The Decameron, Volume I

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This etext was produced by Donna Holsten.

The Decameron

of

Giovanni Boccaccio

Faithfully Translated

By J.M. Rigg

with illustrations by Louis Chalon

--CONTENTS--

INTRODUCTION

PROEM

- FIRST DAY -

NOVEL I. - Ser Ciappelletto cheats a holy friar by a false confession, and
dies; and, having lived as a very bad man, is, on his death, reputed a
saint, and called San Ciappelletto.

NOVEL II. - Abraham, a Jew, at the instance of Jehannot de Chevigny, goes to
the court of Rome, and having marked the evil life of clergy, returns to
Paris, and becomes a Christian.

NOVEL III. - Melchisedech, a Jew, by a story of three rings averts a danger
with which he was menaced by Saladin.

NOVEL IV. - A monk lapses into a sin meriting the most severe punishment,
justly censures the same fault in his abbot, and thus evades the penalty.

NOVEL V. - The Marchioness of Monferrato by a banquet of hens seasoned with
wit checks the mad passion of the King of France.

NOVEL VI. - A worthy man by an apt saying puts to shame the wicked hypocrisy
of the religious.

NOVEL VII. - Bergamino, with a story of Primasso and the Abbot of Cluny,
finely censures a sudden access of avarice in Messer Cane della Scala.

NOVEL VIII. - Guglielmo Borsiere by a neat retort sharply censures avarice
in Messer Ermino de' Grimaldi.

NOVEL IX. - The censure of a Gascon lady converts the King of Cyprus from a
churlish to an honourable temper.

NOVEL X. - Master Alberto da Bologna honourably puts to shame a lady who
sought occasion to put him to shame in that he was in love with her.

- SECOND DAY -

NOVEL I. - Martellino pretends to be a paralytic, and makes it appear as if
he were cured by being placed upon the body of St. Arrigo. His trick is
detected; he is beaten and arrested, and is in peril of hanging, but finally
escapes.

NOVEL II. - Rinaldo d'Asti is robbed, arrives at Castel Guglielmo, and is
entertained by a widow lady; his property is restored to him, and he returns
home safe and sound.

NOVEL III. - Three young men squander their substance and are reduced to
poverty. Their nephew, returning home a desperate man, falls in with an
abbot, in whom he discovers the daughter of the King of England. She marries
him, and he retrieves the losses and re-establishes the fortune of his
uncles.

NOVEL IV. - Landolfo Ruffolo is reduced to poverty, turns corsair, is
captured by Genoese, is shipwrecked, escapes on a chest full of jewels, and,
being cast ashore at Corfu, is hospitably entertained by a woman, and
returns home wealthy.

NOVEL V. - Andreuccio da Perugia comes to Naples to buy horses, meets with
three serious adventures in one night, comes safe out of them all, and
returns home with a ruby.

NOVEL VI. - Madam Beritola loses two sons, is found with two kids on an
island, goes thence to Lunigiana, where one of her sons takes service with
her master, and lies with his daughter, for which he is put in prison.
Sicily rebels against King Charles, the son is recognized by the mother,
marries the master's daughter, and, his brother being discovered, is
reinstated in great honour.

NOVEL VII. - The Soldan of Babylon sends one of his daughters overseas,
designing to marry her to the King of Algarve. By divers adventures she
comes in the space of four years into the hands of nine men in divers place.
At last she is restored to her father, whom she quits again in the guise of
a virgin, and, as was at first intended, is married to the King of Algarve.

NOVEL VIII. - The Count of Antwerp, labouring under a false accusation, goes
into exile. He leaves his two children in different places in England, and
takes service in Ireland. Returning to England an unknown man, he finds his
sons prosperous. He serves as a groom in the army of the King of France; his
innocence is established, and he is restored to his former honours.

