Sixth Day of the Decameron

The Sixth Day of the Decameron is governed by Elisa and gives narrative form to the power of a well-timed reply. Its stories concern people who, when assailed by a jibe or placed at risk, defend themselves or escape loss, danger, or shame through a ready answer or a shrewd piece of advice. The day links that practical use of language to a question of judgment: wit succeeds not merely by being clever, but by fitting its occasion and its hearer.

Place in the storytelling cycle

The Sixth Day follows the close of the Fifth. After the company has spent part of the night listening to songs, Elisa’s companions retire in anticipation of the next day. At dawn they rise and stroll over dewy grass, talking about the stories already told and laughing again over their adventures. They return to the palace before the heat grows strong, eat at tables strewn with fragrant herbs and flowers, and pass the intervening hours in song, sleep, chess, and backgammon. Dioneo sings with Lauretta before the company is summoned back to its customary place around the fountain.

The day’s formal beginning is briefly interrupted by a great clamour from the kitchen, heard by the queen and the assembled company just as Elisa is about to call for the first tale. The interruption places the day within the group’s established routine while allowing the frame to register an unforeseen disturbance. Once the storytelling proceeds, Elisa’s governance supplies its organizing principle: a succession of episodes in which words answer pressure with speed and precision.

The day’s measure of wit

The Sixth Day’s theme includes both the ability to produce a sharp reply and the judgment to know what kind of sharpness a situation permits. In introducing a story about a prelate who is answered in kind, Lauretta distinguishes a retort that bites like a sheep from one that bites like a dog. The first stings without becoming an affront; the second may be justified when it answers an earlier injury. Her formulation makes the day’s verbal contests more than displays of cleverness: their force depends on who speaks, who is present, and what provocation has already occurred.

The framing speeches also make wit a subject of discussion within the tales themselves. Before telling of Madam Oretta, a lady whose companion’s disordered storytelling prompts her to ask to be set down, the speaker reflects on lively speech and the particular value of a concise, well-timed sally. Later, Lauretta recalls Pampinea’s and Filomena’s comments on pithy sayings, then turns from general praise to the conditions under which a retaliatory answer is warranted. The stories thus recur to the same question from different angles: not simply whether a person can answer, but whether the answer meets the moment.

Retorts that reverse an insult

In Lauretta’s account of Nonna de' Pulci, a public jest threatens a young woman’s honour. On St. John’s Day, Bishop Antonio d'Orso rides beside Dego della Ratta, marshal for King Robert, and points out Nonna, who has only recently married. He asks whether she thinks she could win the marshal. The remark is made in the hearing of a crowd and puts Nonna in the position of having to answer an insinuation about herself in public.

The story gives that answer its force by recalling the marshal’s conduct toward another woman in the bishop’s family. Dego had agreed with her miserly husband to pay five hundred gold florins for a night with his wife, then passed off gilded silver coins as the sum. The woman had not consented, and the husband’s bargain brought him both financial loss and public scorn. When Nonna replies that she would require good money even if the marshal could not win her, her retort turns the joke back on both men: it recalls the counterfeit payment and the earlier woman’s treatment. The bishop and Dego feel the sting, leave shamefaced and silent, and do not speak to her again that day. The answer protects Nonna’s standing by exposing the compromised standing of those who presumed to test it.

Cleverness interpreted and recognized

The episode of Guido Cavalcanti gives the day a different kind of verbal victory: a reply whose meaning is initially missed even by its targets. Messer Betto Brunelleschi and his companions ride up to Guido among the marble tombs near San Giovanni and tease him for refusing their company. They mock the philosophical speculation they associate with his interest in whether God exists, then ask what he will have accomplished if he finds that God is not. Hemmed in by the riders, Guido answers that they may say what they like in their own house, springs over a tomb, and escapes.

The company first takes his words for nonsense. Messer Betto, however, recognizes the rebuke: the tombs are houses of the dead, and Guido has compared his pursuers with the dead by learning. Once Betto explains the implication, the others understand and are abashed. The scene makes interpretation part of the contest. Guido’s agility gets him physically clear of the group, while the compact, indirect answer acquires its full force only when Betto supplies its meaning to those who failed to catch it at first.

Together, these episodes show the Sixth Day treating speech as an action with immediate social consequences. A remark can threaten a person’s honour; a reply can redirect the shame toward its source. A brief line can also conceal an argument that listeners must work to understand. Elisa’s day gathers such reversals into a sustained inquiry into timing, audience, and judgment: wit is most effective when it answers the actual danger, and when its meaning can turn a moment of exposure into one of escape.