Alibech “Puts the Devil in Hell” in the Desert is a story told by Dioneo on the Third Day of the Decameron. It turns a child’s sincere search for religious instruction into an episode of sexual exploitation disguised as devotion, then follows the resulting euphemism from an isolated hermitage into public speech. Its comic ending rests on a sharp mismatch: Alibech understands Rustico’s invented religious lesson as a genuine form of service, while the tale’s audience understands the bodily meaning he conceals beneath it.

From Capsa to the Desert

Alibech is a wealthy man’s daughter in Capsa, in Barbary. About fourteen years old and not a Christian, she hears Christians praise their faith and the service of God. When she asks how someone might serve God with the least hindrance, she is told that those who withdraw from worldly life into the deserts of Thebais serve him especially well. Moved, the story says, by a childish fancy rather than a formed religious purpose, she leaves secretly the next morning, alone and without telling anyone where she is going.

The journey costs her considerable effort. At the first hermitage she reaches, an older holy man gives her food—roots, wild apples, and dates—and water, approves her intent, but directs her to another teacher. That man sends her onward in turn. Alibech eventually arrives at the cell of Rustico, a young hermit. The earlier hermits’ refusals establish that they recognize both her youth and the danger of receiving her; Rustico instead accepts her, after telling himself that he will test his own constancy.

Rustico’s Religious Pretext

Rustico’s resolve fails. He abandons prayer and mortification and considers how to obtain what he wants without appearing to Alibech to be a debauched man. Having learned that she has never known a man and is as inexperienced as she seems, he makes religious instruction the instrument of his deception. He tells her that the devil is God’s enemy and that the most acceptable service to God is to put the devil back in hell. Alibech asks how this can be done; Rustico promises to demonstrate.

The scene exposes the falsehood in his lesson without requiring Alibech to understand it. Rustico presents his bodily arousal as the devil troubling him and tells her that she possesses hell in its place. He claims that helping him put the devil there will comfort him and please God. Alibech accepts the explanation in good faith. Her first experience brings some pain, which she interprets through the religious terms Rustico has taught her. He assures her that it will not always be so, and the pair repeat the act several times before stopping for that occasion.

As the encounters continue, Alibech begins to enjoy them and treats them as a devotional duty. She returns to Rustico urging him to resume the supposed service, and she describes people who attend to anything else as neglecting God. The story thereby reverses the initial arrangement: Rustico first invents a religious pretext to exploit her, but Alibech’s literal belief turns her into the eager petitioner. Her repeated invitations do not erase the original deception or make the two characters’ understanding equal; Rustico knows the explanation is a ruse, while Alibech continues to take it as religious truth.

Desire, Scarcity, and Reversal

Rustico’s body cannot keep pace with Alibech’s increasing enthusiasm. He lives on roots and water, and the narrative makes the difference between her appetite and his diminishing capacity part of the joke. He says that it would take too many devils to appease hell, yet does what he can. Alibech complains that she is not serving God as diligently as she would like. To quiet her, Rustico revises his teaching: the devil should be punished only when he raises his head in pride, and, by God’s grace, theirs has been subdued and now wishes to remain peaceful. The religious vocabulary that enabled his deception becomes a makeshift excuse for his exhaustion.

Alibech eventually turns the logic back on him. If his devil has been chastened, she says, her hell still gives her no peace; because she helped subdue his devil, he should use his to quiet her hell. The reversal gives her the story’s most pointed line of reasoning, but it remains inside the comic framework of a lesson that Rustico invented to serve himself. The joke is not that Alibech has received sound spiritual guidance; it is that his fabricated doctrine has become a language through which she can demand more than he is able to provide.

Return, Marriage, and the Saying

While the two are caught in this dispute, a fire in Capsa kills Alibech’s father, his other children, and the rest of his household. Alibech is left heir to her father’s substantial estate. Neerbale, a young man who has spent his own substance on gallantry, learns that she is alive and goes looking for her. Before the government can claim the estate as property belonging to a man who died without an heir, he brings her back to Capsa and marries her. Through his marriage to Alibech, he succeeds to her inheritance. Her return is therefore both a sudden end to life in the desert and a reversal of fortune for Neerbale.

Before Neerbale has slept with her, women in Capsa ask Alibech what she did in the desert to serve God. She answers in the terms Rustico taught her and explains the practice in words and gestures. The women laugh and tell her that the same service is performed there too, with Neerbale able to serve God with her. The tale then traces the explanation outward: it passes from one woman to another, becomes a saying in the city, and, according to Dioneo, crosses the sea and remains current in his own setting. What began as Rustico’s private fraud becomes a portable joke, detached from the vulnerable girl who first believed it.

Comic Frame and Religious Irony

Dioneo introduces the tale as a comic addition to the day’s discussion and says that love exercises its power even in forests, mountains, and desert caves, not only in luxurious dwellings. The claim broadens the story beyond a single hermitage, but the episode’s central target is more particular: Rustico’s use of religious language to conceal appetite. His pose as a holy man and teacher contrasts with his deliberate manipulation of an inexperienced girl, while his later appeals to spiritual restraint are simply another device for managing her demands.

Alibech’s literal trust and Rustico’s knowing pretense create the tale’s double register. Her account is absurd to the women who hear it, yet her mistake began with the desire to serve God and the misleading instruction she received from someone she had reason to trust as a religious guide. Dioneo’s closing recommendation that young women learn the supposed service completes the bawdy performance, inviting laughter rather than offering a reliable moral prescription. The ladies laugh repeatedly at his comic wording; when he finishes, the company’s queen yields her crown to Filostrato, who continues the sexual banter. The episode thus ends not in the desert but in the storytelling circle, where deception’s vocabulary becomes a joke shared by its listeners.