Lydia’s three proofs of love and the pear-tree deception is a tale of adultery engineered as a sequence of tests, performances, and reversals. Lydia secures Pyrrhus’s cooperation by satisfying three demands that seem to prove her devotion, then uses his acting and a pear tree to make Nicostratus disbelieve the evidence of his own eyes. The story’s decisive irony is that the husband’s trust in a servant becomes the means of deceiving him, while the lovers’ boldness is presented as fortunate rather than prudent.

Narrative Setting and Initial Desire

Pamfilo tells the story on the Seventh Day of the Decameron, after Neifile’s tale has amused the company. He introduces it as an example of passionate love’s daring, but cautions that Lydia was more favored by fortune than guided by reason. The warning sets a limit on what the episode’s success means: the lovers escape discovery, yet their conduct is not offered as a safe pattern to follow.

The action begins in Argos, where Nicostratus, a wealthy nobleman approaching old age, is devoted to hunting with his servants, hounds, and hawks. He trusts Pyrrhus, a young, handsome, capable servant, above all his other attendants and commits his affairs to him. Lydia, Nicostratus’s high-spirited and beautiful wife, becomes so enamored of Pyrrhus that she can think of little else. She attributes her dissatisfaction to the difference between her own youth and her husband’s years, and decides that she will seek pleasure with the man she desires rather than continue to endure what she regards as fortune’s poor choice of husband.

Lydia first confides in Lusca, her trusted chamberwoman, and charges her to carry the proposal to Pyrrhus in secret. Pyrrhus is astonished and suspects a test devised by Nicostratus; he refuses, insisting that his master’s trust makes betrayal unthinkable. Lusca returns to Lydia with his rejection. Rather than abandon her plan, Lydia sends her back, arguing that Pyrrhus’s steadfastness is injuring her and that she cannot endure his refusal. Lusca then turns the appeal toward advantage: she urges Pyrrhus to accept the rare fortune of a noble, beautiful woman’s love and argues that servants need not offer masters the same loyalty owed between friends and kin. Her persuasion recasts fidelity as a mistake and opportunity as something a man should seize before it passes.

Pyrrhus’s Conditions and Lydia’s Proofs

Pyrrhus is willing to comply, but only after he has assurance that Lydia’s offer is not a trap. He sets three conditions: she must kill Nicostratus’s beloved hawk in his presence, send him a lock of her husband’s beard, and send him one of Nicostratus’s best teeth. The requirements turn an intimate promise into a staged demonstration of Lydia’s willingness to harm or humiliate her husband. They also give the tale its measured structure: each proof requires a different kind of performance, from public defiance to private bodily injury.

Lydia accepts, although the demands seem difficult to her and Lusca. At a dinner Nicostratus gives for several gentlemen, she appears in green samite and richly dressed, goes to the hawk’s perch, and kills the bird by dashing it against a wall. When Nicostratus cries out, Lydia offers the guests a plausible grievance: she says that his daily hunting leaves her alone, while the hawk takes the time that should belong to women’s pleasure. The company accepts her explanation, turns the supposed quarrel into a joke, and laughs with Nicostratus. Beneath that public cover, Pyrrhus sees the first condition fulfilled and takes the deed as the beginning of their love.

The second proof follows in Lydia’s chamber. While Nicostratus is playfully pulling her hair, she seizes a lock of his beard and tugs it free, laughing as though she is merely returning his rough play. Nicostratus protests, but Lydia makes his complaint seem trivial by comparing it with the hair-pulling he has just inflicted on her. She keeps the lock and sends it to Pyrrhus. A familiar gesture between husband and wife thus conceals the transfer of a token to the lover.

For the last proof, Lydia invents a complaint about Nicostratus’s breath. She has two boys who serve him at meals hold their heads back, telling them that they smell at the mouth and must not reveal her instruction. When Nicostratus notices their behavior, Lydia uses it as apparent confirmation that he has a decayed tooth. She discourages him from summoning a surgeon, insisting that she can draw it herself and will release him if the pain becomes too great. With Lusca helping to hold him, she pulls out a tooth by force, then shows him a rotten tooth she had prepared as a substitute. Nicostratus believes the explanation; Lydia sends the real tooth to Pyrrhus. The physical pain and the false evidence secure the assurance Pyrrhus demanded, and he agrees to do whatever she wishes.

The Pear-Tree Deception

Lydia next arranges an encounter in the garden. Pretending to be unwell, she asks Nicostratus and Pyrrhus to help her outside, where they settle her on the grass beneath a pear tree. She has already told Pyrrhus what to do. When she asks him to climb up and throw down pears, he calls to the couple below as though he can see them making love. Nicostratus protests that they have not moved; Pyrrhus insists that he has witnessed what he describes. The contradiction makes Nicostratus suspect not his servant’s honesty but the tree itself: perhaps, he thinks, it causes anyone who climbs it to see marvels.

Nicostratus climbs up to test the supposed enchantment. As soon as he is above them, Lydia and Pyrrhus embrace. He cries out at their betrayal; the lovers answer that they are sitting where he left them, then return to those positions as he climbs down. On the ground, he sees them apparently unchanged and hears Pyrrhus claim that the tree made him missee. The trick’s central reversal is that Nicostratus now possesses direct evidence but is induced to treat it as an illusion. The servant’s invented vision gives the husband a story with which to dismiss his own real observation.

Cover Story, Consequences, and Significance

Pyrrhus reinforces the deception by appealing to what Nicostratus believes he knows about Lydia’s character. He argues that a woman so virtuous and discreet would not commit adultery in front of her husband, and that he himself would sooner suffer grievously than even think of such an act. Lydia performs indignation in turn, insisting that if she wanted to betray Nicostratus she would have the sense to do it privately, not before his eyes. The lovers make the husband’s trust in their apparent reputations outweigh what he has just seen. He abandons his reproaches and accepts the pear tree as the cause of the vision.

Lydia then turns the false explanation into a public remedy. Claiming that the tree has shamed her and other women, she tells Pyrrhus to fetch an axe and cut it down; she adds that Nicostratus’s foolish credulity deserves blame as well. Pyrrhus fells the tree. Lydia says that her anger is over now that the enemy of her honor has been destroyed, and Nicostratus asks her forgiveness for suspecting her. He returns to the palace with Lydia and Pyrrhus, while the husband’s apparent reconciliation seals the success of their cover story rather than ending their affair.

The story concludes that Pyrrhus thereafter enjoyed Lydia more freely and often. Its ending converts the pear tree from a supposed source of false sight into the instrument by which the lovers preserve their secret: once cut down, it cannot bear witness again, while Nicostratus carries away a false account of what he saw. Pamfilo’s framing distinction between fortune and reason remains pointed. Lydia and Pyrrhus prevail through preparation, performance, and the husband’s credulity, but the outcome is described as good luck, not proof that their conduct was wise. The three proofs give the deception a rising progression, and the pear-tree episode reverses the usual force of seeing: Nicostratus sees the truth at the precise moment when the lovers persuade him that sight itself has betrayed him.