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The king of Lovely Land is spurned by Cinziella, daughter of the king of Long Furrow. After he avenges himself fiercely, reducing her to a miserable condition , he takes her for his wife. If Ciommetella hadn’t made the wizard appear quickly to throw water on the fire, everyone’s spirits would have been squeezed so tightly by pity for Liviella that it would have been hard for them to breathe. But they were all comforted by the poor girl’s comfort, and once their souls were put to rest they waited for Iacova to enter the field with the livery of her tale. And she raced with this lance toward the target of their desire:1 “Those who pull too hard on something break it, and those who look for trouble find trouble and misfortune; if you go to the top of a mountain and fall off, it’s your own fault, as you will hear from the story of a woman who, as a result of her distaste for crowns and scepters, came to be in need of a stable. Even so, the concussions sent by the heavens always come with a poultice, since there has never been a punishment without a caress, nor a club without a piece of bread.2 “It is said that there once was a king, the king of Long Furrow, who had a daughter named Cinziella. She was as beautiful as a moon, but she hadn’t a dram of beauty that wasn’t counterbalanced by a pound of pride,3 so that she gave heed to no one, and it was impossible for her poor father, who wanted to 10 Pride Punished Tenth Entertainment of the Fourth Day 371 AT 900: King Thrushbeard. This tale is quite similar to Grimm 52 (“King Thrushbeard”); see also Straparola 1.4 (“Tebaldo and Doralice”) and 9.1 (“Galafro, King of Spain”), and Gonzenbach 18. 1. A contest similar to that of the ring. See tale 2.10 n19. The target mentioned here (vastaso) is that of the quintana, “a joust of medieval origin in which the competitors, armed with lances, galloped on horseback towards a revolving silhouette dressed like a Saracen and tried to hit its shield without getting knocked off their horses by the club attached to the other hand of the figure” (Guarini and Burani 498). 2. Allusion to the proverb, “Clubs and bread make children nice; bread without clubs make them crazy” (Croce 440). 3. Two measures of weight in use at the time in various European countries. The dram was the eighth part of an ounce, the pound slightly over 300 grams (Rak 852). get her settled, to find a husband, no matter how good or great he might be, that could satisfy her. “Among the many princes that had come to ask for her hand in marriage was the king of Lovely Land, who left nothing undone in his attempts to earn Cinziella’s affection. But the more he weighed the scales of his servitude in her favor, the more she measured out crooked rewards; the more he offered her his love at a good price, the more there was a shortage of desire at her end; the more generous of soul he was, the more stingy of heart was she. And not a day went by without the poor man exclaiming, ‘When, O cruel lady, after so many melons of hope that I’ve found to be white as squash, will I be able to taste a red one? When, O cruel bitch, will the tempests of your cruelty calm? When will I have a favorable wind and be able to direct the rudder of my plans into this lovely port? When, after I have besieged you with entreaties and pleas, will I will be able to plant the banner of my amorous desires atop the walls of this lovely fortress?’ “But all of his words were thrown to the wind; although she had eyes that could bore holes in rocks, she did not have ears to hear the laments of he who lay wounded and moaning. On the contrary: she gave him dirty looks, as if he had cut her grapevine. This went on until the poor lord, well aware of the brutality of Cinziella, who paid as much attention to him as the demon does to crooks, retreated with all his revenues and an angry face, saying, ‘I quit the fire of Love!’ But...

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