Droll Stories

From the great French novelist comes this long-unavailable collection of tales in the tradition of Boccaccio’s Decameron. Balzac’s Contes Drolatiques, or Droll Stories, were originally published in three volumes in the 1830s. Set in medieval Europe, these stories were Balzac’s attempt to write in the great tradition of Rabelais and Boccaccio, to render the Middle Ages with a touch of raunchy humor, and to provide a delightful portrait of medieval France. Balzac took the old themes that had delighted his ancestors—the tales of faithless wives and confiding husbands, of monks incredibly endowed for amorous athleticism, of lusty wenches and adventurous lads, and of great bouts of eating and drinking. Droll Stories has always been an essential part of Balzac’s work when published in French, but it has been excluded from the definitive English editions. This book presents all three volumes of this classic and enduring work.