Wanderers’ Company

The Wanderers’ Company is a secret society Bruno invents to ensnare Master Simone: its lavish meetings and supernatural promises turn the physician’s vanity and appetite for admission into the machinery of a practical joke. The story gives the supposed fellowship a convincing structure, but its details reach the reader as Bruno’s boast, not as an independently verified account of a real organization.

Claimed Foundation and Organization

Bruno presents the Company as the creation of two accomplished disciples left behind by the necromancer Michael Scott when he departed Florence. The disciples, he claims, chose friends without regard to rank or wealth, caring only whether a man suited their customs. They assembled a company of perhaps twenty-five members, among them Bruno and Buffalmacco, and met at least twice a month at a place appointed for the gathering. At each meeting, every member could state a desire, which the two supposed magicians would fulfill that very night.

The Company’s imagined abundance is central to its appeal. Bruno describes rooms dressed with hangings, tables laid out like those of royalty, plentiful attendants, gold and silver vessels, seasonal dishes, music, dancing, sweets, and costly wines. Its members, he claims, arrive in ordinary clothes but appear at the gatherings in such fine garments that even the least among them would seem an emperor. The extravagant inventory gives the secret society the appearance of a world where status, appetite, and luxury can all be satisfied on demand.

Bruno makes sexual access another promised privilege: beautiful women, he says, can be summoned from anywhere in the world, and each goes to the bedchamber of the member who requested her. He boasts that he and Buffalmacco regularly choose the queens of England and France, respectively, and that the women cherish them exclusively. This fantasy is bound to the Company’s name for its own activity, “going a-roving”: Bruno compares its members to raiders who take other people’s goods, adding that, unlike ordinary robbers, they return what they have taken after using it. The mock distinction supplies the story with a thinly respectable cover for a promise built on appetite and theft.

Recruitment, Initiation, and Exposure

The Company’s elaborate constitution becomes a trap when Master Simone, a physician born and bred in Bologna, hears Bruno’s account and longs to join. He believes the painter as if the tale were manifest truth, grows eager for admission, and strengthens his intimacy with Bruno, inviting him to eat morning and evening. Bruno encourages the physician’s confidence with invented details about officers and procedure: the Company has a captain and two counselors, whose terms change every six months; at the next change, Buffalmacco will be captain and Bruno a counselor. Since the captain can procure a candidate’s admission, Bruno tells Master Simone to cultivate Buffalmacco and impress him with his learning. The supposed hierarchy gives the fraud a bureaucratic plausibility, while Bruno makes the physician’s own vanity seem like the means by which he can secure entry.

Once Master Simone has been told that he is accepted, Buffalmacco supplies the initiation. He must wait at the season of first sleep on one of the raised tombs recently made outside Santa Maria Novella, dressed in his finest gown. A black, horned beast will appear, first capering and whistling to frighten him, then approaching quietly. The physician is instructed to mount it, cross his hands on his breast, and touch neither it nor invoke God or the saints; any fear or prayer, Buffalmacco warns, could bring disaster and endanger the others. The instructions turn a staged nocturnal ordeal into a test of courage and secrecy, making Master Simone responsible in advance for whatever humiliation follows.

The initiation ends not in the Company’s promised marvels but in Master Simone’s distress and the painters’ fabricated rebuke. When he returns, Buffalmacco accuses him of calling on God and the saints despite the warning, and says their messenger reported that he shook like a reed and did not know where he was. Bruno and Buffalmacco open their clothes to display breasts painted over, presenting the marks as proof that the physician’s failure has injured them and put their membership at risk. Master Simone begs them not to expose his shame. Thereafter he entertains and honors them still more, hoping to keep the story secret; the invented fellowship has become a means of extracting hospitality from the man who hoped to enter it.

Narrative Function and Credibility

The Company’s apparent rules are never confirmed outside Bruno’s performance. Its founders, membership, supernatural services, sumptuous feasts, and rotating officers all reach Master Simone through a man exploiting his credulity; the more particular the account becomes, the more effectively it disguises invention as institutional knowledge. Even the promise of magical transport is designed to make the physician’s fear look like a failure of courage rather than evidence that he has been deceived. The tale thus presents the Company less as a functioning society than as a fiction whose elaborate organization makes the prank possible.

That fiction also turns secrecy into leverage. Bruno first uses the Company’s supposed pleasures to make Master Simone desire admission, then uses the doctor’s fear of exclusion and public shame to secure his continued hospitality. The membership ritual delivers no banquet or enchanted gathering: its actual result is a physician more anxious to please the painters and less willing to expose them. In the closing judgment, the episode makes the practical joke a lesson in sense for someone presumed to have learned little of it at Bologna. The Company’s grand promises collapse into this reversal: the would-be initiate is not admitted to a world of limitless favors but kept serving the two men who invented it.

Maintaining the Fiction Between Meetings

Bruno keeps the Company alive in Master Simone’s imagination even before the promised initiation. He casually reports that he has attended a gathering the previous night and, tired of the Queen of England, had summoned the Dolladoxy of the Grand Cham of Tartary instead. When Master Simone asks what the unfamiliar name means, Bruno presents it as a foreign title for an empress, turning the physician’s ignorance into another occasion to perform insider knowledge. The boast works: Master Simone continues to seek the painters’ company and waits for a chance to request admission. The Company is therefore sustained not only by its invented constitution and initiation rite, but by little installments of supposed experience, each renewing the physician’s belief and desire.