The Ungrateful Man

Dr CA Bartzokas · Down to Earth Series · 10 pages

First published in The Christian Remembrancer, London: James Burns, November 1843, in the series “Didactic Fiction of the Middle Ages,” pages 482–85, and reprinted in The World of Romance: A Treasury of Tales, Legends, and Traditions, London, Paris and Melbourne: Cassell & Co. Ltd., 1892, pages 73–77. It sits with the other pieces of fiction gathered into this section — the Tolstoy tale, the Hawthorne story and the Velveteen Rabbit among them — each included for the moral it carries rather than for itself.

Vitalis, a noble Venetian, falls at a hunting party into a pit dug to catch wild animals, and passes a night and a day in it. The pit is dark; he runs from side to side hoping to find a branch or root by which to climb out, but hears such confused growlings, hissings and plaintive cries that he becomes half dead with terror and crouches motionless in a corner awaiting death. On the second morning he hears someone passing and cries out for help. A peasant crossing the forest hears him, is frightened at first, then takes courage and comes to the edge to ask who called. Vitalis answers that he is a poor huntsman who has passed a long night and day there, begs to be helped out for the love of God, and promises to recompense his rescuer handsomely. The peasant — Massaccio — cuts a branch strong enough to bear a man, explains how he will brace it against the side and hold it while Vitalis climbs, and, when told to ask anything he wants, answers that he asks for nothing, mentioning only that he is about to be married. What the nobleman does with that debt once he is out of the pit is the point of the tale, and the reason it was placed in a section of study notes.

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