Droll Stories, Volume 2

Droll Stories (original French title Contes drolatiques, often rendered in Chinese as Tales of Touraine or A Hundred Droll Tales) is a collection of short stories that Balzac wrote outside The Human Comedy. He claimed the stories came from old manuscripts preserved in the monasteries of Touraine and that he had edited and published them for the amusement of "Pantagruelists" (readers of Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel); in fact every story was his own, drawn from France in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, and he deliberately imitated sixteenth-century Old French and Rabelais's blunt, rough, vivid style. He originally planned one hundred tales in ten volumes but completed only three volumes plus some fragments, about thirty tales in all. In the standard English translations these stories are usually arranged in volumes as "the first ten," "the second ten," and "the third ten." Volume 2 generally corresponds to the second set of ten: a prologue opens it, followed by 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, and Despair in Love, with an epilogue at the end. These stories mostly concern love affairs and the absurd doings of clergy and nobility, carrying satire on society and human nature within their laughter and abuse. It should be noted that the "collections of English classics" circulating online are often merely simple merges of public-domain texts, differing in how the volumes are divided, the order of the stories, and whether a translator's preface is included; this entry corresponds to Volume 2 of the work, not the whole set.