SOURCE: Lowrie, Joyce O. “Works Sighted in a Frame Narrative by Balzac: Facino Cane.” French Forum 15, no. 2 (May 1990): 149-67.

In the following essay, Lowrie provides a stylistic analysis of “Facino Cane,” focusing on the structure of the frame story.

Parmy tant d'emprunts, je suis bien aise d'en pouvoir desrober quelqu'un, les desguisant et difformant à nouveau service.

Montaigne, Essais¹

Links that exist between the “frame” and the “framed” in embedded narratives are multifarious and complex. Works sighted in Balzac's “Facino Cane” reveal how authors, real and implied, and narrators use intra- and intertexts to build bridges between basic segments of frame stories. The orchestration of these elements also shows that the narratives themselves are frequently homologous, in their dialogic structures, to the very texts to which they allude. Balzac's (and his narrator's) direct and indirect references to libraries, books, 1,001 Nights, the Divine Comedy, the Odyssey, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, and...