It was, therefore, thinking of how pleased his mother would be that the young man replied to his employer with a touched and grateful ‘Thank you’ when the latter, one evening at the end of the month, threw a banknote down on his desk and informed him: ‘From today, you’re on the payroll. You’ll get ten crowns a month.’ These were his first wages: how would the dear, hitherto unrewarded creature react when he put the money in her hand and said: ‘Take this, Mother, it’s for you!’ with the implication: Though all this is nothing compared to what I’ll be able to give you one day. Those ten crowns dispelled the doubts that, in his several months of apprenticeship, he had begun to have about his commercial vocation; they also dispelled that touch of remorse that he could not help but feel when, being out on an errand, he met a former classmate on the street and tried – alas, in vain! – to convince him of the immense good that had befallen him in leaving school for work, and the other either replied rudely or kept silent, as if to say: We’ll see about that in a few years, you poor drudge! His day over, he ran home, walked upstairs with the beating heart of a man in love taking a first gift to his beloved and, stammering and kissing his mother, gave her the great news. Signora Rachele seemed touched (less so, though, than Odone had hoped) and even forgave him for having made her angry at lunchtime by refusing to eat his soup, the memory of which had made the thought of the satisfaction he would give her when he came home all the dearer to him. She suggested that Odone put aside half the amount for himself, for whatever he pleased, although not without advising him to spend it as well as he had earned it and warning him of certain dangers about which young men are more typically taught by their fathers than their mothers; but to her, who never uttered certain words or never indicated them with a periphrasis without first spitting on the ground (such was the disgust she felt towards them), fell the burden of having to speak of such things to her son; and she did her best, even in such a sad task; so that she might, when it so pleased the Lord, sleep in peace and without any regrets on her conscience.

Her advice was unnecessary: Odone did not yet turn to look at women, and never passed down certain alleyways crowded in the evenings with sailors and raucous-voiced women without hurrying on; and besides, he had already decided how to spend his five crowns: he would use them to buy his mother a gift: only, he was torn between a round tobacco tin with silver decorations and a black fan with sequins. But as long as man proposes and God disposes, nobody has the right to believe himself safe from temptation, however strong he feels in broad terms. For Odone, the temptation did not come in the form of a human female, but came instead in that of a beautiful hen; and I will now recount how and why he was unable to resist this temptation, and how cruelly he was subsequently punished.