Les Contes drôlatiques de Balzac, des contes à tous crins et de tout poil.

Hair cornucopia in Balzac's Contes drôlatiques.

Censorship; Hairstyles; Hair analysis; Middle Ages; Anatomists; Success; Internet censorship

In order to re-evaluate the constraints imposed by literary censorship to writers and painters after the Renaissance until the Restauration and Orleanist monarchy, we offer this comparative analysis of the treatment of hair, hair style, body hair in Balzac's La Comédie humaine where Balzac has to restrain himself to reach success and in his Contes drôlatiques, which takes place in the medieval period and the Renaissance, and emulates the language and crudity of the time. Balzac's point of view is particularly interesting first because he is quite knowledgeable of literary and artistic expressions during the medieval age and the Renaissance with Aretino and Rabelais, and second because he lived during the time when the daguerreotype appeared and made possible the representation of the body as it is, attempt that the anatomists of the Renaissance had also played with. However, with their droll stories, neither was Rabelais an anatomist nor was Balzac a common man. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]