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A boulevardier’s sympathy for a young widow in Montmartre Cemetery leads to an affair—and a question about who is hunting whom.
A man asks his doctor whether reason has led him to an invisible world—or into madness.
In an asylum, a beautiful woman hides imaginary scars while a doctor explains the guilt behind her delusion.
A lover of darkness wanders through Paris as the familiar city falls silent and dawn seems to recede beyond reach.
A rural postman, primed by a grisly newspaper report, hears screams behind shuttered windows and races to stop a crime.
A writer reflects on the attraction and menace of cats before recalling a night when one seemed to rule an old castle.
A boisterous sergeant seeking nightlife in a quiet Breton town follows one wrong turn into a social disaster.
Unable to sleep in an old family bedroom, a guest discovers secret love letters hidden beneath its severe former occupant’s portrait.
A respected provincial hostess maintains a secret hotel room for discreet affairs until one extra rendezvous collides with an innkeeper’s concealment.
Amid Cannes’s flower festival, two fashionable women compare the vanity and danger hidden inside the wish to be desired.
A shopkeeper’s unwanted kiss becomes a scandal, and the charming friend sent to repair it proves no model of restraint.
An art dealer lends a cash-strapped baroness a Renaissance Christ and trusts her to invent a profitable story around it.
In a fashionable Paris salon, the privilege of cutting a brioche marks favor, rivalry, and the changing fortunes of its celebrated hostess.
An austere officer returns from maneuvers burdened by one lapse and insists on confessing it to his far more worldly wife.
On a train, a magistrate recognizes a former officer whose war injuries seem to confirm a familiar tale of lost love.
A grieving lover hides in a cemetery overnight, where the dead begin correcting the respectable lies carved above them.
A would-be lover accepts a suspiciously welcoming husband's invitation and discovers a precise defense against adultery.
A reclusive count explains why a traveling mother, her daughter, and a different grateful companion visit him every July.
An Indian prince’s cremation beneath the cliffs of Étretat confronts a French resort town with an unfamiliar rite.
A skeptical magistrate recounts an unsolved Corsican murder involving a secretive Englishman and a chained human hand.
A country gentleman records the invisible presence that seems to drain his strength, command his will, and turn his home into a prison.
A contented clerk dismisses his beloved wife’s glittering jewels as paste until widowhood forces him to have one valued.
A boastful old bachelor recalls his first society affair and the practical lesson he learned about privacy.
A masked dancer collapses at a Paris ball, and the face beneath his disguise leads a doctor into a marriage shaped by vanity and endurance.
