Mrs Rosie and the Priest Read online

  His trusty subjects all replied that they were happy with this and that, no matter who she was, they would treat her as their lady and would honour her as such in every way. Then they all set about organizing a suitably grand and joyous celebration. And Gualtieri did his part too, arranging for a sumptuous and splendid marriage-feast, to which he invited a multitude of friends, relations, great nobles and other people from the surrounding area. In addition he had beautiful, expensive dresses made to fit a young woman who, he judged, had the same measurements as the girl he had decided to marry. Not only that, but he ordered belts, rings and a lovely, costly tiara, plus everything else a new bride should have.

  Soon after sunrise on the day appointed for the wedding, Gualtieri mounted his horse, and all those who had come to honour him did the same. Everything needed was now in order, and he called out, ‘Gentlemen, it is time to go for the new bride.’

  After which he set off along the road to the village with the whole company. When they reached the girl’s father’s cottage, they found her hurrying back from the spring with some other women in the hope of catching sight of Gualtieri’s bride. When he saw her, he called out to her by her name – that is, Griselda – and asked her where her father was.

  ‘My lord,’ she replied bashfully, ‘he is in the house.’

  Gualtieri dismounted and, telling everyone to wait, entered the poor cottage. Inside he found the father, a man called Giannucolo, to whom he said, ‘I have come to make your Griselda my wife, but first I want to learn something from her own lips in your presence.’

  What he asked her was whether, when he took her as his wife, she would do everything she could to please him, would not be upset by anything he might say or do, and would be obedient, together with many other questions of this sort. She replied yes to everything. Then Gualtieri took her by the hand and led her outside, where, in the presence of his whole company and everyone else, he had her stripped naked. He ordered the clothing he had had made to be brought and immediately had her dressed, and shoes put on her, and a tiara placed on her hair, unkempt though it was. Everyone was amazed.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘this is the person I intend should be my wife, if she wishes to have me for her husband.’

  Then he turned to her, standing there bashful and awkward, and said, ‘Griselda, do you want me for your husband?’

  ‘Yes, my lord,’ she replied.

  ‘And I want you for my wife,’ he said.

  With that, before everyone present, he formally married her. Then he had her set on a charger, with attendants to do her honour, and took her home. The marriage-feast was grand and fine, and the festivities no different from what they would have been if he had married the daughter of the king of France.

  The young wife’s character and behaviour seemed to change with her change of clothing. As I said earlier, she had a lovely face and figure. And now to her natural good looks she added enough charm, attraction and refinement to make you think she could not possibly have been Giannucolo’s daughter and a shepherd-girl, but the daughter of some noble lord. Everyone who had known her before was astounded. What is more, she was so ready to obey and serve her husband that he considered himself the most contented and satisfied man in the world. She was similarly so gracious and kindly towards her husband’s subjects that every one of them loved her wholeheartedly and spontaneously honoured her in every way, asking God in their prayers to give her health, prosperity and greater glory still. If they used to say that Gualtieri had acted ill-advisedly in taking such a wife, now they said he was a paragon of wisdom and insight, arguing that no one else could have perceived the exceptional virtues concealed beneath the poverty of her peasant dress. All in all, before much time had passed, she had people speaking of her good qualities and virtuous deeds throughout the marquisate and beyond, and completely turning round any negative comments about her husband that had been made when he married her.

  She had not been with Gualtieri very long when she became pregnant, and in due course she gave birth to a little girl, much to Gualtieri’s delight. But a little later a strange idea came into his head. He felt a need to test her patience by inflicting unbearable torments on her over a prolonged period of time. First of all he made cutting remarks, and gave an impression of being angry with her. He said that his men were badly put out by her low-class origins, all the more now that she was having children. The girl-child was a particular source of resentment, and they wouldn’t stop muttering about her.

  When his lady heard this, she kept her composure and gave no sign of being thrown off the virtuous course she had set herself.

  ‘My lord,’ she said, ‘treat me in the way that most accords with your honour and your happiness. I shall be content with anything. I am aware I’m less than they are and that I didn’t deserve the honour you have had the generosity to bestow on me.’

  Her response was warmly received by Gualtieri, who recognized that any honour that he or anyone else had paid her had not made her feel in the slightest bit superior.

  A little while later, after giving his wife the general impression that his subjects couldn’t stand the little girl she had borne him, he had a word with one of the household staff and sent him to her. The man addressed her with a distressed air.

  ‘My lady,’ he said, ‘I am obliged to do something my lord commands me to do, if I do not wish to die. He has ordered me to take this daughter of yours and …’

  He stopped there. Hearing his words and seeing his face, the lady recalled what her husband had been saying and deduced that he had orders to kill the child. She quickly took her from her cradle, kissed her and blessed her. For all the immense pain in her heart, she again kept her composure and put the child in the man’s arms.

  ‘Take her,’ she said, ‘and carry out to the letter what your lord and mine has ordered you to do. Only do not leave her for animals and birds to devour, unless he told you to.’

