Droll Stories: Selected Tales

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...