NOVEL IX. - Bernabo of Genoa, deceived by Ambrogiuolo, loses his money and
commands his innocent wife to be put to death. She escapes, habits herself
as a man, and serves the Soldan. She discovers the deceiver, and brings
Bernabo to Alexandria, where the deceiver is punished. She then resumes the
garb of a woman, and with her husband returns wealthy to Genoa.

NOVEL X. - Paganino da Monaco carries off the wife of Messer Ricciardo di
Chinzica, who, having learned where she is, goes to Paganino and in a
friendly manner asks him to restore her. He consents, provided she be
willing. She refuses to go back with her husband. Messer Ricciardo dies, and
she marries Paganino.

- THIRD DAY -

NOVEL I. - Masetto da Lamporecchio feigns to be dumb, and obtains a
gardener's place at a convent of women, who with one accord make haste to
lie with him.

NOVEL II. - A groom lies with the wife of King Agilulf, who learns the fact,
keeps his own counsel, finds out the groom and shears him. The shorn shears
all his fellows, and so comes safe out of the scrape.

NOVEL III. - Under cloak of confession and a most spotless conscience, a
lady, enamoured of a young man, induces a booby friar unwittingly to provide
a means to the entire gratification of her passion.

NOVEL IV. - Dom Felice instructs Fra Puccio how to attain blessedness by
doing a penance. Fra Puccio does the penance, and meanwhile Dom Felice has a
good time with Fra Puccio's wife.

NOVEL V. - Zima gives a palfrey to Messer Francesco Vergellesi, who in
return suffers him to speak with his wife. She keeping silence, he answers
in her stead, and the sequel is in accordance with his answer.

NOVEL VI. - Ricciardo Minutolo loves the wife of Filippello Fighinolfi, and
knowing her to be jealous, makes her believe that his own wife is to meet
Filippello at a bagnio on the ensuing day; whereby she is induced to go
thither, where, thinking to have been with her husband, she discovers that
she has tarried with Ricciardo.

NOVEL VII. - Tedaldo, being in disfavour with his lady, departs from
Florence. He returns thither after a while in the guise of a pilgrim, has
speech of his lady, and makes her sensible of her fault. Her husband,
convicted of slaying him, he delivers from peril of death, reconciles him
with his brothers, and thereafter discreetly enjoys his lady.

NOVEL VIII. Ÿ Ferondo, having taken a certain powder, is interred for dead;
is disinterred by the abbot, who enjoys his wife; is put in prison and
taught to believe that he is in purgatory; is then resuscitated, and rears
as his own a boy begotten by the abbot upon his wife.

NOVEL IX. - Gillette of Narbonne cures the King of France of a fistula,
craves for spouse Bertrand de Roussillon, who marries her against his will,
and hies him in despite to Florence, where, as he courts a young woman,
Gillette lies with him in her stead, and has two sons by him; for which
cause he afterwards takes her into favour and entreats her as his wife.

NOVEL X. - Alibech turns hermit, and is taught by Rustico, a monk, how the
Devil is put in hell. She is afterwards conveyed thence, and becomes the
wife of Neerbale.

- FOURTH DAY -

NOVEL I. - Tancred, Prince of Salerno, slays his daughter's lover, and sends
her his heart in a golden cup: she pours upon it a poisonous distillation,
which she drinks and dies.

NOVEL II. - Fra Alberto gives a lady to understand that she is beloved of
the Angel Gabriel, in whose shape he lies with her sundry times; afterward,
for fear of her kinsmen, he flings himself forth of her house, and finds
shelter in the house of a poor man, who on the morrow leads him in the guise
of a wild man into the piazza, where, being recognized, he is apprehended by
his brethren and imprisoned.

NOVEL III. - Three young men love three sisters, and flee with them to
Crete. The eldest of the sisters slays her lover for jealousy. The second
saves the life of the first by yielding herself to the Duke of Crete. Her
lover slays her, and makes off with the first: the third sister and her
lover are charged with the murder, are arrested and confess the crime. They
escape death by bribing the guards, flee destitute to Rhodes, and there in
destitution die.

