Droll Stories
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- Translator’s Preface
- Prologue
- Droll Stories
- The Fair Imperia
- The Venial Sin
- How the goodman Bruyn took a wife
- How the Seneschal struggled with his wife’s modesty
- That which is only a venial sin
- How and by whom the said child was procured
- How the said love-sin was repented of and led to great mourning
- The King’s Sweetheart
- The Devil’s Heir
- The Three Clerks of St. Nicholas
- The Continence of King Francis the First
- How the Chateau D’Azay Came to Be Built
- The Danger of Being Too Innocent
- Perseverance in Love
- About the Monk Amador, Who Was a Glorious Abbot of Turpenay
- Odd Sayings of Three Pilgrims
- The Fair Imperia Married
- I. How Madame Imperia was caught in the very net she was accustomed to spread for her love-birds
- II. How this Marriage ended
- Epilogue
These choice selections from Honoré de Balzac's Droll Stories offer a lively and lusty portrait of sixteenth-century French life and manners. Told in the tradition of Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Rabelais, they allegedly originated in manuscripts from the abbeys of Touraine. Originally published in three sets of ten tales in the 1830s, the stories abound in episodes of good-humored licentiousness that scandalized Balzac's contemporaries and continue to delight modern readers. French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) was a founder of realism in European literature. An inspiration to Proust, Dickens, Faulkner, Dostoyevsky, and countless others, Balzac wrote works that were hailed for their multifaceted characters and exquisite attention to detail. This edition's excellent translation was the first to make his Contes Drolatiques available to English-speaking readers.