Ghita’s well-stone trick is a domestic deception in which Madam Ghita uses her jealous husband’s drinking, his fear of public disgrace, and the neighbors’ judgment to turn an attempted exposure against him. When Tofano locks her out after she returns from a lover’s house, Ghita makes him believe she has thrown herself into a well; while he hurries to rescue her, she gets inside and persuades the neighborhood that he is the drunken, abusive husband. The reversal ends not in separation but in a settlement that leaves her husband chastened and her freedom conditional on his not knowing what she does.

The marriage and the opening deception

The tale is told by Lauretta during the seventh day’s storytelling. She introduces it as another instance of Love supplying a woman with a resourceful stratagem, following the company’s approval of a story about a jealous husband. The episode’s immediate setting is Arezzo, where Tofano is a rich man and Madam Ghita is his beautiful wife. His jealousy comes on quickly, though he can give no sound reason for it. When Ghita questions him, he offers only vague, general suspicions; the story makes the absence of evidence central to the conflict.

Ghita responds not by trying to persuade him out of his jealousy, but by exploiting a habit she has observed: Tofano enjoys drinking. She encourages him to drink until he is intoxicated, and, once he is in bed, meets the young man who desires her. At first she brings her lover into the house and continues the affair there in safety. As her confidence grows, she sometimes spends much of the night at the lover’s nearby house instead. The arrangement depends on Tofano’s being asleep, and on Ghita’s own restraint: she notices that she urges him to drink but never drinks herself.

That contrast gives Tofano a clue. Suspecting that Ghita gets him drunk so she can do as she pleases while he sleeps, he decides to test his suspicion. One evening he has not been drinking, but acts and speaks as if he were more drunk than ever. Ghita believes his performance. Thinking there is no need to give him more wine, she puts him to bed and leaves for her lover’s house, where she remains until midnight. The trick that had previously protected her now supplies Tofano with the opportunity to watch her departure.

The well, the locked door, and the reversal

As soon as Ghita has left, Tofano gets up, locks the doors from inside, and waits at the window. When she returns, she finds herself shut out. He tells her she cannot come in and threatens to expose her in front of her kinsfolk and neighbors. Ghita first denies that she has been at the place he suspects, claiming that she has kept vigil with a female neighbor because she could not sleep alone through the long night. Her pleas do not move him. He is intent on making her shame public, although, as the narrator stresses, the neighbors do not yet know anything about the affair.

Ghita changes tactics. She warns Tofano that, rather than endure the disgrace he would impose on her, she will throw herself into a nearby well. She adds that if her body is found there, people will assume that he cast her in while drunk, leaving him liable to flee, lose his possessions, or face execution for murder. Tofano remains fixed on his purpose. Ghita then asks him to put away the distaff she is leaving behind, says a farewell, and goes toward the well in the darkness. She picks up a large stone and drops it into the water. The splash is loud enough that Tofano believes she has jumped in.

He immediately grabs the bucket and rope and rushes out to save her. Ghita, who has hidden herself near the door, slips into the house and locks it from within. From the window she mocks his drinking, telling him he should dilute his wine when he drinks it, not afterward and at night. The stone has not merely distracted him: it has reversed who controls the threshold. Tofano, who had kept his wife outside to expose her, is now the one shut out and unable to get back in.

The neighbors decide the case

Tofano asks Ghita to open the door, but she refuses. She raises her voice so the neighbors will hear and claims that her husband habitually comes home drunk in the evening or falls asleep in taverns before returning at this hour. She presents locking him out as an attempt to shame him into changing his behavior after having endured it for a long time. Her account turns his chosen stage of exposure against him: the window, the street, and the gathering neighbors become an audience for a different accusation.

Tofano tells the neighbors what has actually happened and threatens Ghita. She counters by asking them to imagine the situation reversed, with her outside in the street and him safely inside. His accusation, she suggests, would then be more readily believed; his story that she had done what she says he himself has done only demonstrates his poor judgment. She also denies that he has frightened her by throwing something into the well and says he would have done better to drown himself and water the wine he drank to excess. The neighbors accept her version and blame Tofano.

The report spreads from neighbor to neighbor until it reaches Ghita’s kinsfolk. They come, hear the story from those present, and beat Tofano so severely that, in the tale’s phrasing, they break every bone in his body. They then take Ghita’s belongings and carry her away, threatening Tofano with worse. The physical punishment follows the public reversal: the husband who wanted to command the neighborhood’s judgment becomes the object of its anger, while Ghita leaves with her relatives rather than under his control.

Reconciliation and the tale’s final irony

Tofano recognizes that his jealousy has brought him into a sorry state. He still loves Ghita, however, and uses friends to intercede for him until he makes peace with her and brings her home. The reconciliation does not restore the marriage to its earlier terms. Tofano promises not to be jealous again and gives Ghita leave to do as she pleases, provided she acts so discreetly that he knows nothing about it. His attempt to expose and restrain her ends in an agreement that explicitly depends on concealment.

Lauretta closes by wishing long life to Love and death to war. The comic force of the episode comes from the sequence of reversals: Tofano’s staged drunkenness is met by Ghita’s staged suicide; his locked door becomes her barrier against him; and his account to the neighbors is defeated by the public story she constructs first. The stone matters because it makes the false drowning plausible, but the deception succeeds through timing and performance: Ghita hides by the door, enters as Tofano runs to the well, and speaks loudly enough to recruit the neighbors before he can regain control of the scene. The ending preserves the affair rather than resolving the marriage’s underlying inequality or mistrust; peace is restored by a bargain that requires Tofano not to know.