NOVEL IV. - Gerbino, in breach of the plighted faith of his grandfather,
King Guglielmo, attacks a ship of the King of Tunis to rescue thence his
daughter. She being slain by those aboard the ship, he slays them, and
afterwards he is beheaded.

NOVEL V. - Lisabetta's brothers slay her lover: he appears to her in a
dream, and shews her where he is buried: she privily disinters the head, and
sets it in a pot of basil, whereon she daily weeps a great while. The pot
being taken from her by her brothers, she dies not long after.

NOVEL VI. - Andreuola loves Gabriotto: she tells him a dream that she has
had; he tells her a dream of his own, and dies suddenly in her arms. While
she and her maid are carrying his corpse to his house, they are taken by the
Signory. She tells how the matter stands, is threatened with violence by the
Podesta, but will not brook it. Her father hears how she is bested, and, her
innocence being established, causes her to be set at large; but she, being
minded to tarry no longer in the world, becomes a nun.

NOVEL VII. - Simona loves Pasquino; they are together in a garden, Pasquino
rubs a leaf of sage against his teeth, and dies; Simona is arrested, and,
with intent to shew the judge how Pasquino died, rubs one of the leaves of
the same plant against her teeth, and likewise dies.

NOVEL VIII. - Girolamo loves Salvestra: yielding to his mother's prayers he
goes to Paris; he returns to find Salvestra married; he enters her house by
stealth, lays himself by her side, and dies; he is borne to the church,
where Salvestra lays herself by his side, and dies.

Nova IX. - Sieur Guillaume de Roussillon slays his wife's paramour, Sieur
Guillaume de Cabestaing, and gives her his heart to eat. She, coming to wit
thereof, throws herself from a high window to the ground, and dies, and is
buried with her lover.

NOVEL X. - The wife of a leech, deeming her lover, who has taken an opiate,
to be dead, puts him in a chest, which, with him therein, two usurers carry
off to their house. He comes to himself, and is taken for a thief; but, the
lady's maid giving the Signory to understand that she had put him in the
chest which the usurers stole, he escapes the gallows, and the usurers are
mulcted in moneys for the theft of the chest.

ILLUSTRATIONS TO THE DECAMERON

VOLUME I.

The lady and the friar (third day, third story) - Frontispiece

The three rings (first day, third story)

The dinner of hens (first day, fifth story)

Rinaldo D'Asti and the widow lady (second day, second story)

Alatiel dancing (second day, seventh story)

The wedding party (fourth day, introduction)

The daughter of the King of Tunis (fourth day, fourth story)

Simona and Pasquino (fourth day, seventh story)

