Droll Stories

First issued in the 1830s as Contes drolatiques, this collection of ribald prose tales is written in a pastiche of older French and set mainly in Renaissance Touraine. Monks, wives, nobles, students, and craftsmen pursue food, money, and sex through tricks, seductions, and comic disasters. The tone imitates Rabelais more than Balzac's contemporary Paris novels. There is no single plot: the book is a sequence of farces about appetite, clerical hypocrisy, and marital bargaining, told as if recovered from a merry medieval chronicle of the Loire country and its neighbouring courts and inns.

Bound in brown canvas blocked with a design in dark brown. Blue slipcase.