Mazzeo the Doctor
Intro
- Storyteller: Dioneo
- Dioneo's pretty sick of all the doom and gloom. He's glad the storytelling game is almost over for the day.
- In fact, he refuses to participate any longer in the misery and plans to tell a story that should set an example for the next day's theme.
Story
- Once again, we have an old man, Mazzeo Della Montagna, who marries a young, beautiful woman.
- He's a respected doctor and showers his wife with worldly goods.
- But there's one problem: she feels neglected in bed.
- Just like Messer Ricciardo, husband of Bartolomea (II.10), Mazzeo also makes his wife observe holy days.
- So the young wife goes out and finds someone else who can do the job. His name is Ruggieri d'Aieroli.
- Ruggieri is a rogue. Well, actually, he's a criminal. But the lady likes him anyway.
- So with the help of her maid, they hook up. The lady quickly sees that Ruggieri really is a thug and has to change his ways. She bribes him with money.
- Meanwhile, the doctor's taken a man with a gangrenous leg into surgery. He sends off a prescription for a special drug that will keep him asleep during his procedure.
- He puts this drug in his house.
- The doc then has to make a house call to another town because of mass casualties from a fight.
- His wife takes advantage of his absence and invites Ruggieri over for some fun.
- As he waits in the house for all the servants to go to bed, Ruggieri spies the drug and decides it would be good to drink.
- When the wife finally appears, Ruggieri is passed out. She tries to wake him, but he looks like a corpse.
- Now she has a problem: what to do with the body?
- Her maid has a solution, as maids often do: stuff him inside a trunk standing outside the neighbor carpenter's house.
- Also, they should stab him two or three times just to make it look good. He was a rogue, after all.
- The lady says yes to the trunk, no to the stabbing. So they drag him down and stuff him in.
- Dioneo has to backtrack to make the story work. Earlier in the week, two miserly young men had moved in down the street.
- And like most young men, they were a bit short on home furnishings. This was pre-IKEA.
- They had seen the trunk sitting by the road, so they planned on stealing it for their living room.
- Ruggieri's already hidden inside the trunk by the time the young men get around to taking it. They deposit the trunk outside their wives' bedroom and leave it there.
- The potion wears off and Ruggieri wakes up. He has no idea where he is and winds up tipping the trunk over with a spectacular crash.
- The women freak out and scream that there are burglars in the house.
- In short, Ruggieri's taken by the young men to the magistrate and tortured into a confession.
- Now he's set to hang.
- When the lady hears the news that her lover isn't actually dead, she can't understand it. (She obviously hadn't gotten around to finishing "Romeo and Juliet" yet.)
- Then her husband returns and asks about his drug. Ahhh—now the lady understands what happened.
- When the true owner of the trunk was heard fighting with the carpenter about how he'd sold it to the two young men, the lady and her maid figure out how Ruggieri made his journey.
- Now the lady has to keep Ruggieri from hanging. She coaxes her maid into pretending that Ruggieri was in the house the night before to make love to her (the maid).
- After speaking with Ruggieri and allowing the judge in the case to make "a little snack of her," the maid manages to get the truth out, save Ruggieri and see to it that the young men are fined.
- Dioneo says that the love between Ruggieri and the lady became stronger than ever, just as he would like to have happen to him, minus the trunk-stuffing.