Madam Ghita

Madam Ghita, the wife of Tofano in the tale set in Arezzo, is a young, attractive woman whose quick judgment turns her husband’s groundless jealousy against him. Her story moves from a concealed affair to a public contest over who will be believed: when Tofano tries to expose her, she makes his own drunkenness the explanation accepted by the neighbors. The ending is an uneasy domestic settlement, won through her resourcefulness rather than through any change in the conditions that made secrecy necessary.

Identity and Introduction

Tofano is a rich man who takes Madam Ghita as his wife. He becomes jealous of her soon after their marriage, although he cannot give a sound reason for his suspicion. Madam Ghita recognizes that his jealousy is not supported by evidence; she resents it and, rather than merely endure his accusations, decides to make the feared infidelity real. The tale links her decision to the attention of a young man she finds pleasing, who already desires her.

Her agency is presented through deliberate choices and close observation. She agrees on terms with her admirer, but waits to act until she has found a way to keep their meetings hidden. Among Tofano’s habits, she notices his pleasure in drinking. Instead of treating it simply as a weakness, she turns it into the practical means of arranging her own freedom of movement.

The Affair and Its Cover

Madam Ghita encourages Tofano to drink, often leading him to intoxication. When he is drunk enough to go to bed, she meets her lover. At first the plan lets her receive him safely in her own house; later, trusting that Tofano will remain asleep, she sometimes spends much of the night at the lover’s nearby home. The arrangement depends on the contrast between their behavior: she promotes her husband’s drinking but does not drink herself, preserving the alertness that his intoxication removes.

That contrast eventually gives Tofano a clue. He notices that she urges him to drink while abstaining herself, and suspects that she is getting him drunk so she can pursue her own pleasure while he sleeps. To test his suspicion, he stays sober one evening but acts as though he is thoroughly drunk. Madam Ghita believes the performance and puts him to bed quickly. She then leaves for her lover’s house, unaware that Tofano has been waiting to catch her out.

The Reversal at the Door

Once Madam Ghita has gone, Tofano gets up, locks the doors from inside, and waits at a window for her return. When she finds herself shut out, she first pleads with him and claims she has been keeping vigil with a female neighbor because she could not sleep. He refuses to admit her and threatens to make the affair known to her family and the neighbors. Her first explanation does not persuade him, and his refusal leaves her exposed in the street while he remains inside.

She changes tactics. Madam Ghita warns that she will throw herself into a nearby well, so that people will believe a drunken Tofano has killed her and punish him for murder. When he remains unmoved, she picks up a large stone and drops it into the water. The splash convinces him that she has carried out the threat. He rushes out with a bucket and rope to rescue her; meanwhile, she slips into the house and locks him out in turn.

From the window, Madam Ghita now recasts the scene for the neighbors. Rather than admit that she has been returning from her lover’s house, she presents Tofano as a habitual drunk who comes home late or falls asleep in taverns. She describes his accusation as an attempt to frighten and shame her, while he, unable to recognize that the staged splash has fooled him, tells the neighbors what he believes happened. His account gives them reason to think he is drunk and irrational; her composed counterstory directs their suspicion toward him. They blame and scold Tofano, and the story of the quarrel spreads from neighbor to neighbor until Madam Ghita’s relatives hear of it.

Consequences and Narrative Significance

Madam Ghita’s relatives arrive, hear the neighbors’ account, and beat Tofano so severely that they break his bones. They take her away with them and threaten him with worse. The punishment follows the public reversal she engineered: Tofano had tried to make her private conduct a matter of communal shame, but the neighbors instead accept her portrayal of him as the disorderly husband. Her success rests not on proving the affair false to the reader, but on controlling the version of events that the people outside the house can judge.

The separation does not last. Tofano still loves his wife, recognizes that his jealousy has brought him into a miserable situation, and arranges through friends to make peace with her. He promises not to be jealous again and gives her leave to do as she pleases, provided she acts discreetly enough that he does not learn of it. Their reconciliation therefore preserves, rather than resolves, the story’s central contradiction: he withdraws his surveillance in exchange for continued concealment, and she returns with a greater practical freedom but no public vindication of the affair.

The tale is introduced by Lauretta as an example of Love’s ability to furnish sudden stratagems. Its plot gives that ingenuity concrete form in Madam Ghita’s sequence of observations, performances, and reversals: she reads Tofano’s drinking, deceives his test, and turns a stone’s splash into a false emergency. In the surrounding storytelling, Fiammetta then uses the jealous-husband tale that follows to argue that jealousy unjustly confines wives and denies them rest and diversion. Madam Ghita’s episode thus places female resourcefulness inside a household conflict shaped by suspicion, reputation, and the risk of public exposure.