Madam Isabella’s two-lover escape

Madam Isabella’s two-lover escape turns a household crisis into a performance of rescue: with her husband suddenly home, Isabella directs Messer Lambertuccio to leave armed and furious, making the lover she cannot hide appear to be a stranger fleeing violence. The escape succeeds because she reads the house, its occupants, and the likely assumptions of her husband as parts of one urgent deception.

Setting and Prior Entanglements

In Florence, Madam Isabella is a young, fair, engaging woman married to a gentleman described as worthy and notable. She has fallen in love with Leonetto, a well-bred and agreeable young man of lower social extraction than herself; their mutual affection has already become a sexual relationship. Her husband is not said to satisfy her entirely, but the story presents Leonetto as the lover she willingly desires.

Messer Lambertuccio’s place in the household is different. He has become enamoured of Isabella, but she finds him disagreeable and tiresome and does not return his feelings. After his messages fail to win her, he threatens to dishonour her because of his standing and character. Isabella submits to his demand out of fear. The episode therefore brings two unequal relationships into the same house: the mutual affair with Leonetto and the encounter with Lambertuccio, imposed by threat.

The immediate setting gives Isabella a brief opportunity to be with Leonetto. In summer, she has gone to stay at an estate in the country; her husband has ridden away to spend several days elsewhere. Hearing of his absence, she sends for Leonetto, who comes at once, pleased by the invitation. Their private meeting is interrupted when Lambertuccio, having learned that the husband is away, rides alone to the house.

The Crisis in the House

The waiting-woman sees Lambertuccio and warns Isabella while she is closeted with Leonetto. Isabella is distressed, but acts quickly: she asks Leonetto not to take offence and to hide behind the curtains of her bed until their visitor has gone. Leonetto fears Lambertuccio as much as she does, and complies. Isabella then has the maid admit the visitor.

She receives Lambertuccio with as cheerful a manner as she can manage. He embraces and kisses her, explaining that he has come because he understood her husband was away. They go into a bedchamber and lock themselves in. The arrangement is not presented as a renewed romance freely chosen by Isabella: the story has already established that she yielded to Lambertuccio under threat. The scene instead tightens the danger around her, as Leonetto remains concealed in the same house and Lambertuccio’s horse is tied in the courtyard.

Then the husband returns unexpectedly. The maid spots him near the house and warns Isabella that he may already be in the courtyard. Isabella understands that she cannot hide both men: Leonetto is behind the curtains, while Lambertuccio’s palfrey is visible outside and would make his presence impossible to conceal. Faced with discovery, she does not try to explain the two men separately. She gives Lambertuccio a role to perform.

An Armed Exit and a Borrowed Story

Isabella tells Lambertuccio to draw his hanger, go downstairs looking angry and disordered, and leave with a threat that he will find his quarry elsewhere. She instructs him to say nothing different if her husband questions him, and not to linger. Lambertuccio agrees. With weapon drawn and face flushed by exertion and anger at the husband’s return, he descends the stairs and rides away, repeating the threat Isabella has supplied.

The husband, already dismounted in the courtyard, has noticed the palfrey. He sees Lambertuccio leave in a fury and asks what has happened. Isabella is waiting at the head of the stairs, disordered and fearful, a manner consistent with the danger her account will describe. She says that an unknown young man had fled into the open chamber asking for help, pursued by Lambertuccio with a drawn hanger. She claims to have stood between them and prevented Lambertuccio from entering. In this version of events, she is not hiding a lover; she has protected a stranger from being killed in her home.

Her husband accepts the account and praises her intervention. He regards it as a matter of household honour that a man should not have been slain under his roof, and considers Lambertuccio unmannerly for pursuing someone who had sought refuge there. His response completes Isabella’s reversal: the lover who has just left her bedchamber becomes, in her husband’s understanding, the aggressor from whom she has defended a victim.

Leonetto’s Escape and the Unexposed Deception

When the husband asks where the young man is, Isabella says that she does not know where he has hidden himself. He then calls for the stranger to come out safely. Leonetto emerges from his hiding place, trembling from fright. He supports the fiction, saying that he knows nothing of Lambertuccio and that the latter attacked him on the road near the house. He claims to have run there without knowing why he was being pursued and to have escaped through Isabella’s help.

The husband believes him too. After supper, he mounts Leonetto on a horse and accompanies him back to Florence, leaving him safely at home. This escort is the practical consequence of Isabella’s invention: her husband does not merely overlook Leonetto’s presence but helps him leave without suspicion. That evening, Leonetto privately speaks with Lambertuccio as Isabella had instructed him. Although people continue to talk about the incident, the husband never learns that his wife has deceived him.

Narrative Design and Significance

Told by Fiammetta as the seventh story of the Seventh Day, the episode makes quick speech and physical staging work together. The palfrey in the courtyard is an obstacle Isabella cannot remove; she instead uses it to make Lambertuccio’s departure seem credible. His drawn hanger, his angry appearance, and his repeated threat supply visible evidence for the false account. Leonetto’s hiding place, initially a temporary concealment, becomes the point from which he can emerge as the supposed victim. Each detail changes meaning according to the story Isabella gives it.

The escape also depends on the difference between Isabella’s private knowledge and her husband’s interpretation. He sees a wife who has intervened to protect a stranger and a young man who has narrowly escaped an attacker. Their account leaves out both the affair with Leonetto and the coercion that brought Lambertuccio into the bedroom. The story’s resolution is therefore not a confession or reconciliation, but the successful preservation of secrecy: the husband’s trust helps the deception hold, while the lovers’ later private contact prevents the staged encounter from exposing what actually happened.