Ruggieri’s Chest Misadventure

Ruggieri’s Chest Misadventure is a comic sequence of mistaken appearances: a sleeping man is taken for a corpse, a stolen chest becomes the means of transporting him, and an innocent lover wakes to find himself accused of theft. Told by Dioneo, the episode makes chance do the work of a plotter, carrying Ruggieri da Jeroli from a secret meeting to a moneylenders’ house and then to a courtroom, where the truth must be reconstructed from an empty flagon, a stolen chest, and several witnesses.

The draught and the apparent death

Ruggieri’s trouble begins when he drinks a physician’s prepared medicine, left in a window, believing it to be drinking water. The draught brings on a deep sleep. His lover, the physician’s wife, comes to the chamber and tries to wake him, first with a nudge and then by shaking him more sharply. When he falls from the chest on which he had been lying and gives no sign of life, she grows frightened. She pinches him, pulls his beard, and even burns his flesh with a lighted taper, but he remains insensible. She concludes that he is dead.

The wife’s distress is sharpened by secrecy: she loves Ruggieri, but dares not cry out or summon help. Fearing that discovery would add public shame to her loss, she calls her maid and asks how to remove the body without making it appear that he came from the house. The maid proposes using a chest she has seen outside a neighboring carpenter’s shop. Her plan includes cutting Ruggieri with a knife so that whoever finds him will suppose he was killed elsewhere. The wife refuses to let him be wounded, but agrees to the chest. While she watches for anyone approaching, the maid helps carry him outside and place him inside it.

The stolen chest and the arrest

Neither woman knows that two young moneylenders, newly settled nearby and short of household gear, have already noticed the chest and planned to take it if it remained outside overnight. At midnight they find it still there and carry it to their house, despite its unusual weight. They set it beside the chamber where their wives are sleeping and go to bed without investigating what it contains. The lovers’ attempt to conceal Ruggieri has thus placed him in a house whose occupants have no idea who he is.

Toward morning, the sleeping draught wears off. Ruggieri wakes dizzy and confused, and discovers that he is enclosed in a chest. He remembers going to his mistress’s chamber, but cannot account for the change of place. He guesses that the physician may have returned and that his lover hid him while he slept, so he waits quietly. Eventually, cramped and uncomfortable, he tries to turn over. The chest is not standing level; his movement makes it tip and fall with a loud crash. The fall opens it. Ruggieri climbs out and gropes around the unfamiliar house, trying to find a stair or door through which he can escape.

The women in the house hear him and call out. When he does not answer, they summon the moneylenders, who are sleeping too soundly to hear them. The women then raise the alarm from the windows, crying that there are thieves. Neighbors enter from different directions, and the awakened moneylenders seize Ruggieri. City officers take him before the governor. Known as a disreputable young man, Ruggieri is put to questioning and admits that he entered the moneylenders’ house to steal. On that account, the governor is ready to have him hanged. The outward evidence is compelling, even though Ruggieri himself does not understand how he came to be there.

How the chain of events is uncovered

News of the arrest spreads through Salerno. Ruggieri’s lover and the maid hear that he has been caught and may be hanged the next day. Their astonishment at the report is so great that they nearly believe the night’s events were only a dream. The wife is especially distressed by the danger to her lover. The physician’s return supplies another clue: when he asks for the prepared water and finds the flagon empty, he angrily protests that nothing in his house can be left alone.

The maid goes out to learn what is being said about Ruggieri and hears a dispute between the carpenter and the owner of the chest. The owner says that the moneylenders told him they had bought it; the carpenter insists that he never sold it and that it was stolen from him the previous night. This establishes how the chest reached the house where Ruggieri was found, though it does not yet explain how he came to be treated as dead or how he woke inside it.

To help secure Ruggieri’s release without exposing her mistress, the maid follows the wife’s instructions and tells the physician that she herself had become Ruggieri’s lover. She says that, while the physician was away, she brought him into the house, gave him the water from the flagon because he was thirsty, and returned it to the physician’s chamber. She admits the deception and asks permission to go and help him. The physician is angry, but allows her to leave, teasing her that the lover she expected had proved a sleepy one and warning her not to bring him into the house again. The explanation accounts for the empty flagon while shielding the physician’s wife.

Exoneration and the comic aftermath

The wife then lays out the full sequence to the prefect: Ruggieri had drunk the physician’s sleeping draught, she had believed him dead, and she had put him in the chest. She also reports what the maid learned from the carpenter and the chest’s owner. The prefect tests the account rather than relying on it alone. He questions the physician about the flagon, summons the carpenter, the chest’s owner, and the two moneylenders, and hears how the chest was stolen. He then asks Ruggieri where he spent the night. Ruggieri can recall going to the physician’s maid’s chamber and drinking water there, but remembers nothing of what followed until he woke in the moneylenders’ house.

After making the witnesses repeat their accounts, the prefect concludes that Ruggieri is innocent and releases him. The moneylenders, whose theft brought about the arrest, are fined ten ounces for stealing the chest. The reversal is exact: Ruggieri had seemed to confess to entering a house to rob it, yet the stolen object that carried him there becomes the evidence that clears him.

The danger passes, and the wife, Ruggieri, and the maid later laugh over the misadventure, including the maid’s proposal to slash him. The lovers continue their affair. Dioneo closes on a bawdy wish that such good fortune might befall him too, with the exception of being put in the chest. Within the gathering, his tale makes the company laugh after earlier stories had saddened the women, turning a near execution into comic relief through a sequence in which every attempt at concealment produces a new and more public misunderstanding.