The Burton version of this story is, in his own words, summarized as “Nardiello is sent three times by his father to buy some wares with an hundred ducats each time. The first time he buyeth a mouse, the next a large crab-louse, and then a cricket, and being expelled by his father for this, he reacheth a city where by means of his purchases he cureth the king’s daughter, and after various adventures becometh her husband. “
There’s a farmer called Miccone, with a son called Nardiello, and the son is a spendthrift and and foolish. When Nardiello goes to the tavern he picks the worst people to quarrel with. When he hires sex workers, he picks the worst and pays for the best. When he gambles he’s plucked by professionals, and this is wasting all of the father’s money. How can he set him straight, he wonders? Hard work, he decides. He says to his son “Take this sack of cash to Salerno and buy us some calves. In a few years when they are oxen, we’ll sow a wheat field and become corn merchants.”
“Leave it to me” says the son, and walks off with the sack of gold. On the way to town he sees a fairy on an ancient flat, rock by the river. The faerie is playing with a giant crab louse, which is changed to “cockroach” in many editions, because public lice are hilarious only in particular cultural contexts. The crab louse is playing a tiny guitar in the Spanish manner. I presume this is really a different instrument, because guitars are from the 15th century. Let’s say it’s a citole? Nardiello asks how much for the clever beast, and the fairy says “A hundred ducats would be just the thing”. The man replies “Ah, this is perfect, I have exactly that much money in this bag.” and hands it over. The fairy puts the louse in little box, and Nardiello runs home, certain his father will be thrilled with his purchase.
His father is not thrilled. Nardiello lays the box on the table and so praises its contents that his father expects it to have a rough diamond inside. When it’s a public louse, his father is so angry he won’t let him speak any further. He demands Nardiello gets the money back, and gives him a hundred more ducats to buy three calves. On a side note, calves are really expensive in this story, at thirty-three gold ducats a head.
Naridello heads for Sarno, and on the way meets the same faerie at the same rock. She is watching a mouse that is dancing. He watches the turns and jumps and twist, mouth agape, for a long while and then offers the faerie a hundred ducats for the mouse. The faerie gives him a free box for the mouse, and sends him home. Miccione is not impressed, but can’t do much because there’s a guest at table who will gossip if he loses his temper. He gives Nardiello another hundred ducats and says “Any more of your games and I’ll slap you so hard your mother will feel it.”
On the third journey, the faerie is listening to a cricket, which sings like in nightingale. Nardiello buys it, and takes it home in a cage made of a vegetable marrow and some twigs. His father picks up a stump of wood and whacks Nardiello about the shoulder like, according to Burton, a Rodomonte. This is a character from the Orlando cycle: he’s the Saracen king who besieges Paris. He’s a villain, but mostly for racist reasons. Nardiello grabs his three animals and books it to Lombardy.
In Lombardy is a lord, Cenzone, with a single daughter, Milia. She suffered a childhood sickness, and as a lasting effect, has not smiled for seven years. So, she’s neurodiverse, and we can’t be having that in fairy stories, time to hand her off as a prize to some worthless nearby guy who has luck on his side. Anyone who can make her laugh gets her as wife, says her dad, in what is an odd choice given that the whole Pentamerone uses the same frame narrative. Why no-one stops the storyteller at this point and says “The prince -right here- poured oil in the street to make a woman laugh.” I don’t know. Cezone oddly ups the stakes, he says that if Nardiello tries and fails “the mould of his hood shall pay for it”. I’m not sure what that means, but it’s clearly a threat. Do you want her to smile or not, Cezone? Get your motivation together.
The lad pulls out his boxes of animals, and the princess laughs heartily at them. Her father, who seems determined to be displeased by life, goes from being sad because she’s sad to being sad because he now needs to marry her off to the dregs of humanity because of the ban which, the narrator does not mention again, he himself wrote. You could have made it a cash prize, Cezone. To up the stakes he says “OK, so, you can marry my daughter, if you agree that, should you not consummate the marriage within three days, I can feed you to lions.” At this point Nardiello says he’s not afraid and agrees. He does not ask the many pertinent questions this bring up, like “How do you have lions in Lombardy?” “Why do you have lions in Lombardy?” and “Does your daughter know you are feeding the men who want to marry her to lions in Lombardy?” He does literally say “..for in that time I am man enough to consummate the marriage of thy daughter and of all thine house ” which is an incest joke about having sex with the guy he’s talking to. Hilarious in medieval Italy? You decide.
There is a marriage feast, and the king gives Nardiello opium, so that when the bridal pair retire, he just falls straight asleep. The king manages this for two further nights, because in addition to lions, he has poppies for days. “Let’s throw him to the lions”, says the king, in what is clearly still murder. Nardiello has his pets with him, and so he opens the boxes saying “I’m about to die and I have nothing to leave you, so you should go free, my beautiful animals.” The animals, in the best Broadway tradition, solve their problems by putting on a show. The lions decide this is the oddest way to avoid being eaten they’ve ever seen, that there’s no way the king is going to let them starve, and that its lionesses that hunt anyway, and so they settle in to watch. Then the mouse speaks.
