The Project Gutenberg EBook of Droll Stories, Complete, by Honore de Balzac

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Title: Droll Stories, Complete
Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine

Author: Honore de Balzac

Release Date: August 23, 2004 [EBook #13260]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DROLL STORIES, COMPLETE ***

Produced by John Bickers, Ian Hodgson, Dagny and Emma Dudding

DROLL STORIES

COLLECTED FROM THE ABBEYS OF TOURAINE

BY

HONORE DE BALZAC

TRANSLATORS PREFACE

When, in March, 1832, the first volume of the now famous _Contes
Drolatiques_ was published by Gosselin of Paris, Balzac, in a short
preface, written in the publisher's name, replied to those attacks
which he anticipated certain critics would make upon his hardy
experiment. He claimed for his book the protection of all those to
whom literature was dear, because it was a work of art--and a work of
art, in the highest sense of the word, it undoubtedly is. Like
Boccaccio, Rabelais, the Queen of Navarre, Ariosto, and Verville, the
great author of _The Human Comedy_ has painted an epoch. In the fresh
and wonderful language of the Merry Vicar Of Meudon, he has given us a
marvellous picture of French life and manners in the sixteenth
century. The gallant knights and merry dames of that eventful period
of French history stand out in bold relief upon his canvas. The
background in these life-like figures is, as it were, "sketched upon
the spot." After reading the _Contes Drolatiques_, one could almost find
one's way about the towns and villages of Touraine, unassisted by map
or guide. Not only is this book a work of art from its historical
information and topographical accuracy; its claims to that distinction
rest upon a broader foundation. Written in the nineteenth century in
imitation of the style of the sixteenth, it is a triumph of literary
archaeology. It is a model of that which it professes to imitate; the
production of a writer who, to accomplish it, must have been at once
historian, linguist, philosopher, archaeologist