The article analyses the model of narrative prose collections, which took shape in France in the last third of the 16th century, and which is commonly referred to as “sundry stories and speeches” (it includes books by Noël du Fail, Nicolas de Cholières, Guillaume Bouchet). Typically regarded as an abortive branch of novelistics, these works emerged under the influence of the reception in French literature of dialogue in its various hypostases - humanist, and later platonic. Due to the work of translators and interpreters, this genre became the basis of a new form of dialogue, “academic conversation” (or devis). The second model for “sundry stories” was the collection of common places (loci communes): the humanist form, when adopted by city culture, not only served to popularise humanist knowledge, but also to determine a structure within which it was possible to accommodate almost all the short prose forms, from a proverb to a novella.