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A dinner-table skeptic challenges tales of telepathy and prophecy, then offers two unsettling examples from his own experience.
In colonial Algeria, a traveler’s affair with a married woman leads him from sensual confidence into a reckless encounter under her husband’s roof.
A Norman farmer’s sudden passion survives rejection until an unexpected crisis puts old loyalties to the test.
A forester’s fearless daughter faces six lost Prussian soldiers alone in a snowbound forest house.
In a quiet Paris garden, a young law student befriends two forgotten dancers who still inhabit the manners of another century.
A wandering painter befriends an eccentric Englishwoman on the Normandy coast and discovers the feeling beneath her reserve.
A stagecoach full of villagers turns one man’s earache into a public medical emergency and a traveling comedy.
A bachelor’s playful affair takes a nervous turn when a fortune-teller links a beloved black cat to a past romantic disaster.
An old colonial officer recalls a seven-man punitive expedition whose celebrated success depended on ruthless deception and force.
A former prosecutor recalls the admired schoolmaster accused of feeding children sweets laced with glass and broken needles.
A man defends an unforgivable marriage by tracing the grief, resemblance, and desire that brought a father to it.
A timid husband’s devotion to his son is shaken by a charge that turns family love into an unbearable question.
A young wife returns from Switzerland with a confession about one moonlit night beside Lake Lucerne.
In occupied Normandy, a mother awaiting news of her soldier son shares her isolated cottage with four courteous enemy troops.
A society observer explains why a fashionable countess is said to have killed her daughter without committing a crime.
Five penniless boating friends find their carefree life on the Seine transformed by the quick-witted young woman who takes the helm.
A rebellious law student smuggles a shopgirl into his strict Breton landlady’s house and learns her rules have unexpected limits.
A forgotten spa diary records twenty-five days of treatments, flirtation, boredom, and selective moral philosophy.
A poor family builds its hopes around an absent uncle’s promised fortune during a long-awaited holiday to Jersey.
A nephew’s Good Friday prank sends a kindly Jesuit to the sickbed of his fiercely anticlerical uncle.
A drunken wrong turn at a country wedding leaves a determined bachelor facing a second ceremony he never planned.
At a quiet spa, a traveler meets a frail young woman and her nervous father, whose strange afflictions share one terrible cause.
A lover of darkness wanders through Paris as the familiar city falls silent and dawn seems to recede beyond reach.
A miserly Norman farmer resists his son's marriage, then finds his rigid household altered by love, loss, and the demands of survival.
