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That Tours was once the foremost of France’s regional capitals is a view to which Balzac gives full expression in six of Les Contes drolatiques, his series of tales set in the late-Middle Ages and Renaissance. 3 Throughout these bawdy adventures, he paints the city’s streets as teeming with life, and rich in unexpected possibilities. The penniless Jacques de Beaune, in ‘Comment fust basti le chasteau d’Azay’(1833), experiences their potential when he follows a beautiful noblewoman home, and wins for his audacity, first a dousing, then a mistress, and finally, riches enough to build ‘[ung] des mieulx elabourez chasteaux de la mignonne Tourayne’(OD, I, 206). Whilst its inhabitants are sometimes cruel, this is a joyful town, one in which even the King, in ‘Les Joyeulsetez du roy Loys le unziesme’(1832), enjoys practical jokes, placing a hanged man’s body in an old spinster’s bed so as to amuse himself and his courtiers …