A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How quickly the story moves.
A visitor to an asylum reads the journal of a collector whose antique cabinet concealed a relic that consumed his mind and desire.
When a grandmother asks a gentle priest why he chose solitude, he recalls the childhood attachment that taught him to fear ordinary happiness.
An aging servant’s daily walk with his mistress prompts a question about thirty-five years of loyalty—and an answer neither has voiced.
A respectable provincial woman visits Paris determined to sample the glamorous vice she has imagined from newspapers and fashionable gossip.
An old marquis confesses why one visit to a dead woman’s locked bedroom left him afraid of darkness for life.
A vain former minister recalls the ingenious deception that kept a clever bourgeois lover in his life for three years.
When a fisherman’s arm is trapped in a trawling cable, his captain brother must choose between saving him and saving an expensive net.
After their child vanishes with a traveling circus, two aging parents spend years searching roads and city churches for one familiar face.
A celebrated cavalry officer returns from war expecting to reclaim his glamorous lover, only to confront a form of sacrifice he cannot understand.
A doctor’s attempt to awaken an intellectually disabled girl’s mind leads her family into a marriage that makes affection another form of confinement.
A dying disciple of Schopenhauer recalls the night his teacher’s corpse seemed to retain its terrifying power.
A young Norman soldier asks his parents to judge the Black woman he hopes to marry on her character rather than her skin.
A self-assured traveler plots a conquest on the road to Corsica, certain he has read his companion correctly.
A childhood memory of an old seamstress opens onto the secret act of courage that shaped her entire life.
A resentful farm boy assigned to care for an old horse turns an ordinary chore into a test of mercy.
A retired notary asks for a divorce after discovering the ingenious history behind his wife’s advertised fortune.
Lonely and aging, a Parisian baron travels south to meet the grown son he secretly supported but has never seen.
Hussars holding a ruined village turn Twelfth Night into an improvised feast before war abruptly reclaims the evening.
At a desolate tarn, a boatman shows a traveler the blood-red cross marking where the Wandering Jew supposedly died.
A seasoned traveller argues that real fear comes not from known danger, but from what the mind cannot explain.
A letter from a former lover forces an aging bachelor to compare his remembered youth with the man he has become.
An old school friend visits a conservative country household and treats their hospitality as permission to remake it.
A lonely traveler reunites with a boastful school friend whose lavish home hides an unexpected family business.
A boulevardier’s sympathy for a young widow in Montmartre Cemetery leads to an affair—and a question about who is hunting whom.
