Essays on literary works - 2024

“An Essay-Letter to Honoré de Balzac” (“Droll Stories” - The Playful Tales of Honoré de Balzac)

Dear Monsieur Balzac,

Hi. It’s me—your long-lost internet grandchild, writing from the year 2025 where books scream silently from digital shelves and TikTok dances have replaced courtship rituals. I just finished Droll Stories, and honestly? I feel like I stumbled into the 16th-century version of late-night Twitter: horny, brilliant, kinda mean, weirdly wholesome at times, but mostly... chaos. Total, glorious, unfiltered chaos.

Did I expect to laugh out loud? No. Did I expect bawdy tales from a man in a powdered wig (sorry, the visual is stuck)? Definitely not. But here I am, typing this on a screen that glows like a witch's mirror, trying to convince literature nerds and extremely online Gen Z students that your “silly little stories” are anything but quaint.

Because Droll Stories isn’t just dusty French folklore in disguise. It’s a medieval thirst trap. It’s a confessional booth made out of wine and satire. It’s the Renaissance internet before the internet was even, like, a distant dream.

Let’s break this down. Loosely. Messily. With love and memes.

What Even Are the “Droll Stories”? (AKA: The Balzac I Wasn't Ready For)

Okay, so. La Comédie humaine—that’s the highbrow Balzac stuff, right? The canonized, triple-underlined, graduate seminar fodder. Droll Stories? That’s his burner account.

Written between 1832 and 1837, this collection of thirty stories masquerades as “old chronicles” from Touraine (aka the Netflix medieval France setting of your dreams). But instead of knights and dragons—actually, wait, there are knights—Balzac gives us randy priests, clever bakers, nuns who are up to things the Vatican would cancel instantly, and a whole lot of deeply unserious but hyper-honest takes on sex, power, stupidity, and the Church.

And no, I don’t mean church in a cute Sunday brunch kind of way. I mean the full-on, Inquisition-dodging, confess-or-be-executed institution. Balzac didn’t just roast religion—he spit-roasted it like a Renaissance hog on a feast day.

If The Canterbury Tales and The Decameron had a problematic love child raised by Voltaire and trained in the art of literary trolling, it would be Droll Stories. Period.

Horny on Main: Why Balzac Was the OG Sh*tposter of French Literature

Let’s talk tone. Because this isn’t just historical storytelling—it’s shitposting with lace collars. Balzac weaponizes innuendo like it’s a fencing foil. Every sentence is puffed up with this faux-archaic style that’s basically the 19th-century version of writing in all-caps for comedic effect. He knows exactly what he’s doing.

Like, imagine someone writing: "The holy friar dideth caress her ample virtues with great piety (if thou knowest what I mean)" and you get the idea. It’s smart and dirty and so over-the-top that it circles back to being kind of profound.

And that’s the weirdest part—Droll Stories feels unserious until suddenly, it isn’t. Between the butt jokes and overactive loins, you get these sharp flashes of satire so good they could slice a papal decree in half.

Clergy hypocrisy? Exposed. Bourgeois greed? Mocked. Gender dynamics? Balzac is lowkey more self-aware than half of BookTok. (Yes, I'm saying it. Fight me.)

The Performance of Language — or, Why Balzac Is the Literary Equivalent of a Drag Show

Reading Balzac here is like watching a drag performance in a candlelit chapel. The tone is campy, excessive, fabulous—and then bam, real emotion punches through. He’s playing with language like a performance artist, mocking the constraints of both the Church and the French Academy while swaddling himself in their velvet robes.

There’s something about this theatricality that feels deeply modern. He’s using his “ye olde” voice the way a YouTuber uses a fake British accent for dramatic effect. And weirdly? It works.

The way he laces morality into mischief reminds me of stand-up comedians like Hannah Gadsby or Bo Burnham—people who seduce you with jokes, then leave you reeling with truth. I know Balzac didn’t TikTok his pain away, but if he had a Notes App, it would be unhinged brilliance.

So Wait—Is This All Just Dirty Jokes or Something Deeper?

Here’s where things get murky (but also good-murky, like the end of Euphoria when you’re not sure if you're inspired or just emotionally broken).

Yes, there’s sex. Like, a lot. No fade to black. No literary euphemism. We’re talking Renaissance sexts.

But Droll Stories is also—bear with me—a kind of therapy. It’s France working through its post-Revolution trauma. Balzac writing through the mess of religious guilt, class friction, and erotic repression. Under the surface-level lust, there’s real political and emotional texture.

He’s laughing so he doesn’t scream. He’s telling you a joke while slipping you the keys to dismantling a corrupt society.

That’s not just droll. That’s dangerous. And kind of punk.

Why It Hits Different in 2025 (Yes, We Still Read Books—Barely)

So why bring Balzac to Gen Z?

Because you all (yes, us all) get irony. We breathe postmodern confusion. We know what it’s like to live in a world that feels like a parody of itself.

Balzac’s Droll Stories are anti-perfection. They're messy, horny, haunted by history, and still full of absurd hope. They’re what happens when you let the freak flag fly in an age trying to burn every flag. He doesn’t moralize. He lets people be ridiculous, and by doing so, makes them weirdly human.

In a world drowning in curated hot takes and algorithmic morality, Droll Stories is refreshingly... feral.

And I think that’s what we crave right now. Stories that aren’t safe. Voices that don’t apologize. Literature that remembers it’s allowed to be gross and gorgeous and contradictory. Literature that swipes right on chaos.

Mic Drop (Or: No Neat Ending, Sorry)

Balzac, you filthy genius—your stories shouldn’t still work. But they do. They do because they’re not trying to be timeless. They’re just so present in their moment that they boomerang back into relevance.

You laughed at hypocrisy. You let women be clever and carnal. You let men be idiots. You let joy be political. And you made storytelling feel like gossip over wine at 2am—too true to be polite, too delicious to stop.

Droll Stories is not a relic. It’s a time capsule for future weirdos. So here I am, cracking it open. Smirking. Blushing. Underlining. Whispering to my lit nerd friends, “Wait, have you read the one with the monk and the baker’s wife?”

You’d like the internet, Balzac. You’d like how we overshare. You’d thrive on BookTok. Your username would be something unholy.

Anyway. Gotta go. Someone just posted a thirst trap of Raskolnikov with a clown emoji and I need to process it.