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    Droll Stories
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    Droll Stories
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    Droll Stories
    Ebook220 pages3 hours

    Droll Stories

    By Honoré de Balzac

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    About this ebook

    The First Ten Tales

    An enduring classic, Droll Stories offers a highly animated and entertaining portrait of life in 16th-century Europe. Jaico Classics presents its first edition of 10 lively tales by the inimitable and irreverent novelist, Honoré de Balzac.

    Written with the author’s trademark wordplay, stories such as The Maid of Thilouse present the good-humoured licentiousness of Balzac’s times. Tales like The Merry Jests of King Louis the Eleventh and The Venial Sin that once scandalized the public now simply delight modern readers.

    Full of exquisite charm and colour, Droll Stories by Balzac is a must-read for any fan of the Classics.

    Honoré de Balzac was a pioneer of Realism in European literature and an inspiration to the likes of Oscar Wilde, Dickens and Dostoyevsky. He continues to influence the work of artists and filmmakers even today. He is famously known for his extensive collection of short stories entitled La Comédie Humaine.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJaico Publishing House
    Release dateJul 1, 2016
    ISBN9788184957952
    Unavailable
    Droll Stories
    Author

    Honoré de Balzac

    Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) was a French novelist, short story writer, and playwright. Regarded as one of the key figures of French and European literature, Balzac’s realist approach to writing would influence Charles Dickens, Émile Zola, Henry James, Gustave Flaubert, and Karl Marx. With a precocious attitude and fierce intellect, Balzac struggled first in school and then in business before dedicating himself to the pursuit of writing as both an art and a profession. His distinctly industrious work routine—he spent hours each day writing furiously by hand and made extensive edits during the publication process—led to a prodigious output of dozens of novels, stories, plays, and novellas. La Comédie humaine, Balzac’s most famous work, is a sequence of 91 finished and 46 unfinished stories, novels, and essays with which he attempted to realistically and exhaustively portray every aspect of French society during the early-nineteenth century.

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    • 4/5
      A set of light, fun short stories about love. Done in an imitation of Rabelais' style. Intricate wordplay and innuendo about love. A lot is lost in translation, but some of the simple lewd humor shines through.
    • 4/5
      These are some stories translated from Old French to English about life in Tourraine, France, in the 16th century... mostly as it related to scandals involving sex, elopements, drama in royal/noble families, drama @ French & English court, and/or adultery. Pretty shocking what Honoré de Balzac actually comes out and says, cloaking the scandalous parts of stories with amusing metaphors that are only too easy to guess. Here's a passage out of his short story "The Reproach," just to give you a taste:"The sweet wench and her well-beloved were busy trying to catch, in a certain lake that you probably know, the little bird that never stays in it, and they were laughing and trying, and still laughing" (183).The translation sometimes makes it difficult to understand the more subtle references, unfortunately. I'm sure it would be doubly hilarious in its original French. Still, I'm pleased that this text was translated at all. It certainly does give one a good idea of what people were like back then, 5-600 years ago. According to the translator's intro, they all appreciated a good, crude joke. If you can, too, then you'll enjoy Balzac's Droll Stories.