Salvestra

Salvestra is the tailor’s daughter at the center of Neifile’s tragic Fourth Day story of a love that family strategy cannot extinguish. As a child she and Girolamo become close; as adults they love each other with equal intensity. His mother and guardians separate them in the hope that distance will make him forget, but he returns from Paris to find Salvestra married. Their final meeting exposes the cost of that intervention: she tries to honor her marriage and preserve her household’s peace, yet the reunion ends with both former lovers dead and buried in the same tomb.

Identity and Early Attachment

Salvestra grows up in the same neighborhood as Girolamo, the son of the wealthy merchant Lionardo Sighieri. The two are of the same age, and as children he becomes more familiar with her than with any of the other children nearby. The story presents their intimacy as something that develops through shared time: with age, their familiarity becomes a love so ardent that Girolamo is at ease only when he can see her. Salvestra loves him no less.

Their social positions are unequal. Girolamo is an only son with substantial wealth and guardians responsible for his affairs; Salvestra is the daughter of a tailor. His mother fears that he may marry her secretly, or pine away if she marries someone else, and wants him to wed a woman of higher birth. Salvestra’s place in the story is therefore shaped not only by private attachment but by a family’s attempt to direct a wealthy heir toward a socially advantageous match.

Separation and Marriage

When Girolamo’s mother and guardians decide that he must leave, their plan is to remove Salvestra from his sight until she passes out of his mind. The guardians first ask him to go to Paris on business and for the advantages of travel. He refuses, saying he can fare as well at home. His mother then rebukes him for his love and persuades him with softer words to agree to a year away.

The promised year becomes two. Girolamo returns more deeply in love than before, but Salvestra is now married to an honest young man who makes tents. The story does not say that she married under pressure or explain how the match came about; it establishes the marriage as the changed circumstance he encounters on his return. Girolamo watches for her and hopes she remembers him as he remembers her. To him, she appears not to remember him at all, or to conceal that she does. His efforts to bring himself back to her mind fail, and his disappointment turns into a resolve to speak to her face to face, even at the risk of death.

The Secret Visit and Salvestra’s Choice

Girolamo enters Salvestra’s home secretly one evening while she and her husband are away visiting neighbors. He hides behind tent cloths until the couple return and her husband falls asleep. Then he approaches Salvestra in bed and speaks to her quietly. She is awake and initially would cry out, but he identifies himself and asks her to listen.

Salvestra tells him to leave. Their childhood love belongs to a time when such affection was permitted; she is now married and says she must have regard for her husband alone. Her refusal is also practical and protective. She explains that if her husband discovers Girolamo, she may lose the peaceful life she presently has with a man who loves her. Girolamo recalls their past and insists that his love has not diminished during his absence, but his appeals and promises do not change her answer.

At last he asks only to lie beside her and warm himself, promising not to touch or speak to her and to leave once he is warm. Salvestra feels some compassion and agrees on those conditions. He lies beside her without touching her. For him, the closeness makes the distance between past love and present refusal unbearable: he gathers his memories, her apparent cruelty, and his lost hope into a final resolve, and dies beside her without a word or movement.

Discovery, Grief, and Ending

Salvestra first thinks Girolamo has fallen asleep. When he does not answer, she reaches out to wake him and finds him cold. She understands that he is dead and is overwhelmed, unsure what to do. Instead of immediately revealing what has happened, she tests her husband’s response by describing the death as though it had occurred to someone else. He says the dead man should be quietly taken home and that the woman involved should not be blamed, since she appears to have done no wrong. Salvestra then reveals the body. Her husband carries Girolamo back to his own house and leaves him at the door.

In the morning, Girolamo is found dead outside his home. The physicians find no wound or bruise, and the people conclude that grief killed him. When the body is taken to a church, Salvestra’s husband asks her to cover her head, join the women there, and listen for any accusation; he will listen among the men. Salvestra goes, now wishing to see dead the man she had not allowed to give her even one kiss while alive. Seeing Girolamo’s face, she is overcome by compassion and grief. She presses through the women, throws herself face down upon his body, and dies when she touches him.

The women identify her, and the news reaches her husband, who weeps and explains what happened during the night. The cause of both deaths becomes known. Salvestra and Girolamo are laid on the same bier, mourned together, and buried in one tomb. The conclusion gives physical form to the story’s bitter reversal: the separation imposed during their lives ends only in a union that neither can experience.

Narrative Role and Significance

Neifile introduces the tale as a warning about those who presume that love can be removed by counsel and control. Salvestra is not the object of Girolamo’s family’s plan in quite the same way he is, but its consequences determine the circumstances in which she must act: by the time he returns, she has a husband and a settled domestic peace that she is unwilling to endanger. Her refusal is neither a denial that their love existed nor a simple return to it. She recognizes the past, but insists that her present obligations matter.

The story’s final movement makes that restraint tragic without turning Salvestra into the cause of Girolamo’s death. He dies after choosing despair; she dies only when, at the church, the sight of his body awakens grief she had held back. The husband’s lack of vengeance and his willingness to return the body quietly also distinguish the private tragedy from the social suspicions that might have followed. In the shared tomb, the lovers are finally joined, but only after family ambition, time, marriage, and their own irreconcilable choices have made a living union impossible.