Il Zima Trades a Horse for a Private Talk with Vergellesi’s Wife

Ricciardo il Zima trades a prized palfrey for the chance to speak privately with Francesco Vergellesi’s wife, turning her husband’s attempt to profit from her admirer into the beginning of a real affair. The exchange first seems to leave the wife silent and untouched; instead, Zima’s eloquence and her husband’s absence transform a staged conversation into a meeting she later chooses for herself.

The bargain and its unequal terms

In Pistoia, Francesco Vergellesi is a wealthy and capable gentleman, but his exceptional covetousness governs his response to a practical problem: appointed provost of Milan, he needs a handsome palfrey and cannot find one to his liking. Ricciardo, a rich young man of lesser family, owns one of the finest horses in Tuscany. He is also known as an unusually stylish dresser and has long courted Francesco’s beautiful, virtuous wife without success.

People tell Francesco that he might obtain the horse through the love Ricciardo bears his wife. He summons Ricciardo and seeks the palfrey as though buying it, expecting to turn the offer into a gift. Ricciardo accepts the premise but sets his own condition: Francesco may have the horse as a gift, provided that he is allowed to speak to the wife in Francesco’s presence, at a distance from the others so no one else can hear. The price is therefore not a sale but an audience, narrowly defined and carefully staged.

Francesco agrees, calculating that he can gain the horse without risking his wife’s honor. He brings her from her chamber and instructs her to listen without answering, however little or much Ricciardo may say. She objects, but submits to her husband’s command. The bargain puts her in a constrained position: her presence is required, her speech is forbidden, and Francesco believes those conditions make the encounter harmless.

A conversation performed in two voices

At a distance from the rest of the household, Ricciardo declares his long-standing devotion. He praises the wife’s beauty, manners, and virtues, offers himself and everything he owns as hers, and presents her pity as the only possible relief from his suffering. His appeal is not merely a declaration of love: he imagines the remorse she might feel if she refuses him and asks her to prevent the death he says her rejection would cause.

The speech affects the wife more than all Ricciardo’s earlier attentions had done. His courtship, jousts, and serenades had failed to move her; now she begins to experience love as something she had not previously known. She keeps the silence Francesco demanded, but cannot prevent gentle sighs from escaping her. Ricciardo notices her glances and suppressed sighs. Her body gives him signs of feeling while her spoken answer remains withheld.

When no answer comes, Ricciardo recognizes that Francesco may have arranged the silence as a test. He answers himself in the wife’s voice, inventing a reply that says she has long loved him but concealed it to protect her reputation. In this imagined exchange, she promises a future meeting after Francesco has left for Milan. She gives him a signal: two napkins displayed at the garden-facing window of her chamber will mean that he should come secretly through the garden door at nightfall.

Ricciardo then resumes his own part in the performance, thanking the silent woman for the favor her invented words have granted him and promising to obey her supposed instructions. The scene’s deception depends on a precise distinction: the wife has not actually spoken or made the promise, but she has heard the possibility of a future meeting spoken aloud in her own imagined voice. The performance allows Ricciardo to test her response without breaking the husband’s rule that she remain silent.

The palfrey changes hands

When Ricciardo rises, Francesco approaches with laughter and asks whether he has kept his promise. Ricciardo replies that Francesco has made him speak to a marble statue, since he was promised a conversation with the wife but received no answer from her. Francesco takes the silence as proof of her virtue and feels his good opinion of her strengthened. He also considers the palfrey his.

Ricciardo confirms that the horse is indeed Francesco’s, but remarks that if he had known what fruit he would receive in return for the favor, he would have given it without asking for the conversation. Francesco laughs at this, believing the arrangement has served him well. A few days later he departs for Milan to take up the provostship, carrying off the fine horse and leaving his wife at home.

The bargain has thus delivered the immediate, visible result Francesco wanted, while the private exchange has produced a different consequence that he does not recognize. He interprets silence as the end of the matter; Ricciardo treats it as a beginning. The contrast between what the husband believes he has purchased and what the conversation has made possible drives the episode’s reversal.

The wife makes the signal her own

After Francesco leaves, his wife recalls Ricciardo’s words, his affection, and the palfrey he gave for her sake. She considers that her husband will remain away for six months and that she is alone, then concludes that the opportunity may not come again. She decides that it is better to act and repent than to abstain and repent.

She displays the two napkins at the garden window, turning Ricciardo’s imagined instruction into a real signal of her own. At night he comes alone to the garden gate, finds it open, and passes through another door into the house. The wife is waiting for him; she rises to meet him, and they go together to her chamber. Their secret meetings do not end with this first night: Ricciardo returns many times while Francesco is in Milan and even after he comes back.

The palfrey bargain therefore sets two forms of exchange in motion. Francesco obtains the horse by exploiting Ricciardo’s love, while Ricciardo uses the permitted conversation to make that love present to the wife in a new way. Yet the eventual decision is hers: she turns a cue spoken by Ricciardo into an invitation she herself chooses to send. The episode’s central irony is that Francesco’s confidence in his wife’s silence helps create the circumstances in which she begins a relationship with her admirer.