Droll Stories

Thirty tales in the manner of the sixteenth century — monks, sergeants, wives, devils and the Loire valley — written in a deliberate old French that Balzac invented for the purpose. He meant them as a hundred and finished thirty, and they cost him readers who could not forgive the coarseness. Under the bawdy is the same interest as in the Comédie humaine: what people will do for money, and what they will pretend afterwards. Nineteen plates after Hogarth and Daumier, among others, follow the same low life the tales do: beggars, street musicians, markets and city views from 1634 to 1856.