Balzac wrote these ten tales in the 1830s as a deliberate homage to Boccaccio and the Arabian Nights, but with his own unsparing eye for human folly. Set in the libertine atmosphere of 16th-century France, the stories follow priests grappling with temptation, bourgeois pretensions collapsing under their own weight, and lovers whose schemes curdle into farce. The opening story introduces a young priest at the Council of Constance, fresh-faced and zealous, who promptly stumbles into the plush quarters of courtesans and discovers that virtue is considerably easier to proclaim than to practice. What makes these stories endure is not merely their bawdy humor, though there is plenty of that. Balzac uses the temporal distance of the Renaissance to illuminate the eternal gap between what people preach and what they do. Every character moralizes, postures, and then betrays themselves in the very next scene. It is social satire delivered with a grin, ribald without being crude, and sharp enough to draw blood two centuries later.
