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A boastful old bachelor recalls his first society affair and the practical lesson he learned about privacy.
A pious aristocratic family races to secure a freethinking marquis's last rites before scandal can reach the newspapers.
During a police roundup in rainy Paris, a young prostitute tells a passerby how poverty, abuse, and the law narrowed her choices.
A newly appointed State Councillor scatters favors across Paris until one generous recommendation threatens his carefully polished importance.
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 coastal place-name preserves the story of an austere village priest whose hatred of desire turns violent on a storm-beaten cliff.
A bored baroness copies a window signal she sees across the street and discovers that curiosity can be taken as a business offer.
A duel between two dragoons reveals the secret arrangement of a widow known for piety and strict respectability.
A young man explains how his mother’s final testament exposed the truth behind a brutal country household.
An anticlerical village joiner wants a lucrative church contract, but the parish priest sets a spiritual price for the work.
At the Last Judgment, tyrants, saints, and ordinary souls learn that divine scrutiny exposes more than public sins.
A vain minor poet mistakes his hunger for inspiration for a grand passion when a young admirer takes his rhetoric seriously.
A shabby barroom storyteller explains how he was promised a fortune by an unread author—and why he never received it.
After a drunken fall, a salesman’s friends try to guide him back toward the church.
On the anniversary of Parnell’s death, campaign workers shelter from the rain and argue over Irish politics.
A boarding-house owner decides how to handle her daughter’s relationship with one of her lodgers.
Two Dublin men arrange a meeting with a servant, and one spends the evening waiting for news.
Bingo falls for a revolutionary's daughter and joins her father's cause, even as he bets on a horse owned by his wealthy uncle.
A poet who hates New York must send his aunt lively reports from its nightlife to keep the allowance that lets him stay in the country.
When the stars vanish and a voice schedules Earth’s judgment, a New York dress seller watches humanity prepare for the end.
A prejudiced anthropologist and his assistant discover that an alien village possesses a rare medicine with extraordinary healing powers.
A university professor receives a bereaved mother whose composed manner appears to embody the ideal he has made of Japanese restraint.
