A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
Where does the story take place?
A boisterous sergeant seeking nightlife in a quiet Breton town follows one wrong turn into a social disaster.
A French traveler among English hotel guests turns hymns, dancing, and Scripture into a private war.
A nervous bridegroom’s wedding-night embarrassment sends him into Paris in search of a drastic remedy.
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.
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.
A lavish wedding breakfast paid for by an estranged daughter turns awkward when the groom chooses the wrong song.
A sheltered mill owner’s wife discovers Parisian flirtation, then mistakes the force of a dream for love.
An art dealer lends a cash-strapped baroness a Renaissance Christ and trusts her to invent a profitable story around it.
Three drunken artists in military costumes capture a burglar and turn his arrest into an improvised campaign.
On his wedding night, a reformed libertine receives an urgent summons that brings his abandoned past into his new marriage.
A lonely Parisian seeking company for the night hears a noise behind a hidden door in a sex worker’s rented room.
After burying a man celebrated for his honesty, his children open a private confession that forces them to choose between truth and family honor.
A law student turns a murderer’s preserved hand into a bell pull, dismissing every warning until terror enters his locked room.
A grieving lover hides in a cemetery overnight, where the dead begin correcting the respectable lies carved above them.
On her first trip to Paris, a newlywed becomes alarmed when her husband does not rejoin her after boarding an omnibus.
Years after abandoning a pregnant lover, a lonely clerk sees the child he never knew and seeks one brief chance to meet him.
A skeptical magistrate recounts an unsolved Corsican murder involving a secretive Englishman and a chained human hand.
A visitor wins the trust of a hermit whose retreat on a southern hill began with one devastating discovery in Paris.
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 pious aristocratic family races to secure a freethinking marquis's last rites before scandal can reach the newspapers.
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.
