A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How quickly the story moves.
An innkeeper buys a stubborn widow’s farm on a life annuity, then grows impatient when she remains stubbornly healthy.
A devoted widower pours all his love into the son his wife left behind, until an angry servant voices what the whole town knows.
Two homesick Breton soldiers share every Sunday—until a cowgirl’s kindness divides them.
A fallen log prompts an old bachelor to explain how one dangerous evening ended a close friendship and settled his view of marriage.
During the Prussian occupation, an officer mistakes a grieving woman’s immobility for defiance and decides to punish her.
A masked dancer collapses at a Paris ball, and the face beneath his disguise leads a doctor into a marriage shaped by vanity and endurance.
On a bright beach, a painter walks beside his disabled wife while a friend tells the harsh story behind their silent marriage.
A traveler visits a notorious countrywoman whose prosperity depends on the children society pays to stare at.
A clerk’s dissatisfied wife borrows a glittering necklace for one night among the wealthy, then pays dearly when it vanishes.
During a police roundup in rainy Paris, a young prostitute tells a passerby how poverty, abuse, and the law narrowed her choices.
A farming couple schedule a funeral around the colza crop, but the dying old man refuses to cooperate with their practical plans.
A lonely woman adopts an orphan for love, then begins to fear the silent young man growing up inside her house.
A sheltered young wife befriends the woman named in an anonymous warning about her husband—and trusts them both.
A late-night walk with a nervous pedlar leads a young oarsman into a poor household where each sound suggests the wrong kind of danger.
A newspaper’s suicide statistics carry a riverside reader into a dream of a Paris institution that promises a quiet, respectable death.
On her way to a lover’s apartment, a Parisian society wife discovers that habit can exhaust even the most forbidden affair.
A stranger’s watchful presence unsettles a fisherman’s household until his identity forces the family to reconsider every bond within it.
A frugal Norman peasant picks up a scrap of string on market day and finds that a harmless act can destroy a man’s reputation.
A smug husband decides he would recognize any sign of adultery and devises a test that may prove more than he wants to know.
A respected lawyer accused of violating his lover’s grave refuses counsel and asks a shocked courtroom to hear why he returned to her.
A disabled beggar, rejected from every familiar door, sets out hungry across a winter landscape governed by suspicion and contempt.
An unemployed carpenter walks from town to town seeking work until hunger and official suspicion drive him toward collapse.
A Parisian libertine becomes consumed by a stranger whose identity remains beyond his reach.
A young man explains how his mother’s final testament exposed the truth behind a brutal country household.
