Droll Stories

Balzac's exuberant prologue launches a collection of bawdy, satirical tales set in medieval France with a mock-heroic defense of wit, sensuality, and the "gay science" of storytelling. Arguing that these stories are deeply French in their passion and unruly humor, the narrator celebrates women, love, fantasy, and drollery as essential sources of literary life, then introduces "Perseverance in Love," beginning in thirteenth-century Paris with the silversmith Anseau. Anseau is portrayed as a man of hard work, prudence, and near-absurd virtue: a prosperous craftsman whose strength, self-mastery, and unmarried state invite comic astonishment. Yet beneath the satire lies a serious fascination with labor, desire, and the strange ways discipline can lead to wealth. As he reflects on courtship as an exhausting game of patience and flattery, his own imagination turns toward marriage. A chance meeting with Tiennette, a poor bondswoman bound to an abbey and denied freedom, awakens both pity and desire, and their tender exchanges lead into a chain of comic-romantic complications involving flirtation, deception, seduction, shame, and desperate attempts to preserve honor. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.