The Poisoned Sagebrush Incident of Simona and Pasquino turns a clandestine meeting into a double death and a belated exoneration. In Emilia’s tale, the lovers’ innocence is first obscured by suspicion, then made visible by the very gesture that proves fatal: rubbing sage against the teeth. The garden’s hidden cause—an enormous toad beneath the bush—makes the lovers’ fate an accident, not a crime, and gives the story’s final discovery the force of both explanation and judgment.

Framing and the City Under Threat

Emilia introduces the tale after Pamfilo has finished his story of Andrevuola. She draws a parallel between two women who lose their beloveds in a garden and are taken into custody, but distinguishes their outcomes: Andrevuola is freed through fortitude and constancy, whereas Simona is released from the court by an unforeseen death. Emilia also returns the company’s attention to Florence in Tedaldo’s story, after the day’s storytelling has ranged across other places. The episode is thus framed as both a return to the company’s own city and a variation on the garden tragedy just told.

That city has already been described under the 1348 Florence Black Death. The narrative’s account of the epidemic gives particular weight to sudden bodily change: swellings appear at the groin or beneath the armpits, dark or livid blotches spread, and the afflicted commonly die within days. It also describes infection passing through contact with the sick and even through objects they have touched. This context does not identify the lovers’ deaths as plague deaths; their cause is disclosed separately. But the story unfolds in a narrative world where signs on the body provoke fear, where causes can be hard to discern, and where an apparently inexplicable death readily invites accusation.

The Lovers and the Garden

Simona is a poor young woman who earns her bread by spinning wool. Pasquino, a young man of similar standing, supplies wool on behalf of his master, a wool merchant. Their attachment begins through his pleasing words and manner, and grows while he attends to her work more diligently than to the spinning of anyone else. At first Simona desires him but dares not go further; as their mutual affection becomes bolder, each begins to invite the other, and the relationship becomes a shared pursuit rather than a one-sided solicitation.

Pasquino proposes a more private meeting in a garden, and Simona agrees. On a Sunday after dinner, she tells her father she is going to San Gallo for a religious pardon and travels with her friend Lagina to the appointed place. Pasquino is waiting with his companion Puccino, commonly called Stramba. The two pairs quickly form their own amorous company and separate within the garden: Pasquino and Simona withdraw to one part, while Stramba and Lagina remain elsewhere.

The lovers sit at the foot of a large, handsome sage bush. They spend a long while together and discuss a collation they mean to share there. Then Pasquino plucks a sage leaf and rubs it against his teeth and gums, believing the herb will clean away what remains after eating. The ordinary, domestic gesture abruptly changes the scene. Before long he loses his color, then his sight and speech, and dies. Simona’s private happiness gives way to grief and cries for help; when Stramba and Lagina arrive, Pasquino’s body is already swollen and dark-spotted.

Accusation and Simona’s Death

Stramba immediately accuses Simona of having poisoned Pasquino. The people who hear the commotion and come from nearby accept his account. Simona, overcome by the sudden loss, cannot explain herself effectively and is carried, still weeping, to the Provost’s palace. Stramba and two other companions of Pasquino, Atticciato and Malagevole, press the accusation. The judge questions her but cannot establish either malice or guilt, so he goes to inspect the body and the place where Pasquino died.

At the garden, Simona recounts what happened and repeats Pasquino’s action to make the circumstances clear: she rubs a leaf of the same sage against her teeth. Stramba, Atticciato, and the others dismiss her account as frivolous and renew their denunciations, demanding that she be burned. Before their accusation can be resolved by testimony, Simona suffers the same sudden collapse as Pasquino and dies. Her death does not function as a confession: the narrative presents it as the consequence of repeating the gesture that killed him. The supposed proof against her instead becomes the occasion on which her innocence is made unmistakable to those present.

The Cause, Burial, and Ending

The judge and the bystanders are astonished. The judge concludes that the sage must have become poisonous, orders it cut down to its roots, and has it burned so that it cannot harm anyone else. Only when the great bush is levelled does the hidden cause appear: beneath it lies a toad of extraordinary size. The witnesses infer that its pestilential breath had made the sage venomous. No one dares approach the animal; they enclose it behind a hedge of brushwood and burn it together with the sage. The inquest ends not with evidence of a human plot but with the removal of the plant and creature responsible for the fatal chain of events.

Stramba, Atticciato, Guccio Imbratta, and Malagevole bury Pasquino and Simona together in the church of St. Paul, whose parishioners they are. The burial closes the plot by restoring the lovers to one another in death, even as the narrator cannot claim to know whether they are together beyond it. Emilia’s account makes the garden both the place of their secret intimacy and the scene where an unseen natural danger turns an innocent habit into a fatal one. The explanation arrives, but only after the lovers themselves can no longer benefit from it.