The Gentlewoman and the Confessor
Intro
- Storyteller: Filomena
- Filomena rips into the clergy, saying that all friars are feeble-minded pigs.
- She wants to tell a story to prove that even the clergy are capable of being deceived.
Story
- In Florence, there was a gentlewoman who was married off to a rich merchant.
- She hated him because she felt that she should have been married to a gentleman.
- So she decides to find some other way of satisfying herself. That is to say, with some other man.
- But she's a discreet woman and won't use her maid as a go-between.
- Instead, she hooks up with a fat friar who's a friend of the object of her desire.
- She pretends that this man has threatened her virtue and asks if the friar will please get him to stop his wicked behavior.
- The next time this handsome gentleman visited his friar friend, the clergyman gives him a good talking to about his wickedness.
- At first, the man is amazed. Then he understands the woman's plan. He cruises by her house and serious flirtation starts.
- The gentlewoman wants things to proceed, so she visits the friar again.
- This time, she complains that the gentleman sent her a belt and purse as a gift. Would the friar please take them back and tell him to stop?
- So the friar meets up with the gentleman again, and gives him a good lecture—and the belt and purse.
- The friar doesn't realize it, but the he's now delivering gifts between the lovers.
- Then the gentlewoman's husband goes to Genoa for business and she decides to push her luck further.
- She goes back to the friar and tells him the harrowing story of how his friend must have learned that her husband was away from home, because he appeared at her window and saw her naked.
- The friar is about to pop a vessel at this news. He confronts the gentleman, who receives the information exactly as the gentlewoman intends it.
- The next morning, he's in his lover's arms. They spend their time together making fun of her husband and the friar.
- Soon they arrange a better way to hook up than using the friar.
- Filomena ends the story with a funny little prayer, asking God to give her a similar fate as these two lovers.