INTRODUCTION

Son of a merchant, Boccaccio di Chellino di Buonaiuto, of Certaldo in Val
d'Elsa, a little town about midway between Empoli and Siena, but within the
Florentine "contado," Giovanni Boccaccio was born, most probably at Paris,
in the year 1313. His mother, at any rate, was a Frenchwoman, whom his
father seduced during a sojourn at Paris, and afterwards deserted. So much
as this Boccaccio has himself told us, under a transparent veil of allegory,
in his Ameto. Of his mother we would fain know more, for his wit has in it
a quality, especially noticeable in the Tenth Novel of the Sixth Day of the
Decameron, which marks him out as the forerunner of Rabelais, and prompts us
to ask how much more his genius may have owed to his French ancestry. His
father was of sufficient standing in Florence to be chosen Prior in 1321;
but this brief term of office--but two months--was his last, as well as his
first experience of public life. Of Boccaccio's early years we know nothing
more than that his first preceptor was the Florentine grammarian, Giovanni
da Strada, father of the poet Zanobi da Strada, and that, when he was about
ten years old, he was bound apprentice to a merchant, with whom he spent
the next six years at Paris, whence he returned to Florence with an
inveterate repugnance to commerce. His father then proposed to make a
canonist of him; but the study of Gratian proved hardly more congenial than
the routine of the counting-house to the lad, who had already evinced a
taste for letters; and a sojourn at Naples, where under the regime of the
enlightened King Robert there were coteries of learned men, and even Greek
was not altogether unknown, decided his future career. According to Filippo
Villani his choice was finally fixed by a visit to the tomb of Vergil on the
Via Puteolana, and, though the modern critical spirit is apt to discount such
stories, there can be no doubt that such a pilgrimage would be apt to make a
deep, and perhaps enduring, impression upon a nature ardent and sensitive,
and already conscious of extraordinary powers. His stay at Naples was also in
another respect a turning point in his life; for it was there that, as we
gather from the Filocopo, he first saw the blonde beauty, Maria, natural
daughter of King Robert, whom he has immortalized as Fiammetta. The place was
the church of San Lorenzo, the day the 26th of March, 1334. Boccaccio's
admiring gaze was observed by the lady, who, though married, proved no Laura,
and forthwith returned his love in equal measure. Their liaison lasted several
years, during which Boccaccio recorded the various phases of their passion
with exemplary assiduity in verse and prose. Besides paying her due and
discreet homage in sonnet and canzone, he associated her in one way or another,
not only with the Filocopo (his prose romance of Florio and Biancofiore, which
he professes to have written to pleasure her), but with the Ameto, the Amorosa
Visione, the Teseide, and the Filostrato; and in L'Amorosa Fiammetta he wove
out of their relations a romance in which her lover, who is there called
Pamfilo, plays Aeneas to her Dido, though with somewhat less tragic
consequences. The Proem to the Decameron shews us the after-glow of his
passion; the lady herself appears as one of the "honourable company," and
her portrait, as in the act of receiving the laurel wreath at the close of
the Fourth Day, is a masterpiece of tender and delicate delineation.

Boccaccio appears to have been recalled to Florence by his father in 1341;
and it was probably in that year that he wrote L'Amorosa Fiammetta and the
allegorical prose pastoral (with songs interspersed) which he entitled
Ameto, and in which Fiammetta masquerades in green as one of the nymphs.
The Amorosa Visione, written about the same time, is not only an allegory but
an acrostic, the initial letters of its fifteen hundred triplets composing two
sonnets and a ballade in honour of Fiammetta, whom he here for once ventures
to call by her true name. Later came the Teseide, or romance of Palamon and
Arcite, the first extant rendering of the story, in twelve books, and the
Filostrato, nine books of the loves and woes of Troilus and Cressida. Both
these poems are in ottava rima, a metre which, if Boccaccio did not invent
it, he was the first to apply to such a purpose. Both works were dedicated
to Fiammetta. A graceful idyll in the same metre, Ninfale Fiesolano, was
written later, probably at Naples in 1345. King Robert was then dead, but
Boccaccio enjoyed the favour of Queen Joan, of somewhat doubtful memory, at
whose instance he hints in one of his later letters that he wrote the
Decameron. Without impugning Boccaccio's veracity we can hardly but think
that the Decameron would have seen the light, though Queen Joan had withheld
her encouragement. He had probably been long meditating it, and gathering
materials for it, and we may well suppose that the outbreak of the plague in
1348, by furnishing him with a sombre background to heighten the effect of
his motley pageant, had far more to do with accelerating the composition
than aught that Queen Joan may have said.

