Droll Stories — Volume 2
1928
Balzac wrote these tales in the 1830s as a deliberate homage to Rabelais, crafting them in an archaic, mock-medieval French so difficult that even his contemporaries suspected a joke at the reader's expense. They were his escape from the crushing weight of La Comédie Humaine, his permission to be improper. Volume 2 collects some of the most notorious stories: tales of lusty monks, scheming clerks, and village tricksters whose elaborate cons collapse into glorious chaos. The humor is deliberately broad, bawdy, and Rabelaisian, but beneath the ribaldry lies sharp social satire. Balzac skewers the gap between how people behave and how they pretend to behave, and he clearly enjoys every moment of it. These aren't just dirty jokes told by a great novelist. They're a literary game, a deliberate act of literary mischief that lets Balzac reveal truths about human appetite and hypocrisy that his "serious" novels could only approach obliquely.
