Fortune (Fortuna)

Fortune (Fortuna) is the force of unstable change through which wealth, security, rank, and even bodily beauty pass into unforeseen danger or relief. In the storytelling of the Second Day, it is not a dependable reward for virtue or a predictable punishment for error: it overturns human expectations by an order people cannot discern, making awareness of its changes a discipline for those who prosper and a consolation for those who suffer.

An unseen power over what people call their own

Pampinea introduces Fortune as a power that governs everything people foolishly regard as theirs. Under its hidden ordinance, those things pass continually from one person to another and back again, by a method unknown to human beings. The emphasis falls not merely on reversals but on the limits of human understanding: people may witness change all around them, yet cannot securely infer its design or determine what will happen next. Pampinea notes that earlier stories have already demonstrated this truth, and offers another story because the company’s chosen theme makes Fortune’s operations worth considering again.

That framing makes possession provisional. Wealth and status appear to belong to individuals, but Fortune can alter who holds them and under what conditions. The recurring movement from one extreme to another is the point: a person’s present condition cannot guarantee its continuation. The stories therefore treat Fortune less as a stable explanation that makes events predictable than as the name for their exposed and unsettling instability.

Reversals of wealth and security

Pampinea’s story of Alessandro gives Fortune its most dazzling reversal in this sequence. His Florentine uncles first inherit a great fortune and dissipate it through unrestrained expenditure. After their credit collapses and their property proves insufficient to satisfy their creditors, they are imprisoned; their wives and children scatter in desperate circumstances. Their nephew Alessandro, meanwhile, has been lending money in England against the castles and possessions of barons. A war between the king and his son deprives him of those revenues, leaving the family’s prospects dependent on a peace that does not come. When Alessandro finally sets out for Italy, he is returning from a failed venture while his uncles are ruined.

The story’s title announces an extraordinary turn: Alessandro encounters an abbot who proves to be the King of England’s daughter. She takes Alessandro as her husband and makes good his uncles’ losses, restoring them to prosperity. Lauretta identifies this movement from the lowest misery to royal estate as an exceptional display of Fortune. Yet the reversal does not erase the earlier instability: the brothers’ rise had depended on successful lending, their ruin on war and vanished credit, and their recovery on an encounter no one could have planned.

Lauretta places beside this splendid restoration the more painful fortunes of Landolfo Ruffolo. Her comparison insists that stories of Fortune need not end in royal elevation to be worth hearing: Landolfo’s tale contains still greater distress, even though its outcome is less magnificent than Alessandro’s. Fortune’s reach is thus measured both by the extremity of a reversal and by what it costs, not only by the brilliance of a final recovery.

A warning and a consolation

Emilia explains why accounts of Fortune matter to people at opposite ends of good or ill fortune. They awaken minds that might otherwise fall asleep under prosperity’s blandishments: the happy are made wary. For the unhappy, the same stories offer consolation. Her tale of Madam Beritola embodies the contrast between prolonged bitterness and eventual joy. Emilia acknowledges that the later happiness can scarcely seem sufficient to assuage suffering so long and severe; the ending does not make the losses disappear. Instead, the story gives both hardship and recovery a place within a changing course.

This double use of storytelling shapes the concept. Fortune’s instability is not only an abstract claim about the world; hearing particular lives altered by it can change how the listeners inhabit their own present conditions. Prosperity is no warrant for complacency, while misery need not be mistaken for an unchangeable destiny. The stories console without promising that every reversal will be equal, swift, or painless.

Desire, beauty, and human limits

Pamfilo widens the theme beyond money and political security. People imagine that riches will give them a carefree and secure life, yet the pursuit of wealth can expose them to violence by those who covet their inheritance. Others reach royal power through perilous struggles and discover that kingship brings innumerable anxieties; even cups of gold cannot protect those who may drink poison at a royal table. Bodily strength, beauty, and personal adornment can likewise become sources of death or a painful life rather than uncomplicated goods.

His conclusion is that no object of human desire can be chosen with complete assurance against Fortune’s changes. The counsel is to accept what is allotted by the one who alone knows what is needful and can provide it. Pamfilo applies the point pointedly to the ladies’ desire for beauty: nature’s gifts do not satisfy them, and they use elaborate art to augment their charms. The example complicates any easy equation of beauty with happiness. In the preceding story, Alatiel’s beauty is explicitly associated with repeated marriages over four years; the quality desired as an advantage can also expose its possessor to repeated changes of circumstance.

Taken together, these accounts distinguish Fortune from a simple moral ledger. Extravagance contributes to the brothers’ ruin, but war disrupts Alessandro’s income; wealth may invite danger, rank brings fear, and beauty can become a source of misfortune. The stories do not offer a reliable technique for mastering these turns. Their steadier counsel is interpretive: recognize that present advantages are fragile, and hear the accounts of changing lives as warning, consolation, and a reminder of human limits.