A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
The narrator’s attitude toward the story.
A midnight train encounter leads two travelers through unsettling accounts of the dread inspired by things not yet understood.
When distant Corsica appears across the evening sea, an old traveler recalls a noblewoman who gave up society for lasting love.
A dying Norman farmer entrusts his son with an address, a secret household, and an obligation no legal will records.
A confirmed bachelor plans to marry a near stranger because one empty armchair has made solitude unbearable.
A severe priest sets out to confront his niece’s secret lover, but the moonlit countryside challenges his certainty.
A man asks his doctor whether reason has led him to an invisible world—or into madness.
During a winter retreat, a resourceful French lieutenant risks his mission to carry a freezing young woman through enemy-held country.
A hunter in a frozen marsh witnesses a wild bird's devotion and finds his sport transformed by the sight.
A man who fears his own hands demonstrates a power over minds and objects that leaves his friend unsure whether either of them is sane.
In an asylum, a beautiful woman hides imaginary scars while a doctor explains the guilt behind her delusion.
During the Prussian occupation, a young Frenchwoman is drawn into an officers’ supper where humiliation sharpens into resistance.
A Norman farmer’s sudden passion survives rejection until an unexpected crisis puts old loyalties to the test.
A former prosecutor recalls the admired schoolmaster accused of feeding children sweets laced with glass and broken needles.
A young wife returns from Switzerland with a confession about one moonlit night beside Lake Lucerne.
In occupied Normandy, a mother awaiting news of her soldier son shares her isolated cottage with four courteous enemy troops.
A lover of darkness wanders through Paris as the familiar city falls silent and dawn seems to recede beyond reach.
A hard Norman farmer faces a Prussian court-martial and calmly explains why enemy scouts have been vanishing.
A frightened countess helps a wounded stranger cross a border, beginning a wordless bond neither dares disturb.
A seasoned boatman anchors for a quiet smoke on the Seine, only to spend the night trapped in fog, silence, and mounting terror.
A night of torch fishing on the Algerian coast leads an old school friend to disclose the jealousy that drove him from France.
A servant tried for killing her newborn asks the court to hear how careful plans for motherhood collapsed in one night.
On a nighttime walk through Paris, a convivial dinner guest argues that no friendship or love can breach the solitude of the mind.
A man with no obvious catastrophe explains why thirty years of repetition and one drawer of old letters have made life unbearable.
Letters hidden inside an old chasuble reveal a bedridden woman’s intimate meditation on the object that holds birth, love, illness, and death.
