Droll Stories: Collected from the Abbeys of Touraine - Softcover

De Balzac, Honore

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1603124586 ISBN 13: 9781603124584

Publisher: Aegypan, 2008

Synopsis

Already famous for his novels, in the 1830s Honoré Balzac undertook a series of tales as full of human understanding as of dalliance and lusty conniving: the rowdy, Rabelasian Droll Stories.

"Who does not love the warm attack of life . . . when it flows thus round the heart and engulfs everything?" None know this better than the good old Canon of Notre Dame. Coming to Paris naked as a dagger, he soon proves a favorite confessor to the ladies. Then a high-born beauty awards him a prize: the relic of a Saint . . . a bone, the ladies say, that will cure anything!

This omnibus volume includes all three books of Balzac's Droll Stories, including the tales, "The Fair Imperia," "The Venial Sin," "The King's Sweetheart," "The Devil's Heir," "The Merrie Jests of King Louis the Eleventh," "The High Constable's Wife," "The Maid of Thilouse," "The Brothers-in-Arms," "The Vicar of Azay-le-Rideau," "The Reproach," "The Three Clerks of St. Nicholas," "The Continence of King Francis the First," "The Merry Tattle of the Nuns of Poissy," "How the Chateau d'Azay Came to Be Built," "The False Courtesan," "The Danger of Being too Innocent," "The Dear Night of Love," "The Sermon of the Merry Vicar of Meudon," "The Succubus," "Despair in Love," "Perseverance in Love," "Concerning a Provost Who Did Not Recognize Things," "About the Monk Amador, Who Was a Glorious Abbot of Turpenay" and "Bertha the Penitent."

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Balzac's Contes Drolatiques, published in three installments in the 1830s, offers a lively and lusty portrait of sixteenth-century French life and manners. These thirty stories in the tradition of Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Rabelais were claimed by the author to have originated in manuscripts from the abbeys of Touraine. Abounding in episodes of good-humored licentiousness, the tales scandalized Balzac's contemporaries and continue to delight modern readers.
French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) was a founder of realism in European literature. An inspiration to Proust, Dickens, Faulkner, Dostoyevsky, and countless others, Balzac wrote works that were hailed for their multifaceted characters and exquisite attention to detail. This edition's excellent translation was the first to make Contes Drolatiques available to English-speaking readers.
Dover (2014) republication of a standard edition.
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About the Author:

Honoré de Balzac (1799 - 1850) was a French novelist and playwright. The novel sequence La Comédie Humaine, which presents a panorama of post-Napoleonic French life, is generally viewed as his magnum opus. Owing to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. He is renowned for his multi-faceted characters; even his lesser characters are complex, morally ambiguous and fully human. Inanimate objects are imbued with character as well; the city of Paris, a backdrop for much of his writing, takes on many human qualities. His writing influenced many famous writers, including the novelists Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, Jack Kerouac, and Henry James, filmmakers Akira Kurosawa and Eric Rohmer as well as important philosophers such as Friedrich Engels. Many of Balzac's works have been made into films and they continue to inspire other writers.

About this edition

• Publisher: Aegypan
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1603124586
• ISBN 13: 9781603124584
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400