[2] Set in medieval and Renaissance France, the Contes drolatiques seek to recall to the reader a golden age of French national character, before it was tainted by over-analysis and what Balzac himself refers to as hypocritical prudery.

[5][6] Balzac wrote to his future wife, Countess Hańska, describing them as an "arabesque" he was weaving around his contemporary novels and stories, Human Comedy, and predicting that they would be his "principal title to fame in days to come".

[14] Balzac's stated aim was to write in a purely French idiom free of the artifice of foreign terms: ung françois pour luy seul, oultre les mots bizarres ... phrazes d'oultre mer et jargons hespagnioles advenuz par le faict des estrangiers ("a French language for itself alone, without the bizarre words[,] ...overseas words and bits of Spanish jargon attached to it through the actions of foreigners").

[20] The final group, published after periods of self-doubt and the destruction of some drafts in a fire, show more ironic references to contemporary life and to the complex plotting the series had sought to avoid; some of the stories appear novelistic.

[11][23] George Sand termed them "indecent"; a critic called them "tales in which all the lusts of the flesh are unleashed, satisfied and left to run riot amid a bacchanalia of flushed Priapi"; Alphonse de Lamartine described them as "futile, somewhat cynical volumes".

Roland Chollet has argued that his humorous works "served Balzac as an experimental space",[25] and for Stefan Zweig, such disparate writings carried out simultaneously "[could] be explained only by his desire to test his own genius", thereby establishing the foundations for his Human Comedy like an architect "calculat[ing] and check[ing] the dimensions and stresses" of a projected building.

In the first story, "La belle Impéria" [fr], the Bishop of Chur, secretary to the Archbishop of Bordeaux, is seduced and threatened with excommunication for committing sins of the flesh.