A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
The narrator’s attitude toward the story.
At a desolate tarn, a boatman shows a traveler the blood-red cross marking where the Wandering Jew supposedly died.
A caustic observer attacks Parisian politicians, journalists, and friends whose charm masks fickle loyalties and flexible principles.
Spring fever draws a young man toward a stranger on the Seine, until another passenger offers an urgent warning about love.
An aging Parisian couple's return to the woods of their courtship ends with an embarrassed appearance before the village mayor.
A provincial town crowns its shyest young man as a model of virtue, then watches its solemn civic experiment take an unruly turn.
A major turns military discipline on an entire fortified town for the sake of one forbidden meeting with a married woman.
A Norman brothel closes for a country confirmation, carrying its lively household from familiar commerce into an unexpected sacred occasion.
A dinner-table skeptic challenges tales of telepathy and prophecy, then offers two unsettling examples from his own experience.
In colonial Algeria, a traveler’s affair with a married woman leads him from sensual confidence into a reckless encounter under her husband’s roof.
A stagecoach full of villagers turns one man’s earache into a public medical emergency and a traveling comedy.
A bachelor’s playful affair takes a nervous turn when a fortune-teller links a beloved black cat to a past romantic disaster.
A rebellious law student smuggles a shopgirl into his strict Breton landlady’s house and learns her rules have unexpected limits.
A forgotten spa diary records twenty-five days of treatments, flirtation, boredom, and selective moral philosophy.
A nephew’s Good Friday prank sends a kindly Jesuit to the sickbed of his fiercely anticlerical uncle.
A drunken wrong turn at a country wedding leaves a determined bachelor facing a second ceremony he never planned.
A Paris office clerk explains how one disastrous Sunday cured him of the country—and of marriage.
A writer reflects on the attraction and menace of cats before recalling a night when one seemed to rule an old castle.
A French traveler among English hotel guests turns hymns, dancing, and Scripture into a private war.
A veteran practical joker recalls the night suspicion made him his own victim and the chemical prank he played as a boy.
A nervous bridegroom’s wedding-night embarrassment sends him into Paris in search of a drastic remedy.
A lifelong sportsman considers marriage at fifty, then travels to Paris to test whether neglect has left him unfit for it.
In a fashionable Paris salon, the privilege of cutting a brioche marks favor, rivalry, and the changing fortunes of its celebrated hostess.
On a train, a magistrate recognizes a former officer whose war injuries seem to confirm a familiar tale of lost love.
A would-be lover accepts a suspiciously welcoming husband's invitation and discovers a precise defense against adultery.
