A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
The readership the story was written for.
A rural postman, primed by a grisly newspaper report, hears screams behind shuttered windows and races to stop a crime.
A hard Norman farmer faces a Prussian court-martial and calmly explains why enemy scouts have been vanishing.
A Paris office clerk explains how one disastrous Sunday cured him of the country—and of marriage.
A writer reflects on the attraction and menace of cats before recalling a night when one seemed to rule an old castle.
A poor clerk spends a rare bonus on a grand family outing and a hired horse meant to restore his aristocratic dignity.
A frightened countess helps a wounded stranger cross a border, beginning a wordless bond neither dares disturb.
A seasoned boatman anchors for a quiet smoke on the Seine, only to spend the night trapped in fog, silence, and mounting terror.
A night of torch fishing on the Algerian coast leads an old school friend to disclose the jealousy that drove him from France.
A boisterous sergeant seeking nightlife in a quiet Breton town follows one wrong turn into a social disaster.
A French traveler among English hotel guests turns hymns, dancing, and Scripture into a private war.
Unable to sleep in an old family bedroom, a guest discovers secret love letters hidden beneath its severe former occupant’s portrait.
At a crowded riverside resort, a young man’s absolute devotion collides with a lover whose desires he cannot control or understand.
A thrifty Norman widow takes in a small dog, then discovers that protecting her property carries an unwelcome cost.
A veteran practical joker recalls the night suspicion made him his own victim and the chemical prank he played as a boy.
An imperious old maid’s final illness exposes the private life she never allowed anyone to see.
An aging bachelor revisits the one love he never declared and asks the question that could make his quiet life seem wasted.
Alone in the house of her whole life, an elderly woman writes to a friend about memory, aging, and the objects that preserve vanished lives.
A nervous bridegroom’s wedding-night embarrassment sends him into Paris in search of a drastic remedy.
A respected provincial hostess maintains a secret hotel room for discreet affairs until one extra rendezvous collides with an innkeeper’s concealment.
A servant tried for killing her newborn asks the court to hear how careful plans for motherhood collapsed in one night.
Amid Cannes’s flower festival, two fashionable women compare the vanity and danger hidden inside the wish to be desired.
A lifelong sportsman considers marriage at fifty, then travels to Paris to test whether neglect has left him unfit for it.
A boastful Norman farmer turns the Prussian soldier billeted with him into a local joke, until humiliation becomes dangerous.
A young marquise determined to escape her jealous husband hires an expert accomplice to produce evidence no court can ignore.