It speaks in a flowery, indirect way, given that it’s meant to be doing ballet so fascinating that it saves a man from hungry lions. The gist is that the animals are magical, and will save Nardiello, because it’s clear he loves them. They then talk about submitting joyfully to slavery, because Italian nobles liked that sort of thing. The mouse then bores a tunnel upward in the wall, the size of a man, so Nardiello can walk out of the den. It even cuts stairs in the tunnel, because if its worth doing, you might as well go creative mode Minecraft.
The tunnel comes out in a hayloft, and the animals ask him what he wants. He says that what he wants, more than anything in the world, is that if the king gives Milia a new husband, he won’t be able to consummate the marriage. Thus the abused becomes an abuser, but at the start of the story you were warned he’s a lucky idiot, not a hero. The animals say that’s easy, and they’ll do it, asking Nardiello to stay in the hayloft while his cunning plan comes to fruition.
At court, the king has married his daughter to a visiting English lord. That’s two husbands in a week. No wonder Milia never smiles – it makes her Dad murder people. The new pair go to bed, but the man has overindulged at the feast and falls asleep. There’s no actual mention of opium. The crab louse, hearing his snores, sneaks into the bed and opens the man’s anus, so that he has a watery discharge of dysentery into the bed and onto his bride.
The English lord is near ready to die of shame. He gets up, washes himself, and sends for a cluster of doctors. The doctors agrees that his symptoms are a result of overindulgence at the feast. The next night, the crab louse tries the same trick but is stymied. The lord has cunningly, on the advice of many valets, equipped himself “repairs of bindings, a bank of ribbons, and a trench of rags.”
He crab louse goes back to his fellows and says he can’t break into the man’s body, so the mouse says “We need to see if a good sapper can overcome these fortifications” and goes to gnaw the cloths. Given that it has just constructed a tunnel with its teeth, the cloths provide little resistance. The crab louse then gives the man some sort of laxative enema, and he stinks up the palace. The princess, sensibly, leaves for one of her maid’s tooms. In the verbose repetition so normal in these stories we learn the sheets were white and from Holland, but come to look like a Venetian tabby.
The man, in what strikes me as a sign of great maudlin wit for someone who is blamelessly being raped by animals, says that the greatness of his his house is being undone by the looseness of his foundation. His valets say to blame the food poisoning that caused the problem the previous night, because that’s his host’s fault, but to not let it happen again, as that would make it seem as if he’s constitutionally incontinent, and would embarrass him. THey then scheme on his behalf and come up with a cunning plan.
The lord changes room, and changes bed, and “not all the poppies in the world will cause him to sleep”. He’s too nerved up, and he doesn’t want the relaxation of sleep to get to him. It’s not absolutely clear if he’s taken the “Hump or Death” bet (Thanks Mel Brooks!}. One of his valets is a maker of bombards, and so he convinces the man to let him make a wooden stopper, like those used for mortars, and the man puts it in place. Then he really can’t sleep, because it’s uncomfortable, he doesn’t want to dislodge it, and there’s the chance he’ll be eaten by lions.
The crablouse speechifies a lengthy version of “Alas comrades, as he won’t sleep I have no time for my work. We are undone.” The cricket then steps up and says “Leave this to me.” and sings a sweet lullaby, so that the man nods off. The crab louse begins its duties as a syringe, but finds the way barred. The mouse heads to the pantry, anoints the tip of its tail in mustard, and then wipes it on the upper lip of the Englishman. He sneezes so strongly that the stopped comes flying out with great force.
As he is one of those chaps who sleeps on his side with his back facing his wife, she is struck in the solar plexus with such force it almost kills her. She screams. The king comes in and asks what’s going on, and she says she’s been shot with a petard. A petard is a small bomb. It’s a box filled with powder used in breaching doors, or a firework of much the same design. The king says that’s impossible, so she pulls down the sheets and shows him the wooden implement, her injury and the…ahem…powder which propelled it. The king is disgusted and throws the Englishman out. I’m not sure exactly what he’s done wrong in this scenario or why an English lord has been specifically chosen as the butt of the joke.
He then started beating his breast and repenting killing Nardiello, as clearly he has been cursed for his cruelty. In what, to him, must have seemed an unlikely turn of events, a gigantic, speaking, public louse then tells him that Nardiello is still alive and worthy to be his son in law. The king says that this beautiful naimal has saved him from a sea of trouble and a pricking in his heart, and so the cricket goes to find his master and return him to court. The naimals then give Naridello a spell to make him a handsome youth, and the pair marry. Happily ever after. THe moral is “More happens in an hour than a hundred years”
I promise you stats, remind you these were stories for children, and say that my saga, would vary.
Games From Folktales 