Witty Replies and Artful Speech

Witty Replies and Artful Speech are more than ornaments of conversation in the Decameron: a well-judged sentence can recover dignity, redirect an awkward encounter, or make a powerful listener recognize a fault. The Sixth Day gives this capacity a place at the center of its storytelling. Its examples range from a courteous hint about a badly told tale to a public retort that silences a bishop, making timing and social judgment as important as verbal ingenuity.

A theme built around timing

At the close of the preceding day, Dioneo’s story draws less laughter than usual, which the narrator attributes to the ladies’ modesty rather than a lack of delight. The queen then passes her crown to Elisa. Taking up her new authority, Elisa sets the next day’s subject: people who, when assailed by a jibe, defend themselves with a ready reply or use a quick-witted expedient to escape loss, danger, or shame. The theme thus covers both speech that answers an attack and speech that changes the practical terms of an encounter.

The introduction to the first story develops the standard that makes such speech effective. Pampinea compares well-placed sallies to ornaments of nature and argues that their brevity suits women particularly well in a society that restricts their speech. She also laments that few women can deliver a witty word at the right moment or recognize one when it is addressed to them. The stories that follow test that judgment in action: the reply must fit its hearer and setting, not merely display cleverness. Lauretta makes the qualification explicit, distinguishing a sheep’s measured bite from a dog’s insulting one and urging attention to whom a jest addresses, as well as when and where it is exchanged.

Courtesy as a way to stop a story

Madam Oretta, wife of Messer Geri Spina, is traveling in the country with a company of ladies and gentlemen after entertaining them to dinner. One gentleman offers to carry her along the road with one of the finest stories in the world. She accepts, but his delivery repeatedly stumbles: he repeats words, corrects himself, confuses names, and tells the incidents badly. The story may be good in itself, yet his manner of telling it makes the journey intolerable to his listener.

Rather than openly insult her companion, Madam Oretta turns his own offer into a gentle correction. She likens the story to a horse whose trot is too rough and asks to be set down. The image communicates both the problem and the remedy: she wants the recital to stop, not a quarrel to begin. The gentleman understands the hint, takes the jest well, and changes the subject. Her reply is effective because it makes an uncomfortable truth intelligible without turning correction into an outright affront.

Cisti’s measure of a request

The story Pampinea tells next concerns Cisti the baker, whose lofty spirit contrasts with the trade that Fortune has assigned him. This contrast prepares the episode’s central reversal: a man of humble occupation proves more perceptive about proper conduct than the socially eminent people around him. During the stay of ambassadors in Florence, Messer Geri Spina visits Cisti repeatedly and drinks his excellent wine from small pitchers. When Geri later sends a servant to fetch wine for a magnificent banquet, the servant arrives with an oversized flagon.

Cisti tells him that Messer Geri did not send him there. The servant insists that he did, but Cisti’s reply—that Geri sent him to the Arno—prompts Geri to inspect the vessel. He recognizes that the flagon is unsuitable for the fine wine and sends back a proper flask. Cisti then fills it cheerfully. He also sends Geri a little cask of wine, explaining that his refusal was not fear of the large container but a reminder that the wine he had served in small pitchers was not ordinary household wine. His brief correction protects the value of his gift without withholding his generosity. Geri thanks him, esteems him, and thereafter treats him as a friend.

The retaliatory edge of a public retort

Lauretta’s example concerns Nonna de' Pulci, a young, well-spoken woman newly married in Porta San Piero. On Saint John’s Day, Bishop Antonio d'Orso points out Nonna to the marshal Dego della Ratta and asks whether she could win him over. The question puts Nonna’s honor at stake before the many people present. Her answer makes clear that the marshal would not win her without paying well, turning the insinuation back on the men responsible for it.

The retort carries a specific sting because Dego had previously arranged to sleep with the bishop’s niece, whose miserly husband accepted what he believed to be five hundred gold florins. Dego had gilded silver poplins to make them pass for that sum; the woman had not consented, and the husband was left with both loss and public scorn. The bishop had affected ignorance of the affair. Nonna’s answer therefore touches Dego as the perpetrator of the fraud and Antonio as the relative whose family had been dishonored. Both men leave ashamed and silent. Lauretta does not present every counterattack as equally proper: her account allows the bitten person to bite back, while insisting that the force of a reply depends on the circumstances that provoked it.

A reply that changes the audience’s understanding

Guido Cavalcanti’s encounter with Messer Betto Brunelleschi’s company shows how a compact answer can escape a physical and social encirclement at once. The men find Guido among the marble tombs near San Giovanni and tease him about his philosophical inquiries, asking what he will have accomplished if he discovers that God does not exist. Hemmed in by their horses, Guido answers that they may speak to him in their own house, then vaults over a tomb and gets away.

The company first takes his words literally and thinks the reply amounts to nothing: the men are still in the city, where they have no special privilege over other citizens. Betto recognizes the allusion. The tombs are houses of the dead, and Guido has called them the company’s house, implicitly contrasting the men he regards as foolish and unlearned with himself and other learned people. The joke changes the meaning of the setting and the balance of the encounter: Guido escapes, and his pursuers belatedly understand that the insult has been directed back at them. Across these episodes, artful speech works through exact fit—an image suited to a bad performance, a vessel that makes an immoderate request visible, or a place-name that turns mockery into a rebuke. Its power lies not in length but in the listener’s eventual recognition of what the words have done.