  The servant took the child away and passed on what his wife had said to Gualtieri, who was astounded by her constancy. He then sent the servant off with the child to a female relative of his in Bologna, with a request to bring her up and educate her with the utmost care, but not to let anyone know whose daughter she was.

  The next thing to happen was that the lady became pregnant again. In due course she gave birth to a male child, which pleased Gualtieri immensely. But what he had done already was not enough for him. His criticisms became sharper and sharper, and one day, his face contorted with rage, he said this to her:

  ‘My lady, ever since you had this boy child, I haven’t been able to live with these men of mine. They are bitterly against some grandson of Giannucolo ending up their lord after me. If I don’t want to be hounded out of here, I’m afraid I’m going to have to do what I did the other time, and then in the end I’m going to have to leave you and take another wife.’

  The lady heard him out without flinching.

  ‘My lord,’ was all she replied, ‘think only of contenting yourself and following your own inclinations, and don’t worry at all about me. Nothing matters to me except whatever I see pleases you.’

  A few days later Gualtieri sent someone for his son, much as he had done as regards his daughter. After a similar show of having him murdered, he dispatched him to Bologna to be brought up there, like the little girl. What the lady said and showed in her face was no different from before, which stunned Gualtieri. He declared to himself that there wasn’t a woman anywhere capable of behaving like that. If he hadn’t seen her visceral attachment to the children as long as she had his approval, he would have thought she was glad to see the back of them, but he knew that there was sense and wisdom in her.

  His subjects, believing he had had his children killed, strongly condemned him for his cruelty and felt nothing but compassion for the lady. When other ladies sympathized with her for having lost her children in this way, she said only that what pleased her was precisely what pleased the man who had fathered them.

 
Some years after the little girl’s birth, Gualtieri decided it was time to put her capacity for endurance to the ultimate test. He told many of his men that he just could not bear Griselda being his wife any more, and that it was clear to him that marrying her had been a bad juvenile error; he was now going to do all he could to obtain special dispensation from the Pope to take another wife and leave Griselda. Quite a few of his better men took him to task, but he only replied that that was how things had to be. When his lady heard the news, she found herself having to face the idea of going back to her father’s house, and perhaps tending the sheep as she had done in the past, with the added prospect of some other lady taking possession of the man to whom she had given all the love she had. She was devastated. But she had borne all the other wrongs that fortune had done her, and she set herself to bear this one with similar fortitude.

  A little later Gualtieri arranged for some counterfeit letters to be sent from Rome and gave his subjects to believe that in these the Pope had given him dispensation to marry again and leave Griselda. He had her summoned and addressed her before a crowd of onlookers.

  ‘My lady,’ he said, ‘thanks to a special concession granted me by the Pope, I can take another wife and let you go. Since my ancestors were from the high nobility and the lords of these lands, whereas yours have always been labourers, I intend that you should no longer be my wife and should go back to Giannucolo’s house with the dowry you brought me. After that I shall marry someone I’ve found who will be appropriate for my station.’

  Hearing this, the lady had to make an immense effort, one beyond women’s natural capacities, in order to keep back her tears.

  ‘My lord,’ she replied, ‘I always knew my lowly origins in no way accorded with your own nobility. I was glad to attribute to God and to yourself the position I have enjoyed with you. I have never thought it something I had been given, or treated it as anything more than a loan. Your wish is to recover it. I must make it my wish to let you have it, and I am happy to do so. Here is the ring with which you married me. Take it. You order me to carry away with me the dowry I brought you. That’s not something for which you’ll need a banker, or for which I’ll need a bag or a packhorse. It does not escape me that you took me in naked. If you consider it decent for that body in which I carried the children you fathered to be seen by all and sundry, I shall go away naked. But I beg you that you let me have some payment for the virginity that I brought here and do not take away again by allowing me, over and above my dowry, to have a single shift to wear.’

  Gualtieri wanted to weep more than anything else. But his face stayed as hard as ever.

  ‘So you go off with a shift then,’ he said.

  Everyone round him begged him to make her the gift of a robe, and not let the woman who had been his wife for thirteen years or more be seen leaving his house penniless and utterly humiliated, which was what leaving in just a shift would mean. But their requests came to nothing. So it was in a shift, barefoot and bareheaded, that the lady commended them to God’s care, and walked out of her husband’s house and back to her father’s, amid the weeping and wailing of all who saw her.

  Giannucolo had never been able to believe that Gualtieri really wanted his daughter as his wife, expecting every day something like this to happen, and had kept the clothes she was wearing on the morning Gualtieri married her. He brought them out and she put them on. Then she gave herself over to the menial tasks around her father’s house that she used to do in the past, valiantly bearing the savage assault that hostile fortune had inflicted on her.

  Gualtieri’s next step was to pretend to his subjects that he had got himself a daughter of one of the Counts of Panago. In the course of the grandiose preparations for the marriage ceremony, he sent for Griselda to come and see him.

