A company of Italian merchants who are assembled in a tavern at Paris, are represented as conversing on the subject of their wives: all of them express themselves with levity, or skepticism, or scorn, on the virtue of women, except a young Genoese merchant named Bernabo, who maintains, that by the especial favor of Heaven he possesses a wife no less chaste than beautiful. Heated by the wine, and excited by the arguments and the coarse raillery of another young merchant, Ambrogiolo, Bernabo proceeds to enumerate the various perfections and accomplishments of his Zinevra. He praises her loveliness, her submission, and her discretion--her skill in embroidery, her graceful service, in which the best trained page of the court could not exceed her; and he adds, as rarer accomplishments, that she could mount a horse, fly a hawk, write and read, and cast up accounts, as well as any merchant of them all. His enthusiasm only excites the laughter and mockery of his companions, particularly of Ambrogiolo, who, by the most artful mixture of contradiction and argument, rouses the anger of Bernabo, and he at length exclaims, that he would willingly stake his life, his head, on the virtue of his wife. This leads to the wager which forms so important an incident in the drama. Ambrogiolo bets one thousand florins of gold against five thousand, that Zinevra, like the rest of her sex, is accessible to temptation--that in less than three months he will undermine her virtue, and bring her husband the most undeniable proofs of her falsehood. He sets off for Genoa, in order to accomplish his purpose; but on his arrival, all that he learns, and all that he beholds with his own eyes, of the discreet and noble character of the lady, make him despair of success by fair means; he therefore has recourse to the basest treachery. By bribing an old woman in the service of Zinevra, he is conveyed to her sleeping apartment, concealed in a trunk, from which he issues in the dead of the night; he takes note of the furniture of the chamber, makes himself master of her purse, her morning robe, or cymar, and her girdle, and of a certain mark on her person. He repeats these observations for two nights, and, furnished with these evidences of Zinevra's guilt, he returns to Paris, and lays them before the wretched husband. Bernabo rejects every proof of his wife's infidelity except that which finally convinces Posthumus. When Ambrogiolo mentions the "mole, cinque-spotted," he stands like one who has received a poniard in his heart; without further dispute he pays down the forfeit, and filled with rage and despair both at the loss of his money and the falsehood of his wife, he returns towards Genoa; he retires to his country house, and sends a messenger to the city with letters to Zinevra, desiring that she would come and meet him, but with secret orders to the man to despatch her by the way. The servant prepares to execute his master's command,