Droll Stories

Honore de Balzac's Droll Stories bursts open in a riot of Renaissance color, mischievous scholarship, and irreverent laughter. Framed as a playful revival of sixteenth-century French storytelling, it celebrates Touraine's earthy wit, bawdy folklore, and Rabelaisian spirit, insisting that comic tales are not trivial amusements but a necessary antidote to sorrow. The result is a world where monks, nobles, priests, courtesans, and clever commoners collide in stories of desire, hypocrisy, greed, and social performance. In "The Fair Imperia," a young priest from Touraine, Philippe de Mala, is drawn from clerical duty into a corrupt, sensual world at the Council of Constance, where he falls under the spell of the dazzling courtesan Imperia. His fumbling devotion, her commanding wit, and the arrival of bishops and cardinals expose the farce beneath ecclesiastical authority and the inseparability of power, appetite, and vanity. Elsewhere, an aging canon's fortune becomes the object of fierce family scheming, while the shepherd Chiquon, meant to be a fool, may prove the shrewdest of them all. Balzac turns inheritance, adultery, and murder plots into sharp, fast-moving satire, where innocence survives only by luck and wit. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.

Honoré de Balzac : Tour à tour dramaturge, journaliste et écrivain, il est considéré comme l'une des figures majeures du monde des lettres françaises.
Créateur du roman réaliste moderne, il conçut dès 1833 le grand cycle de la Comédie humaine. Dépensier et excentrique, il vécut criblé de dettes ; amoureux de la vie et des femmes, il se fit remarquer dans les salons mondains et littéraires, et connut de tumultueuses et rocambolesques liaisons. Voyageur infatigable et collectionneur, habité par des projets extravagants, il s'aventura dans des contrées lointaines et souvent inhospitalières.
Il laissera à sa mort, à 51 ans, l'une des plus grandes oeuvres de la littérature mondiale. " Il entre le même jour, dans la gloire et dans le tombeau ", dira Victor Hugo dans l'éloge funèbre qu'il prononça au cimetière du Père-Lachaise.