By seeing and dramatizing changes that he mainly deplored, he initiated his readers into understanding the shape of the century. “Balzac’s great glory is that he pretended hardest,” declared his faithful disciple Henry James: In the art of make-believe, Balzac was the master.

Yet interspersed among the ninety-odd titles that make up The Human Comedy are a number of short stories and novellas that are among the best work Balzac did. Here he produces his striking effects, his thunderous climaxes, his acute psychological twists with greater economy than in the full-length novels. And he uses short fiction to try out some of his boldest imaginative flights. Here is the place to dramatize extremes of emotion: the loss of self in madness, artistic creation, and passion; the inventive forms taken by vengeance; the monomania of the artist; and, especially, the wilder shores of love, whether of a duchess, a castrato, or a panther. Somehow the short form works to liberate Balzac’s imagination from the need to be “the secretary of society,” as he put it. Not that society is missing here but rather that it, too, is given in its essence: as the conversation and interaction of social beings. In fact, Balzac’s short fiction tends to be extraordinarily fixed on the moment of oral exchange, on the telling of and the listening to stories. In this manner he renews an age-old tradition of oral storytelling, now given a new and knowing form. These stories, which often show us humanity in extreme situations, are also about the power of storytelling—and about the effect of that power on those listening.

Take for instance “Another Study of Womankind,” which opens at two o’clock in the morning. Félicité des Touches, herself a novelist, has asked the finest minds in her already select group of friends to linger after one of her large evening gatherings. The narrator, one of these chosen few, describes the scene:

Secrets artfully betrayed, exchanges both light and deep, everything undulates, spins, changes luster and color with each passing sentence. Keen judgments and breathless narrations follow one upon the next. Every eye listens, every gesture is a question, every glance an answer. There, in a word, all is perspicuity and reflection. Never did the phenomenon of speech, to which, when carefully studied and skillfully wielded, an actor or storyteller owes his glory, cast so overpowering a spell on me.

The phenomenon of speech stands at the very center of fictional creation, in the capacity to spin stories and to tell them to others. If, as Walter Benjamin tells us in “The Storyteller,” the novel is the form of the solitary modern individual—and a genre that one generally reads in solitude—Balzac’s many conversational tales take us back to an imagined golden age of storytelling where the living voice of the narrator is part of the story, and the reactions of listeners indicate the force of the story told and suggest also that there is a further story to be told about the relations of the tellers and the listeners. His characters evoke the spirit of an earlier age of sociability, all the while conscious that it is doomed by a world of commerce, journalism, and the devaluation of leisure. In “Another Study of Womankind,” the final episode is recounted by Horace Bianchon, the medical doctor who shows up repeatedly in The Human Comedy (we know several other guests as well from prior appearances in other novels and tales), and its effect is briefly registered: “The tale at an end, all the women rose from the table, and with this the spell Bianchon had cast on them was broken. Nevertheless, some had felt almost cold on hearing those final words.” This final tale of honor, vengeance, agony, and slow death casts a chill and breaks up the circle. Stories enchant but then leave us to meditate, alone, on their often sinister meanings.

Not only the tellers of stories but also the listeners to them are crucial here, and the scene of narrative exchange is itself dramatic. As Benjamin declared in his essay extolling the vanishing art of the oral tale, storytelling is about the transmission of wisdom. Something passes from teller to listener. It is this very process of transmission that matters to Balzac as much as the content of the tale. The act of narration can be dangerous, as the man who is about to begin telling the story of the origin of the Lanty family fortune warns the Marquise de Rochefide in “Sarrasine.” But she is impatient to hear. For his part, the narrator seems to believe that the intimacy of a late-night storytelling session alone with the marquise will bring an erotic reward. But the very subject of the story he has to tell proves difficult to manage, its effects uncontrollable. You can’t always get what you want by telling a story. You may be punished instead for what you have told.

A formalist critic would note that Balzac very often makes use of the “framed tale,” or the “embedded tale,” using an outer frame to establish the narrative situation and then turning the narration over to one of the characters. Sometimes, as in “Sarrasine,” the character who listens to the tale reemerges at the end to comment on it.