The poisonous sage bush

The poisonous sage bush turns a familiar garden plant into the instrument of two lovers’ sudden deaths and the object of a brief judicial inquiry. Pasquino first uses its leaves as a harmless-seeming aid to clean his teeth; Simona later repeats his gesture while explaining his death and suffers the same fate. The eventual discovery of a great toad beneath the bush supplies the story’s explanation for the poison, while the destruction of both plant and animal closes the case that had threatened to leave Simona accused of murder.

A Familiar Plant in the Garden

The bush grows in the part of the garden where Pasquino and Simona have gone together. They sit at its foot for a long while, talking about a collation they intend to have there at leisure. The plant is initially part of an unremarkable setting for companionship and future pleasure, not a recognized danger. Its position matters: the lovers sit beside it, and the later deaths emerge from a small, ordinary action performed within that shared refuge.

Pasquino plucks a leaf and rubs his teeth and gums with it, saying that sage cleans away what eating may have left behind. He then returns to talking about their planned collation. The gesture is presented as routine and practical, so the bush’s menace is not apparent when he uses it. The sequence brings an everyday object into sudden prominence: the leaf that seems merely useful becomes the point of contact between Pasquino and the fatal danger concealed beneath it.

From Pasquino’s Death to Simona’s Accusation

Pasquino’s condition changes abruptly after he rubs his teeth with the leaf. His face changes, he nearly at once loses sight and speech, and he dies shortly afterward. Simona sees the change, weeps, cries out, and calls Stramba and Lagina for help. When they arrive, Pasquino is dead, swollen, and covered with dark spots on his face and body. His visible condition is alarming, but it does not itself explain what has happened.

Stramba turns that uncertainty into an accusation, crying that Simona has poisoned Pasquino. The accusation spreads as other people hear the noise and gather at the garden. Simona, overcome by the sudden loss of her lover, cannot adequately defend herself; those present accept Stramba’s charge. She is taken, still weeping, to the Provost’s palace. Pasquino’s companions Stramba, Atticciato, and Malagevole press the case, and the judge examines her. Unable to discover evidence that she acted maliciously or was guilty, he goes to inspect the body and the place of death, since her account has not made the manner of the mishap clear to him.

The Repeated Gesture and the Hidden Cause

The judge brings Simona back to where Pasquino’s body lies, swollen as a tun. Asked to explain what happened, she approaches the sage bush and recounts the earlier events. To make her account more intelligible, she rubs one of its leaves against her teeth, reenacting Pasquino’s action. His companions mock her explanation as frivolous and vain, continue to denounce her, and demand that she be burned for the alleged crime.

As Simona performs the same gesture, she suffers the same mischance as Pasquino and drops dead. Her death gives her account a terrible force: the repeated action demonstrates that the sage is dangerous, even as it makes further testimony impossible. The narrative presents her death as an escape from the accusation that Stramba, Atticciato, and Malagevole have sustained. The lovers’ deaths coincide, but the account also sharply contrasts Simona’s innocence with the certainty of those who had called for her punishment.

Destruction and Aftermath

The judge, astonished and at a loss for words, concludes that the sage must be poisonous, although sage is not ordinarily so. To prevent harm to anyone else, he orders the bush cut down to its roots and cast into the fire. The garden keeper carries out the order in the judge’s presence. Only when the large bush has been levelled does the hidden cause appear: beneath it lies a toad of extraordinary size. Those present conclude that the animal’s pestilential breath has made the sage venomous. No one dares approach the creature, so they build a great hedge of brushwood around it and burn it together with the bush.

The same plant that first seemed a benign aid to cleanliness is thus explained by a danger concealed below it. The bush is not left standing as an unresolved threat: cutting it down exposes what its leaves had hidden, and burning both plant and toad turns the discovery into a public remedy. With the destruction of the suspected cause, the judge’s inquest ends. Pasquino and Simona, still swollen, are buried by Stramba, Atticciato, Guccio Imbratta, and Malagevole in the church of St. Paul, whose parishioners they happen to be. The bush’s role therefore extends beyond causing the deaths: its removal explains the deaths, ends the inquiry, and leaves the lovers’ shared fate as the story’s final consequence.