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Two hunters leave a lonely Norman château for midnight Mass and a condolence call that turns Christmas custom into grim comedy.
A respected man returns to a Breton inn and confronts the human cost of a long-forgotten encounter.
A landowner recalls forcing his pregnant servant into a marriage arranged to protect his own name.
Two hungry strangers sharing a slow train along the Mediterranean coast discover an unusual way to ease each other’s need.
A vain former minister recalls the ingenious deception that kept a clever bourgeois lover in his life for three years.
Ten travelers flee occupied Rouen, but their escape stalls when a Prussian officer makes one passenger’s body the price of everyone’s freedom.
A lonely Parisian’s plan for a generous Christmas supper with a stranger develops an alarming complication before bedtime.
After four years at sea, a sailor returns to Marseille and meets a woman whose questions turn a night of celebration into dread.
A wealthy, childless couple offers two poor farming families money and security in exchange for adopting a son.
Two tipsy noblewomen trade secrets, and one boasts of turning a servant’s devotion into summer entertainment.
At a Twelfth Night dinner, a guest asks how the household’s quiet companion came to live there and what her place has cost her.
A poor family builds its hopes around an absent uncle’s promised fortune during a long-awaited holiday to Jersey.
A poor clerk spends a rare bonus on a grand family outing and a hired horse meant to restore his aristocratic dignity.
A servant tried for killing her newborn asks the court to hear how careful plans for motherhood collapsed in one night.
After his parents die, a blind farmhand becomes the target of a household’s escalating cruelty in rural Normandy.
A country doctor recounts the lifelong devotion of an itinerant chair mender to a village chemist.
A lonely Parisian seeking company for the night hears a noise behind a hidden door in a sex worker’s rented room.
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 newspaper’s suicide statistics carry a riverside reader into a dream of a Paris institution that promises a quiet, respectable death.
A duel between two dragoons reveals the secret arrangement of a widow known for piety and strict respectability.
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.
