Simona Dies Suddenly While Proving Her Innocence with Sage

Simona Dies Suddenly While Proving Her Innocence with Sage turns an attempt to establish innocence into a fatal repetition: after Pasquino dies from rubbing sage against his teeth, Simona imitates him before a judge and suffers the same sudden death. The discovery of a huge toad beneath the bush explains the poison and undoes the accusation against her, but only after both lovers have died. The tale’s decisive irony is that the gesture meant to make the truth visible becomes the means by which Simona follows Pasquino in death.

The garden encounter and Pasquino’s death

Pasquino and Simona have gone together to a part of a garden where a great sage bush grows. They sit at its foot, spending a long while in one another’s company and discussing a meal they mean to share there later. Their conversation is ordinary and companionable; the danger is not something they recognize or seek. When Pasquino turns to the bush, he plucks a leaf and rubs his teeth and gums with it, claiming that sage cleans away what eating leaves behind.

After rubbing his teeth for a while, Pasquino returns to their conversation about the planned meal. He has not continued speaking long before his expression changes. Almost immediately, he loses sight and speech, and soon dies. Simona sees the sudden collapse and calls out in distress for Stramba and Lagina. They hurry to the garden and find Pasquino dead, his body already swollen and marked with dark spots on his face and across his body. The physical signs make the death alarming, but at this point they do not explain it.

Suspicion and the judge’s inquiry

Stramba interprets the swollen body as evidence against Simona and accuses her of poisoning Pasquino. His charge draws the attention of people living nearby, who come running at the noise and find the dead man. As Stramba laments and repeats his accusation, Simona is overcome by grief at the loss of her lover and cannot adequately defend herself. Those present accept Stramba’s account, and she is taken, still weeping, to the Provost’s palace.

At Stramba’s urging, joined by two of Pasquino’s companions, Atticciato and Malagevole, a judge begins examining Simona without delay. He cannot discover evidence that she acted maliciously or is guilty. Because her distressed account does not make the circumstances clear to him, he decides to inspect Pasquino’s body and the place where he died. The inquiry therefore shifts from accusation to physical evidence: rather than relying on the confidence of Pasquino’s companions, the judge returns with Simona to the garden to see what happened for himself.

Pasquino’s body remains there, enormously swollen. Asked to explain the death, Simona goes to the sage bush and recounts the events, including Pasquino’s use of a leaf to clean his teeth. To make the action clear, she rubs one of the leaves against her own teeth. Stramba and Atticciato mock her account as foolish and persist in demanding that she be punished by fire. Simona’s explanation is thus challenged at the very moment she demonstrates it: the people around her treat the reenactment as no answer to their suspicion, even though it reproduces the circumstance that preceded Pasquino’s death.

Simona’s death and the hidden cause

While still before the judge, Simona suffers the same mischance as Pasquino after rubbing the sage against her teeth. She dies suddenly, to the astonishment of those present. Her death cannot be treated as a confession or as proof of guilt: it repeats Pasquino’s symptoms after the same contact with the same bush. The event that should have helped distinguish her from the accused instead makes the parallel between the lovers impossible to ignore.

The judge, astonished and silent for a long while, reasons that the sage itself must be poisonous, although this is not ordinarily a property of sage. To prevent anyone else from being harmed, he orders the bush cut down to its roots and burned. As the keeper of the garden levels it in the judge’s presence, the hidden cause becomes visible: beneath the great bush lies a toad of extraordinary size. Those present conclude that its pestilential breath had made the sage venomous. Since no one dares approach the creature, they build a large barrier of brushwood around it and burn it together with the plant. The investigation ends with a material explanation for both deaths, not with the punishment Stramba had demanded.

Burial and the tale’s final judgment

Stramba, Atticciato, Guccio Imbratta, and Malagevole bury Pasquino and Simona together, both still swollen, in the church of St. Paul, where they happen to be parishioners. The shared burial gives the lovers a final bodily and communal union after their deaths have exposed how little the living understood what had happened in the garden.

The tale’s closing reflection imagines the lovers as fortunate to have ended their passionate love and mortal lives on the same day, and more fortunate still if they have gone to the same place and can love one another there. It also singles out Simona’s fate as a release from the testimony of Stramba, Atticciato, and Malagevole, whom the narrator disparages as wool-carders or men of even lower standing. That judgment does not erase the injustice of the accusation: Simona never lives to be formally vindicated. Instead, the discovery beneath the sage bush supplies the explanation her reenactment could not complete, while the narrative’s final emphasis transforms her matching death into an escape from calumny and a reunion with Pasquino.