I prepare for you as for
travelers a rough and steep mountain, beyond which lies a
most beautiful and delightful plain, by so much the more
pleasurable as the difficulty of the ascent and passage of
the mountain had been great. And as the extreme of pleasure
touches pain, so suffering is effaced by a joy succeeding. To
this brief vexation (I call it brief, as contained in few
words) follow closely the sweets and pleasures I have
promised, and which would not be hoped for from such a
beginning if it were not foretold. And to tell the truth, if
I had been able frankly to bring you where I wished by other
way than this rough one, I had willingly done so; but because
I could not, without these recollections, show what was the
occasion of the incidents of which you will read, I was
obliged to write of them."

The elaborate description of the plague which follows, shows not only
Boccaccio's inventive power,--as being, like that of Defoe of the plague
of London (which is a curious parallel to this) altogether imaginary,
since the writer was at Naples during the whole period of the
pestilence,--but also that it was a part indispensable of the entire
scheme, and described with all its ghastly minuteness simply to enhance
the value of his sunshine and merriment. He was in Naples from 1345
until 1350, without any other indication of a visit to Florence than a
chronological table of his life, in which occurs this item:--"1348,
departs in the direction of Tuscany with Louis of Taranto:" as if either
a prince on his travels would take the plague in the course of them, or
a man so closely interested in the events of the time at Naples, and in
the height of his passion for Fiammetta,--the separation from whom he
had hardly endured when earlier (1345) he was separated from her by his
duty to his aged father,--would have chosen the year of the pestilence,
when every one who could, fled Florence, to return there; and we find
him in May, 1349, in Naples, in the full sunshine of Fiammetta's favor,
and remaining there until his father's death in 1350.

There is indeed in Boccaccio's description of the plague that which
convicts it of pure invention, quickened by details gathered from
eye-witnesses,--the very minuteness of the description in certain
points not in accord with the character of the disease, as when he
narrates that the hogs rooting in the garments of the dea