  ‘I’m bringing here as my bride,’ he said to her when she arrived, ‘this lady I’ve very recently promised to marry. My intention is to receive her with due honour when she comes here for the first time. You’re aware that I don’t have ladies in the house who can spruce up the rooms and do all the things required for a festive occasion of this sort. Since you know better than anyone else how this house works, sort out what needs to be done, and also invite a welcome party of ladies you think suitable, and receive them as if you were the lady in charge. Then once the marriage-feast is over, you can go back to your own house.’

  His words were so many knives in Griselda’s heart. She had never been able to abandon the love she felt for him in the way she had let go of her good fortune.

  ‘My lord, I am willing and ready,’ she said.

  And so, in a makeshift dress of thick, rough cloth, she went back into the house she had left in just her shift not long before, and began sweeping the chambers and tidying them up, fixing hangings and drapes in the halls, and getting the kitchen ready, doing every single thing with her own hands as if she were nothing but a mere servant-girl. Nor did she stop till she had everything as neat and orderly as the occasion required.

  Once she had had invitations sent out on Gualtieri’s behalf to all the ladies in the area, the only thing left for her to do was to await the coming festivities. When the day of the wedding-feast arrived, in spite of the poor clothes she had on, she gave every one of the ladies who came a joyful and dignified welcome.

  Gualtieri had taken care the children should be properly brought up in Bologna by his female relative, who had married into the house of the Counts of Panago. The girl was now twelve and the prettiest creature ever, and the boy was six. Gualtieri had written to the relative’s husband, asking him to be so good as to bring his daughter and son to Saluzzo, accompanied by an appropriate guard of honour, and to tell everyone that he was bringing the girl to be Gualtieri’s wife, with no hint to anyone of who she really was.

  This gentleman did as the Marquis asked and set off with the girl, her brother and the guard of honour. After some days, around the time of the morning meal, they arrived in Saluzzo, where they found all the local people and many others from round about waiting for this new bride of Gualtieri. The girl was greeted by the ladies and entered the hall where the tables were laid out. Griselda, dressed just as she was, went towards her happily enough, saying, ‘My lady is welcome.’

  The other ladies, who had repeatedly but fruitlessly begged Gualtieri either to let Griselda stay in one of the chambers or to lend her one of the robes that were once hers, so that she would not appear before the visitors looking as she did, were now assigned their places at the tables and began to be served. The girl was the object of everybody’s attention and the general view was that Gualtieri had made a good exchange. One of those who was most lavish with her praises, both of the girl and of her little brother, was Griselda.

  Gualtieri thought he had now had all the proof he could want of the patience of his lady. He could tell that it was not at all affected by events, no matter how bizarre they were, and, given the wisdom he knew was in her, he was sure that dullness of mind was not a factor. He decided it was time to release her from the tortures he judged she must be suffering beneath her calm and steady exterior. He had her come forward and, before everyone who was there, gave her a smile and asked:

  ‘What do you think of our bride?’

  ‘My lord,’ replied Griselda, ‘I can only think very well of her. If her good sense is equal to her beauty, as I believe it must be, I have no doubt that living with her will make you the most most contented lord in the world. But I beg you with all my heart not to inflict on her the sort of wounds you inflicted on the other one, the one who was your wife before. I can’t really believe that she could stand it. She’s younger, and what’s more she’s been brought up in luxury, whereas the other had spent her childhood doing hard physical work.’

  Gualtieri could see that she firmly believed that the girl was going to be his wife and yet still said nothing he could disapprove of. He sat her down at his side and then spoke.

  ‘Griselda,’ he said, ‘it is now time for you to taste th
e fruit of your steadfast patience and for those who judged me cruel, unjust and inhuman to acknowledge that what I did had a deliberate purpose. I wanted to teach you to be a wife, to teach my critics how to take a wife and to keep one, and to bring about for myself unbroken peace and quiet for as long as my life with you might last. This was something I was very afraid wouldn’t happen when I first took a wife. It was to test if it were possible that I inflicted on you the wounds and torments you are all too aware of.

  ‘Since I have never perceived you going against my wishes in anything you have said or done, I judge that I do indeed have from you the contentment I desired. I therefore intend to restore to you in one single moment what I took from you over the years, and to apply the sweetest possible medicine to the wounds I inflicted. So now, with joy in your heart, receive this girl you think is my bride, and her brother too. These are our children that you and many others have long thought I had brutally murdered. And I myself am your husband, who loves you more than anything else. I think I can rightly and honestly boast that no other man alive can be as happy with his wife as I am.’

  After this speech he put his arms round her and kissed her. He then raised her to her feet and led her, weeping for joy, over to where their daughter was sitting, astounded by what she was hearing. They tenderly embraced the two children, and then told the girl and many other people there the truth of the situation. The ladies were delighted to get up from the tables and go with Griselda into one of the chambers. Expressing hopes of a better outcome this time, they helped her out of her rough clothing and dressed her in one of her noble robes. Then they led her back into the hall a courtly lady, which even in her rags she had retained the air of being. There followed a moment of marvellous celebration with the children, and everyone showed their joy at the way things had turned out. Then they plunged into fun and merrymaking, which went on for days.