Messer Gentile rescues Madam Catalina from a tomb after physicians and her relatives have taken her for dead. The discovery reverses an apparent funeral into a recovery, but the rescue’s decisive significance lies in what follows: although Gentile has long loved Catalina, he protects her honor and ultimately returns her, together with her newborn son, to her husband, Niccoluccio Caccianimico.

Background and mistaken death

Messer Gentile de' Carisendi, a young gentleman of Bologna, had fallen in love with Catalina, the wife of Niccoluccio Caccianimico. She had not returned his love, and Gentile, appointed provost of Modena, had gone there in despair. While Niccoluccio was away from Bologna, Catalina went to a country house about three miles from the city because she was pregnant. There, a sudden and violent illness left her showing no sign of life. Several physicians judged her dead.

The mistaken judgment was reinforced by Catalina’s nearest female relatives, who believed that she had not been pregnant long enough for the child to be fully formed. They did not investigate further. After much lamentation, they buried her in a vault in a neighboring church. The burial thus arose not from a confirmed death but from an error about both her condition and the progress of her pregnancy; meanwhile, the absent husband and Gentile were elsewhere, unable to intervene before she was entombed.

The discovery and rescue

A friend carried news of Catalina’s death to Gentile. Though she had never granted him so much as a look while alive, he grieved for her. He then resolved to visit her grave secretly. At night he rode with one servant to the church, opened the sepulchre, and entered it. Beside Catalina’s body, he kissed her repeatedly through tears. His desire to touch her breast arose from the thought that he would never have another opportunity, but the gesture brought the crucial reversal: he felt what seemed to be a faint beat of her heart.

Gentile put aside his fear and examined her more carefully. Finding that life remained, though barely, he and his servant carried her gently out of the tomb. Gentile placed her before him on his horse and took her in secret to his house in Bologna. The rescue depends on a small bodily sign that the physicians and mourners had missed. The person everyone treated as a corpse could still be brought back, but only through Gentile’s attention and the prompt help that followed.

Recovery, shelter, and childbirth

Gentile’s mother, described as a worthy and discreet gentlewoman, heard the circumstances from her son and set about restoring Catalina. She used hot baths and great fires to revive her. When Catalina regained consciousness, she did not know where she was; seeing Gentile, she was astonished and asked his mother to explain how she had arrived there. Gentile recounted what had happened. Catalina was distressed, then asked him to preserve the honor of both her and her husband and to let her return home as soon as day came.

Gentile assured Catalina that he would not use her presence to satisfy his former desire. He did, however, ask her to remain quietly with his mother until he returned from Modena, because her family and the people of Bologna believed her dead and he wanted to present her to her husband in a public and solemn manner. Catalina agreed, though she longed to bring her family the news that she was alive. Soon afterward, her labor began. In Gentile’s mother’s care she gave birth to a healthy boy, and Gentile arranged that mother and child receive everything they needed. Catalina was looked after as if she were Gentile’s own wife, while he secretly returned to Modena to complete his term of office.

Public restitution and the meaning of the rescue

Before returning to Bologna, Gentile arranged a lavish banquet and invited many local gentlemen, including Niccoluccio. At the meal he raised a question about a faithful servant whom one master, believing him beyond recovery, had cast into the street, and whom a stranger had taken in and restored to health. The guests agreed that the second man could not be blamed for keeping someone whom the first had abandoned. Gentile had the assembly consider the principle before showing them how it applied to Catalina.

After the meal, Gentile revealed that the woman among them was the supposed servant: Catalina, whom her own people had cast away as dead and whom he had recovered. He recounted how he had found and revived her, then presented the case for keeping her according to the guests’ judgment. The company was moved, and Niccoluccio and Catalina wept. Gentile then made the point of his story concrete: he took the child in his arms and Catalina by the hand, identified the boy as Niccoluccio’s son, and returned wife and child to the husband from whom death had seemed to separate them. He released Catalina from every promise she had made him; Niccoluccio received them with joy, and the assembled guests praised Gentile. Catalina was welcomed home, where the people of Bologna continued to regard her with amazement as one raised from the dead. Gentile thereafter remained a friend to Niccoluccio and both families.

The rescue’s movement is from private desire to public renunciation. Gentile first approaches the tomb because he believes death has removed the ordinary limits that kept Catalina from him; once he discovers that she lives, he declines to turn her dependence into possession. His mother’s quiet care makes recovery possible, and his banquet converts a hidden act of rescue into an acknowledged restitution. In the story told by Dioneo, the apparent loss of a wife and unborn child becomes the occasion for Gentile to demonstrate magnanimity by saving them and freely giving them back.