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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.
Bullied because he has no father, a village boy asks a kindly blacksmith to give him a name his classmates cannot mock.
On a nighttime walk through Paris, a convivial dinner guest argues that no friendship or love can breach the solitude of the mind.
A farm servant’s brief romance leaves her facing motherhood, secrecy, and a marriage shaped by work, fear, and rural necessity.
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 lavish wedding breakfast paid for by an estranged daughter turns awkward when the groom chooses the wrong song.
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.
A husband’s teasing questions about his wife’s first marriage turn posthumous jealousy into a dangerous demand for honesty.
A sheltered mill owner’s wife discovers Parisian flirtation, then mistakes the force of a dream for love.
An art dealer lends a cash-strapped baroness a Renaissance Christ and trusts her to invent a profitable story around it.
Letters hidden inside an old chasuble reveal a bedridden woman’s intimate meditation on the object that holds birth, love, illness, and death.
After his parents die, a blind farmhand becomes the target of a household’s escalating cruelty in rural Normandy.
Three drunken artists in military costumes capture a burglar and turn his arrest into an improvised campaign.
In a fashionable Paris salon, the privilege of cutting a brioche marks favor, rivalry, and the changing fortunes of its celebrated hostess.
After forty years of silence, an aging woman walks across Normandy to see the son she was forced to surrender after a secret affair.
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.
On his wedding night, a reformed libertine receives an urgent summons that brings his abandoned past into his new marriage.
At a country christening, a priest discovers an unexpected tenderness as he holds his newborn nephew among the reveling family.
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.