That Boccaccio was not at Florence during the pestilence is certain; but we
need not therefore doubt the substantial accuracy of his marvellous
description of the state of the stricken city, for the course and
consequences of the terrible visitation must have been much the same in all
parts of Italy, and as to Florence in particular, Boccaccio could have no
difficulty in obtaining detailed and abundant information from credible
eye-witnesses. The introduction of Fiammetta, who was in all probability at
Naples at the time, and in any case was not a Florentine, shews, however,
that he is by no means to be taken literally, and renders it extremely
probable that the facetious, irrepressible, and privileged Dioneo is no
other than himself. At the same time we cannot deem it either impossible,
or very unlikely, that in the general relaxation of morale, which the plague
brought in its train, refuge from care and fear was sought in the diversions
which he describes by some of those who had country-seats to which to
withdraw, and whether the "contado" was that of Florence or that of Naples
is a matter of no considerable importance. (1) It is probable that
Boccaccio's father was one of the victims of the pestilence; for he was dead
in 1350, when his son returned to Florence to live thenceforth on the modest
patrimony which he inherited. It must have been about this time that he
formed an intimacy with Petrarch, which, notwithstanding marked diversity
of temperament, character and pursuits, was destined to be broken only by
death. Despite his complaints of the malevolence of his critics in the Proem
to the Fourth Day of the Decameron, he had no lack of appreciation on the
part of his fellow-citizens, and was employed by the Republic on several
missions; to Bologna, probably with the view of averting the submission of
that city to the Visconti in 1350; to Petrarch at Padua in March 1351, with
a letter from the Priors announcing his restitution to citizenship, and
inviting him to return to Florence, and assume the rectorship of the newly
founded university; to Ludwig of Brandenburg with overtures for an alliance
against the Visconti in December of the same year; and in the spring of 1354
to Pope Innocent VI. at Avignon in reference to the approaching visit of the
Emperor Charles IV. to Italy. About this time, 1354-5, he threw off, in
striking contrast to his earlier works, an invective against women, entitled
Laberinto d'Amore, otherwise Corbaccio, a coarse performance occasioned by
resentment at what he deemed capricious treatment by a lady to whom he had
made advances. To the same period, though the date cannot be precisely fixed,
belongs his Life of Dante, a work of but mediocre merit. Somewhat later, it
would seem, he began the study of Greek under one Leontius Pilatus, a
Calabrian, who possessed some knowledge of that language, and sought to pass
himself off as a Greek by birth.

Leontius was of coarse manners and uncertain temper, but Boccaccio was his
host and pupil for some years, and eventually procured him the chair of
Greek in the university of Florence. How much Greek Boccaccio learned from
him, and how far he may have been beholden to him in the compilation of
his elaborate Latin treatise De Genealogia Deorum, in which he essayed with
very curious results to expound the inner meaning of mythology, it is
impossible to say. In 1361 he seems to have had serious thoughts of
devoting himself to religion, being prodigiously impressed by the menaces,
monitions and revelations of a dying Carthusian of Siena. One of the
revelations concerned a matter which Boccaccio had supposed to be known only
to Petrarch and himself. He accordingly confided his anxiety to Petrarch,
who persuaded him to amend his life without renouncing the world. In 1362
he revisited Naples, and in the following year spent three months with
Petrarch at Venice. In 1365 he was sent by the Republic of Florence on a
mission of conciliation to Pope Urban V. at Avignon. He was employed on a
like errand on the Pope's return to Rome in 1367. In 1368 he revisited
Venice, and in 1371 Naples; but in May 1372 he returned to Florence, where
on 25th August 1373 he was appointed lecturer on the Divina Commedia, with
a yearly stipend of 100 fiorini d'oro. His lectures, of which the first
was delivered in the church of San Stefano near the Ponte Vecchio, were
discontinued owing to ill health, doubtless aggravated by the distress which
the death of Petrarch (20th July 1374) could not but cause him, when he had
got no farther than the seventeenth Canto of the Inferno. His commentary is
still occasionally quoted. He died, perhaps in the odour of sanctity, for
in later life he was a diligent collector of relics, at Certaldo on 21st
December 1375, and was buried in the parish church. His tomb was desecrated,
and his remains were dispersed, owing, it is said, to a misunderstanding,
towards the close of the eighteenth century. His library, which by his
direction was placed in the Convent of Santo Spirito at Florence, was
destroyed by fire about a century after his death.

