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Updated: May 29, 2025
After some years, the two hermits went together to the desert of the Thebaid and began the work to which God had called Pachomius, for Palemon died soon after. Many monasteries were founded, and men flocked to the desert to give themselves to God.
"With God's help," he said to himself, "I must save her." And he slept. The next morning, when he had said his prayers, he went to see the sainted Palemon, a holy hermit who lived some distance away. He found him smiling quietly as he dug the ground, as was his custom.
Dioneo and Fiammetta sang together a great while of Arcite and Palemon, and on this wise, taking various and divers delights, they passed the time with the utmost satisfaction until the hour of supper; which being come, they seated themselves at table beside the lakelet and there, to the song of a thousand birds, still refreshed by a gentle breeze, that came from the little hills around, and untroubled of any fly, they supped in peace and cheer.
"It is a hard thing to be a true monk, and there few who persevere." "Perhaps so," replied Pachomius; "but all people are not alike." "I have already told you," repeated the old man, "that you cannot be a monk here. Go elsewhere and try; if you persevere you can come back." "I would rather stay with you," said Pachomius. "You do not know what you are asking," answered Palemon.
Then, going at once to the cell of an old hermit called Palemon, famous for his holy and mortified life, he knocked at the door of his hut. "Who are you, and what do you want?" asked the old man, opening his door a few inches. "I am called Pachomius, and I want to be a monk," was the answer. "You cannot be a monk here," said Palemon.
"I will confide in you, then, brother Palemon, that I am stricken with grief at the thought that there is, in Alexandria, a courtesan named Thais, who lives in sin, and is a subject of reproach unto the people." "Brother Paphnutius, that is, in truth, an abomination which we do well to deplore. There are many women amongst the Gentiles who lead lives of that kind.
"Brother Palemon, what I propose is really to the glory of God. Strengthen me with your counsel, for you know many things, and sin has never darkened the clearness of your mind." "Brother Paphnutius, I am not worthy to unloose the latchet of thy sandals, and my sins are as countless as the sands of the desert. But I am old, and I will never refuse the help of my experience."
"I live on bread and salt; I pray and do penance the greater part of the night sometimes the whole night through." Pachomius shivered, for he was a sound sleeper, but he replied sturdily enough: "I hope in Jesus Christ that, helped by your prayers, I shall persevere." Palemon could resist him no longer. He took the young man to live with him and found him a humble and faithful disciple.
"I am but a poor sinner," replied Palemon, "and I know little about men, having passed all my life in this garden, with gazelles, little hares and pigeons. But it seems to me, brother, that your distemper comes from your having passed too suddenly from the noisy world to the calm of solitude. Such sudden transitions can but do harm to the health of the soul.
We must not judge, as I have said, either by poems of much earlier date, like the Nibelungen and the Carolingian chansons de geste, which merely received a new form in the early Middle Ages; still less from the prose romances of Mélusine, Milles et Amys, Palemon and Arcite, and a host of others which were elaborated only later and under the influence of the quite unfeudal habits of the great cities; and least of all from that strange late southern cycle of the Amadises, from which, odd as it seems, many of our notions of chivalric love have, through our ancestors, through the satirists or burlesque poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, been inherited.
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