Decameron Nights

Boccaccio's lusty, bawdy collection of stories is considerably sanitized here. The main story tells of Jourdan, as Boccaccio, hiding out from a rebel army and wooing Fontaine. Within this frame are hung three stories, each starring Fontaine and Jourdan. In the first, "Paganino the Pirate," a young wife whose aging husband shows more interest in astrology than in her allows herself to be abducted by a young, virile pirate. When she is rescued, she pretends never to have seen her husband before. The second, "Wager for Virtue," concerns a man tricked into betting on his wife's virtue and then believing circumstantial evidence of his cuckoldry. It ends with the trickst...