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From my encounter with my bookseller I went straight home and took down my favorite copy of the "Decameron" and thumbed it over very tenderly; for you must know that I am particularly attached to that little volume. I can hardly realize that nearly half a century has elapsed since Yseult Hardynge and I parted.
Women deceived their husbands with much the same relish as Boccaccio depicts in his Decameron; passions were everywhere the moving forces, in the higher and lower classes as well, and nowhere was there to be seen the continence which comes from an intelligent self-control.
He was not alone in this view, for it would be difficult to give the uninitiated a conception of the importance attached to this mechanical department of book-making by the adepts. About a third of Dibdin's Bibliographical Decameron is, if I recollect rightly, devoted to bindings.
Decameron comes from two Greek words deka, ten, and hemera, a day, the book being so called because the stories in it were supposed to be told in ten days. During a time of plague in Florence seven ladies and three gentlemen fled and took refuge in a house surrounded by a garden far from the town.
She is more like one of the donnine in the Decameron." Her Dante, overhearing, hurried her up the steps. His eyes were bright with anger in the shadow of his hood, but they changed and darkened as he caught sight of one girl's face in the crowd.
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.
There they remained for ten days, and to amuse themselves each told a tale every day, so that there are a hundred tales in all in The Decameron. It is very likely that in one of his journeys to Italy Chaucer saw this book. Perhaps he even met Boccaccio, and it is more than likely that he met Petrarch, another great Italian poet who also retold one of the tales of The Decameron.
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.
See how he trots along the road, keeps an eye on the scenery, and minds his own business. I never saw him get into a fight yet. Wish I could say the same of myself. I named him after Boccaccio, to remind me to read the 'Decameron' some day." "Judging by the way you talk," I said, "you ought to be quite a writer yourself." "Talkers never write. They go on talking."
To his unutterable astonishment, Geoffrey suddenly stooped over him, and whispered in his ear, "I want a word in private with you." Sir Patrick started back, as if Geoffrey had tried to bite him. "I beg your pardon, Mr. Delamayn what did you say?" "Could you give me a word in private?" Sir Patrick put back the Decameron; and bowed in freezing silence.
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