Rinieri

Rinieri is a Florentine gentleman and scholar whose learning first sharpens his desire for Elena and later equips him to answer her trick with an elaborate counterplot. Having returned from years of study in Paris with a reputation for nobility and learning, he is drawn into a conflict that turns a night of humiliating cold into the motive for a revenge staged in the heat of July. His story contrasts intellectual distinction with credulity, then asks what a person wronged may do when the chance to retaliate arrives.

Identity and Introduction

Rinieri has studied in Paris, not to sell his knowledge as a trade, but to understand the nature of things and their causes. Back in Florence, he lives as a citizen and is honored for both his noble birth and his learning. The contrast between that purpose and his later conduct is central to his story: the man who returns intent on understanding the world soon devotes his thoughts to pleasing one woman.

At an entertainment, he sees Elena, a young, beautiful widow dressed in black. He becomes convinced that she is more beautiful and agreeable than any woman he has seen, and resolves to spend his efforts winning her love. His desire is immediate and idealizing; he watches her furtively and seeks to learn where she lives. In pursuing her, he sets aside the philosophical studies that had distinguished his years in Paris.

Courtship and the Winter Deception

Elena notices Rinieri looking at her and interprets his attention as another conquest. She enjoys attracting admirers and believes that the number of men she ensnares adds to the value of her beauty. Already in love with another young man, she does not intend to return Rinieri’s affection. Instead, she tells her trusted maid to claim that Elena loves the scholar even more than he loves her, but must protect her reputation among other ladies. Rinieri believes the message. The maid acts as intermediary, and his letters and gifts are accepted, though the answers he receives remain vague.

Elena’s lover grows jealous of Rinieri. To reassure him, she arranges an apparent appointment on the feast of the Nativity, telling Rinieri that he may come to her courtyard by night. She then tells her lover about the plan so he can watch her seeming fidelity for himself. The day has brought heavy snow. Locked in the courtyard, Rinieri waits in mounting cold, trusting that Elena will come as soon as she can.

From a lattice, Elena and her lover watch unseen while the maid tells Rinieri that a brother has arrived and is keeping Elena from him. He accepts the excuse and asks only that Elena come when convenient. The maid returns to bed; Elena and her lover do the same, amused by the scholar’s suffering. Rinieri paces the courtyard to keep warm, with nowhere to sit or shelter from the damp night. He believes that each sound may mean Elena is coming, and the hope makes the deception last until dawn.

Injury and the Turn to Revenge

When the maid finally opens the courtyard door, she pretends to pity Rinieri and says that what could not happen that night may happen another time. He conceals his anger, answers as if Elena were blameless, and leaves without revealing what he intends. At home he falls asleep exhausted, then wakes with his arms and legs nearly crippled by the cold. Physicians treat the contracted sinews with powerful remedies; his recovery takes time, and he suffers greatly before the warm season helps restore him.

He keeps his hatred to himself. Even after his health returns, he pretends to be more enamoured of Elena than before. His restraint is purposeful: he understands that threats would alert the person he hopes to punish. The story marks a sharp change in his desire. The love that had once made him eager to endure any effort for Elena is replaced by a wish for revenge that he pursues more urgently than he had pursued her affection.

The opportunity comes when Elena’s own lover falls for another woman and refuses to see or please her. As Elena grieves, her maid imagines that a scholar might use necromancy to bring the faithless lover back. Elena agrees to ask Rinieri for help and promises to do whatever he wishes in return. Hearing the request, he welcomes the chance to make Elena pay for what she did to him. He tells the maid he can bring the lover back even if he is in the Indies, and arranges to explain the necessary measures to Elena in person at Santa Lucia del Prato.

The Tower Reversal

Rinieri claims that he learned necromancy in Paris but had sworn not to practise it because it displeases God. He presents his willingness to help Elena as an exception made out of love for her. Elena believes him. She proposes using an uninhabited tower on her farm near the bank of the Arno River, in the upper Val d'Arno, as the place for the operation. The tower has a chestnut-wood ladder leading to a room at the top and stands in a solitary spot. Rinieri pretends not to know the place, then prepares an image marked with talismanic characters and a conjuration of his own invention.

He sends instructions for Elena to perform the supposed rite that very night. While she travels to the farm with her maid, Rinieri secretly goes with a servant to a friend’s house near the tower. Hidden with his servant among willows and other trees, he watches Elena come to the river at night. She checks that nobody is near, removes her clothes, hides them under a bush, bathes seven times with the image, and approaches the tower naked, carrying it. The scholar’s scheme converts the very confidence with which she had once toyed with him into exposure and fear.

When Elena begs him to bring her clothes and let her down, Rinieri recalls the snow-filled courtyard and the night she left him to freeze while laughing at his trust. He refuses to accept her appeal to his honor as sufficient reason to end the punishment. He directs her instead to call on the lover with whom she had once chosen to lie warmly while Rinieri paced below. Yet his response is not free of conflict: seeing her weep and plead gives him both pleasure in the revenge and distress because his humanity moves him to pity. That compassion does not overcome his appetite for retribution.

Aftermath and Narrative Role

Elena is eventually brought home with help from a husbandman and his family. Her maid has broken a thigh, and Elena is deeply distressed. Back in Florence, Elena invents an account attributing what happened to diabolical enchantment, concealing the real course of events from her family and others. Physicians treat her severe fever, and the maid’s broken thigh is also healed. Elena thereafter gives up her lover and refrains from both making mock of others and loving.

Rinieri does not publicize his role or claim a further reward. On hearing that the maid has broken her thigh, he considers himself fully avenged and passes on without saying anything more. His ending is therefore marked by silence as much as by victory: the retaliation answers Elena’s earlier deception, but he does not turn it into a public boast. In the story’s framing, his education is a warning against assuming that a scholar is an easy target. More pointedly, his conduct illustrates the tale’s central reversal: the woman who had treated his longing as a game discovers that he has patiently learned how to make her own credulity the instrument of her punishment.