Ferondo Made to Seem Dead

Ferondo Made to Seem Dead, called Ferondo in Lauretta’s story, is a wealthy farmer whose apparent death and return are engineered by an abbot to conceal an affair with Ferondo’s wife. The deception makes Ferondo’s own jealousy the stated reason for his punishment: drugged, entombed, and imprisoned, he accepts the abbot’s invented purgatory as reality. His story turns the language of holiness and penance into cover for sexual exploitation, while making his credulity—not any knowledge of the abbot’s crime—the basis of his ordeal.

Identity and Background

Ferondo is a very wealthy farmer in Tuscany. The narrator describes him as heavy, clumsy, and exceptionally dull-witted. Yet his simplicity has a pointed limit: he is shrewd enough in loving and guarding his wife to make the abbot despair of reaching her by ordinary means. The contrast helps explain why the abbot’s scheme must alter not only Ferondo’s circumstances but his understanding of them.

Ferondo is closely acquainted with the abbot, who welcomes him partly because his foolishness provides amusement. The abbot’s public reputation is sharply different from his private conduct: he is regarded as godly and just, though the story’s narrator identifies his failure in the matter of women. Ferondo’s trust in this respected religious figure gives the abbot access to him and makes the later deception possible.

Ferondo’s wife is described as very beautiful. The abbot becomes passionately enamoured of her and, having judged that Ferondo will guard her, seeks a way to remove him. Ferondo and his wife sometimes visit the abbey garden, where the abbot speaks demurely about eternal blessedness and the pious works of earlier generations. This religious conversation helps create the appearance of sanctity that will later lend credibility to his fraud.

Drugging and Apparent Death

The abbot obtains a powerful powder from the Levant, from a prince who claims that it is the substance used by the Old Man of the Mountain to send people sleeping into his paradise or bring them out again. In the story, its effect depends on the amount administered: it induces a sleep so profound that the sleeper appears lifeless. The abbot puts enough in a beaker of wine to make Ferondo sleep for three days and gives it to him in his cell, where Ferondo drinks without suspicion.

The powder takes effect suddenly. Ferondo first falls asleep while still standing and then drops to the ground. The abbot performs concern, loosening his clothes, calling for cold water, and trying other remedies as though he were attempting to restore Ferondo’s senses. The monks find no sign of life in his pulse and conclude that he is dead. His wife and kinsfolk are summoned; after mourning him with her female relatives, his wife leaves the abbey and returns home. She says she will not part from the little son she had with Ferondo and takes charge of the child and his wealth.

That night, the abbot and a trusted monk from Bologna secretly lift Ferondo from the tomb. They carry him to a lightless vault used as a prison for monks who have done wrong. They remove his clothes, dress him in a monk’s habit, and lay him on a bundle of straw. The Bolognese monk is instructed to wait there until Ferondo recovers consciousness, while the rest of the community remains unaware of the ruse.

The Invented Purgatory

When Ferondo wakes, he does not know where he is. The Bolognese monk enters with a terrible noise, seizes him, and beats him soundly with a rod. Ferondo’s first response is to ask where he is; the monk tells him that he is in purgatory and confirms his belief that he has died. Stripped of any way to check the claim, Ferondo interprets the dark vault and the monk’s violence through the story he has been given.

The monk supplies food and drink, explaining that Ferondo’s wife sent them to the church for masses for his soul and that God has permitted them to be passed on to him. Ferondo accepts this account and thanks his wife, recalling how affectionate he had been toward her while alive. The scene’s irony is that Ferondo’s confidence in her devotion persists while the abbot is secretly exploiting her. Even as he eats, Ferondo judges the wine poor and complains that his wife should have sent better wine from the cask against the wall.

After the meal, the monk beats him again. He explains that God has ordained this punishment twice a day because Ferondo was jealous despite having an exceptionally good wife. Ferondo admits that he had been jealous, but believes the punishment follows divine judgment rather than a human trick. The monk’s invented explanation turns Ferondo’s possessiveness into a religious offense and makes arbitrary assault appear like a sentence from God.

The monk also tells Ferondo that countless other people are present but invisible and inaudible to him, and that they are unimaginably far from their own countries. Ferondo takes this as further evidence that he is outside the world. For half a score months—ten months—he is kept in the vault, eating, drinking, and being beaten, while believing that these events belong to the afterlife.

The Abbot’s Scheme and Its Consequences

During Ferondo’s confinement, the abbot repeatedly visits his wife and has intercourse with her. When she becomes pregnant, she tells the abbot, and they decide that Ferondo must be returned to life so she can claim the child as her husband’s. The scheme thus depends on Ferondo’s removal in two senses: the abbot first makes him absent from his household and then manufactures a story that will explain his return and the pregnancy.

The abbot calls to Ferondo in a counterfeit voice, announcing that God has granted him a return to the world and that he will have a son by his wife. He is told to name the child Benedict, in gratitude for the prayers of the abbot and his wife and for the love of Saint Benedict. Ferondo rejoices at the promise and blesses God, the abbot, the saint, and his wife. His gratitude shows how completely the invented account has shaped his understanding: the abbot responsible for his imprisonment is, to him, among the holy intercessors who have won his release.

To complete the deception, the abbot gives Ferondo enough of the powder in wine to make him sleep for about four hours. With the Bolognese monk’s help, he puts Ferondo’s own clothes back on him and secretly restores him to the tomb where he had been buried. The supplied passage ends with Ferondo asleep there; it does not describe his waking or the later course of his return. The abbot’s immediate purpose, however, is clear: Ferondo’s reappearance will provide a false explanation for his wife’s pregnancy.

Narrative Role and Significance

Ferondo’s ordeal exposes the gap between religious reputation and religious conduct. The abbot uses the appearance of piety, the language of purgatory, the authority of the Church, and the expectation that masses aid the dead to make a private crime look like sacred order. Ferondo is not a knowing accomplice to the deception: he accepts the abbot’s account because he believes himself dead and has no access to the truth outside the vault.

His jealousy supplies the story’s comic punishment, but the deception makes the moral arrangement unstable. The monk claims Ferondo is being beaten for jealousy, while the abbot exploits the very absence that jealousy had made difficult to secure. Ferondo’s apparent death is therefore both an elaborate practical trick and a reversal of religious judgment: villagers interpret the disguised abbot’s visits as Ferondo doing penance, and the story’s opening frames the supposed dead man as someone people might adore as a saint, though the abbot is the one who should be condemned as a criminal. Ferondo’s credulity sustains that public misunderstanding, while the reader sees the fraud beneath it.