaboration.

The prank begins with a specific grievance. Calandrino’s aunt has died and left him two hundred crowns in small coin. He talks of buying an estate and negotiates with brokers as though he had ten thousand gold florins to spend, but the purchase repeatedly falls through when the price is named. Bruno and Buffalmacco have urged him to use the inheritance to make merry with them instead. They have not even managed to get a meal from him, and their frustration supplies the immediate motive for the scheme. The story’s joke therefore grows out of a contrast between Calandrino’s grand talk about land and his refusal to share even a modest portion of his money.

A diagnosis assembled in stages

Nello, a painter and companion of the other two, joins their planning. The three agree on a way to make Calandrino pay, then wait for him to leave his house the next morning. Nello greets him and studies his face, asking whether anything has happened during the night and suggesting that Calandrino looks changed. He does not give a definite diagnosis. The uncertainty is the first part of the trap: Calandrino feels no illness, but the suggestion prompts him to ask whether something might be wrong.

Buffalmacco takes up the hint as soon as Nello has moved on. When Calandrino repeats the painter’s concern, Buffalmacco confirms it, saying that there must be something amiss because Calandrino looks almost dead. Bruno then arrives and joins the same performance by remarking on his face. Three ostensibly separate observations now appear to agree. The staged consensus overcomes Calandrino’s own evidence that he feels well; he begins to believe that he has a fever and asks what he should do.

Bruno supplies the next step, advising him to go home, get into bed, cover himself warmly, and send his urine to Master Simone, the physician. The recommendation makes the trick resemble a proper consultation rather than a practical joke. The companions accompany Calandrino home, where he tells Tessa to cover him because he feels disordered. He sends his urine to the physician, who keeps a shop in the Old Market at the sign of the Pumpkin. Bruno volunteers to go ahead, leaving the others with the patient and ensuring that the physician will hear the conspirators’ version of events before receiving the sample.

Master Simone makes the fiction medical

Bruno reaches Master Simone before the maid carrying the urine and explains the case. When the maid arrives, the physician tells her to instruct Calandrino to keep warm; he will come shortly and explain what ails him. That message maintains the appearance of a measured medical procedure while giving the plotters time to assemble in the sickroom. Master Simone examines the urine and feels Calandrino’s pulse. In front of Tessa, he then announces that the sole cause of Calandrino’s trouble is that he is pregnant.

The diagnosis turns a sexual joke into the supposed explanation of a physical crisis. Calandrino accepts it at once, cries out in distress, and blames Tessa, claiming that her insistence on being on top has caused his condition. He imagines the consequences of childbirth, complains that women suffer terribly in labor despite having the proper means to give birth, and says he would die if forced to endure such pain. His alarm is not a momentary misunderstanding: he treats the physician’s absurd pronouncement as a real predicament and fears the bodily ordeal he thinks lies ahead.

Tessa, described as modest, blushes at her husband’s accusation and leaves the room without answering. Calandrino continues complaining in her absence, wishing misery upon her and threatening that, if he survives, she will not again be allowed to take the upper position. The deception thus draws out both his fear of pregnancy and his attempt to turn that fear into a complaint against his wife. Bruno, Buffalmacco, and Nello can scarcely contain their laughter; Master Simone laughs so hard that the narrator says every tooth might have been drawn from his head.

Payment, treatment, and the supposed cure

After Calandrino begs for help, Master Simone reassures him that the condition has been caught early and can be removed within a few days, though at some expense. Calandrino offers the two hundred crowns he had hoped to spend on an estate if that will prevent him from giving birth. The sum he is prepared to surrender makes the earlier inheritance plot concrete: the conspirators have found a way to obtain from him what their direct requests for a meal failed to secure.

Master Simone prescribes a preparation of distilled waters, to be taken in a large beakerful, and specifies three pairs of fine fat capons as ingredients for the treatment. He also directs Calandrino to give one of his companions five silver crowns for the remaining supplies and have everything delivered to the physician’s shop. Calandrino agrees to the terms and hands Bruno the money for the capons and the five crowns. His trust completes the transaction: the very companions who have manufactured his illness now collect the payment for its cure.

Master Simone sends Calandrino a little clary. Bruno buys the capons and the other provisions, but the food is consumed by him, his fellow conspirators, and the physician rather than used to prepare a remedy. Calandrino, meanwhile, drinks the clary for three mornings. Master Simone returns with the companions, feels his pulse again, and declares him cured. The ritual of a second examination gives the fraud a closing medical form: the diagnosis has been delivered, the treatment completed, and the patient officially released.

The reversal and its comic consequence

Calandrino rises happily and resumes his business. Whenever the occasion arises, he praises Master Simone for having unbegotten him of his pregnancy in three days without pain. His public account confirms that he has not discovered the fraud: he interprets the sham cure as evidence of the physician’s skill. Bruno, Buffalmacco, Nello, and Master Simone are pleased that their device has overcome Calandrino’s reluctance to spend money on them. Tessa, by contrast, recognizes the trick and scolds her husband for it.

The ending depends on the distance between what the reader knows and what Calandrino believes. Every step has been visible as a joint performance, yet each apparent confirmation has made the fiction more persuasive to its intended victim: a worried greeting, repeated warnings, a physician’s examination, an extravagant diagnosis, a costly prescription, and a final declaration of recovery. Calandrino’s own explanation of his cure preserves the joke after the deception is over. He leaves the episode not wiser about his companions, but confidently praising the man who helped them spend his inheritance on capons.