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Thus for some days she tended him as best she could, until he recovered his strength, and knew where he was. Then, in due time, the good woman, who had kept his chest safe, gave it back to him, and bade him try his fortune. Landolfo could not recall the chest, but took it when she brought it to him, thinking that, however slight its value, it must suffice for a few days' charges.
In due time she took him from the stove, comforted him with wine and good cordials, and kept him some days till he knew where he was; she then restored him his chest, and told him he might now provide for his departure.” Of course the little chest that Landolfo had clutched by chance in his agony of drowning eventually turned out to be filled with precious stones, which by a miracle—and miracles were common enough in the days of the Decameron—not only floated of itself but also supported the weight of Master Landolfo.
That their name was still familiar in Italian society in the fourteenth century is evident from the circumstances that Boccaccio puts a story, no doubt founded on fact, into the mouth of the fair Lauretta, which deals with the adventures of one Landolfo Rufolo of Ravello, “who, not content with his great store, but anxious to make it double, was near losing all he had, and his life also.” The novel proceeds to relate how this member of a wealthy and respected family turned corsair, after losing all his capital in a mercantile speculation in Cyprus; how he, in his turn, was robbed of his ill-gotten gains on the high seas by some thievish merchants of Genoa; and how Landolfo, after passing through a variety of more or less improbable adventures, was finally rescued from drowning off the coast of Corfu by a servant-maid who, whilst washing dishes by the sea-shore, chanced to espy the unconscious merchant drifting towards the beach with his arms clasped round a small wooden chest, which kept him afloat. “Moved by compassion,” says the relator of the tale, “she stepped a little way into the sea, which was now calm, and seizing the half-drowned wretch by the hair of his head, drew both him and the chest to land, where with much trouble she unfolded his arms from the chest, which she set upon the head of her daughter who was with her.
"The stones found by Landolfo," began Fiammetta, to whose turn it came to tell, "have brought to my mind a story scarce less full of perilous scapes than that related by Lauretta, but differing therefrom inasmuch as the adventures comprised in the latter befell in the course of belike several years and these of which I have to tell in the space of a single night, as you shall hear.
She herself carried Landolfo like a little child to the town, put him on a stove, and chafed and washed him with warm water, by which means the vital heat began to return, and his strength partially revived.
Landolfo they carried aboard one of the carracks, leaving him but a sorry doublet; then, taking everything out of the ship, they scuttled her.
Accordingly, moved with compassion, she entered somedele into the sea, which was now calm, and seizing Landolfo by the hair, dragged him ashore, chest and all.
And such was the fury of the gale that the ship, aboard which was poor, hapless Landolfo, was driven with prodigious force upon a shoal off the island of Cephalonia, and broke up and went to pieces like so much glass dashed against a wall.
Landolfo, who had no recollection of the chest, yet took it, when the good woman presented it to him, thinking it could not be so little worth but that it might defray his expenses for some days, but, finding it very light, was sore abated of his hopes.
The young man is the son of Landolfo di Procida, own brother to Messer Gian di Procida, by whose means thou art king and lord of this island, and the damsel is the daughter of Marino Bolgaro, to whose influence thou owest it that thine officers have not been driven forth of Ischia.
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