Besides the De Genealogia Deorum Boccaccio wrote other treatises in Latin,
which need not here be specified, and sixteen Eclogues in the same language,
of which he was by no means a master. As for his minor works in the
vernacular, the earlier of them shew that he had not as yet wrought himself
free from the conventionalism which the polite literature of Italy inherited
from the Sicilians. It is therefore inevitable that the twentieth century
should find the Filocopo, Ameto, and Amorosa Visione tedious reading. The
Teseide determined the form in which Pulci, Boiardo, Bello, Ariosto, Tasso,
and, with a slight modification, our own Spenser were to write, but its
readers are now few, and are not likely ever again to be numerous. Chaucer
drew upon it for the Knight's Tale, but it is at any rate arguable that his
retrenchment of its perhaps inordinate length was judicious, and that what
he gave was better than what he borrowed. Still, that it had such a redactor
as Chaucer is no small testimony to its merit; nor was it only in the
Knight's Tale that he was indebted to it: the description of the Temple of
Love in the Parlement of Foules is taken almost word for word from it. Even
more considerable and conspicuous is Chaucer's obligation to Boccaccio in
the Troilus and Criseyde, about a third of which is borrowed from the
Filostrato. Nor is it a little remarkable that the same man, that in the
Teseide and Filostrato founded the chivalrous epic, should also and in the
same period of his literary activity, have written the first and not the
least powerful and artistic of psychologic romances, for even such is
L'Amorosa Fiammetta.

But whatever may be the final verdict of criticism upon these minor works of
Boccaccio, it is impossible to imagine an age in which the Decameron will
fail of general recognition as, in point alike of invention as of style, one
of the most notable creations of human genius. Of few books are the sources
so recondite, insomuch that it seems to be certain that in the main they
must have be merely oral tradition, and few have exercised so wide and
mighty an influence. The profound, many-sided and intimate knowledge of
human nature which it evinces, its vast variety of incident, its wealth
of tears and laughter, its copious and felicitous diction, inevitably apt
for every occasion, and, notwithstanding the frequent harshness, and
occasional obscurity of its at times tangled, at times laboured periods,
its sustained energy and animation of style must ever ensure for this human
comedy unchallenged rank among the literary masterpieces that are truly
immortal.

The Decameron was among the earliest of printed books, Venice leading the
way with a folio edition in 1471, Mantua following suit in 1472, and
Vicenza in 1478. A folio edition, adorned, with most graceful wood-
engravings, was published at Venice in 1492. Notwithstanding the freedom
with which in divers passages Boccaccio reflected on the morals of the
clergy, the Roman Curia spared the book, which the austere Savonarola
condemned to the flames. The tradition that the Decameron was among the
pile of "vanities" burned by Savonarola in the Piazza della Signoria on
the last day of the Carnival of 1497, little more than a year before he
was himself burned there, is so intrinsically probable--and accords so
well with the extreme paucity of early copies of the work--that it would
be the very perversity of scepticism to doubt it. It is by no means to
the credit of our country that, except to scholars, it long remained in
England, an almost entirely closed book. (2) Indeed the first nominally
complete English translation, a sadly mutilated and garbled rendering of
the French version by Antoine Le Macon, did not appear till 1620, and
though successive redactions brought it nearer to the original, it
remained at the best but a sorry faute de mieux. Such as it was,
however, our forefathers were perforce fain to be content with it.

The first Englishman to render the whole Decameron direct from the Italian
was Mr. John Payne; but his work, printed for the Villon Society in 1886,
was only for private circulation, and those least inclined to disparage
its merits may deem its style somewhat too archaic and stilted adequately
to render the vigour and vivacity of the original. Accordingly in the
present version an attempt has been made to hit the mean between archaism
and modernism, and to secure as much freedom and spirit as is compatible
with substantial accuracy.

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