Girolamo Is Sent to Paris to End His Romance

Girolamo Is Sent to Paris to End His Romance is the decisive separation at the center of a plan to redirect a young heir’s future: his mother and guardians send him away from Florence in the hope that absence will extinguish his love for Salvestra, a neighbor’s daughter. Instead, the arrangement delays their reunion without changing his attachment. He returns after two years more deeply in love, only to find that Salvestra has married another man.

Background and the Proposed Separation

Girolamo is the son of Lionardo Sighieri, a very wealthy merchant. After Lionardo’s death, the boy’s mother and guardians manage his affairs. Growing up among the children of the neighborhood, Girolamo becomes especially close to Salvestra, the daughter of a tailor. As they grow older, their familiarity turns into an ardent mutual love: he is uneasy unless he can see her, and she loves him no less.

His mother sees the attachment as a threat to the future she wants for her son. Girolamo is not yet fourteen, she tells his guardians, but she fears he may marry Salvestra without anyone’s knowledge, or else waste away if he sees her married to someone else. She wants him removed from her sight so that he will forget her and can eventually be given a bride of suitable birth. Her concern is therefore not simply that her son is in love: it is that this love might determine his marriage and frustrate the family’s hopes for his advancement.

The Journey to Paris

The guardians act on the mother’s proposal by presenting the journey as an opportunity for Girolamo to learn how his wealth is employed and to improve his manners. They urge him to spend some time in Paris, where he can observe lords, barons, and gentlemen and become more polished before returning home. Their appeal frames the removal as education and preparation for adult responsibilities, rather than as a direct attempt to separate him from Salvestra.

Girolamo refuses at first. He says he is not disposed to go and believes he can fare as well in Florence as anyone else. When further arguments fail, his mother reproaches him—not for resisting Paris in itself, but for being in love. She then changes her approach, cajoling and softly persuading him until he consents to go to France for a year, and no longer. The agreement makes the intended separation seem limited and purposeful; it does not mean that he has ceased to care for Salvestra.

A Separation That Does Not Work

Although Girolamo leaves ardently in love, he is kept in Paris from one day to another until two years have passed. The narrative gives no further account of what happens to him during that interval; its emphasis falls on the contrast between his prolonged absence and the unchanged force of his feeling. His family’s plan assumes that removal from Salvestra will make her pass out of his mind. The result is the opposite of the hoped-for resolution: when he returns to Florence, he is more in love than before.

The separation has meanwhile altered Salvestra’s circumstances. She is now married to an honest young tentmaker. Girolamo is deeply distressed, but recognizes that he cannot undo what has happened and tries to console himself. He finds out where she lives and begins passing in front of her, expecting that she will remember him as he remembers her. She appears to have forgotten him—or, if she remembers, to pretend otherwise. His repeated efforts to revive her attention achieve nothing, adding rejection to the grief of finding her married.

Consequences and Narrative Significance

The journey does not end the romance; it changes the conditions under which Girolamo pursues it. After learning that his attempts to bring himself back to Salvestra’s mind are failing, he resolves to speak with her face to face, even if doing so should cost him his life. The subsequent decision to seek her secretly in her home follows from this failed return to their former familiarity. Distance has not reconciled him to losing her; it has left him confronting both her marriage and the limits of his influence over her life.

Neifile introduces the episode as a warning against trying to set human judgment against the nature of love. The mother and guardians treat separation as a practical remedy: send Girolamo away, let absence do its work, and preserve the possibility of a socially advantageous marriage. Yet the two-year stay in Paris exposes the weakness of that calculation. The event’s force lies in the reversal between intention and result: the journey succeeds in keeping the lovers apart, but not in making Girolamo forget Salvestra. His return makes clear that a family can control where a young heir lives for a time, without thereby controlling whom he loves.