A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How the story is told.
A French traveler among English hotel guests turns hymns, dancing, and Scripture into a private war.
A veteran practical joker recalls the night suspicion made him his own victim and the chemical prank he played as a boy.
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.
Amid Cannes’s flower festival, two fashionable women compare the vanity and danger hidden inside the wish to be desired.
A young marquise determined to escape her jealous husband hires an expert accomplice to produce evidence no court can ignore.
A man with no obvious catastrophe explains why thirty years of repetition and one drawer of old letters have made life unbearable.
A dying woman hires an advocate to find the son who vanished after discovering the secret at the center of her household.
A shopkeeper’s unwanted kiss becomes a scandal, and the charming friend sent to repair it proves no model of restraint.
A novice lawyer asks a jury to see murder not as a mystery of evidence, but as the final consequence of one man’s blind reverence.
An art dealer lends a cash-strapped baroness a Renaissance Christ and trusts her to invent a profitable story around it.
Three drunken artists in military costumes capture a burglar and turn his arrest into an improvised campaign.
A country doctor recounts the lifelong devotion of an itinerant chair mender to a village chemist.
A doctor’s defense of a desperate mother leads him to recount a widow’s struggle with pregnancy and public shame.
A doctor’s attempt to protect a newborn at a Breton christening collides with custom, cold, and drink.
A lonely Parisian seeking company for the night hears a noise behind a hidden door in a sex worker’s rented room.
A would-be lover accepts a suspiciously welcoming husband's invitation and discovers a precise defense against adultery.
At a Norman farm, a baron explains why the tenant who serves him faithfully also makes him feel like a forgiven culprit.
A reclusive count explains why a traveling mother, her daughter, and a different grateful companion visit him every July.
An exile has built a fortune around one plan: return to the woman whose love ruined him.
A skeptical magistrate recounts an unsolved Corsican murder involving a secretive Englishman and a chained human hand.
A visitor wins the trust of a hermit whose retreat on a southern hill began with one devastating discovery in Paris.
An upholsterer explains how a cherished fishing spot, two furious wives, and one unlucky punch brought him before a jury.
A general challenges a dinner party’s easy use of the word “horrible” with two memories of people stripped of humanity.
