A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
Where does the story take place?
An aging bachelor revisits the one love he never declared and asks the question that could make his quiet life seem wasted.
A lifelong sportsman considers marriage at fifty, then travels to Paris to test whether neglect has left him unfit for it.
A boastful Norman farmer turns the Prussian soldier billeted with him into a local joke, until humiliation becomes dangerous.
A farm servant’s brief romance leaves her facing motherhood, secrecy, and a marriage shaped by work, fear, and rural necessity.
A sheltered mill owner’s wife discovers Parisian flirtation, then mistakes the force of a dream for love.
After his parents die, a blind farmhand becomes the target of a household’s escalating cruelty in rural Normandy.
After forty years of silence, an aging woman walks across Normandy to see the son she was forced to surrender after a secret affair.
A country doctor recounts the lifelong devotion of an itinerant chair mender to a village chemist.
At a country christening, a priest discovers an unexpected tenderness as he holds his newborn nephew among the reveling family.
A doctor’s attempt to protect a newborn at a Breton christening collides with custom, cold, and drink.
A farmer bargains with a deathbed nurse, turning his mother's final hours into a contest of rural thrift.
Two poachers on the Seine buy a dying donkey, turn its suffering into sport, and look for one more way to profit.
At a Norman farm, a baron explains why the tenant who serves him faithfully also makes him feel like a forgiven culprit.
A reclusive count explains why a traveling mother, her daughter, and a different grateful companion visit him every July.
Years after abandoning a pregnant lover, a lonely clerk sees the child he never knew and seeks one brief chance to meet him.
An upholsterer explains how a cherished fishing spot, two furious wives, and one unlucky punch brought him before a jury.
A country gentleman records the invisible presence that seems to drain his strength, command his will, and turn his home into a prison.
A landowner’s annual hunting visit exposes a gamekeeper’s private crisis, then turns into a night of fire, flight, and irreversible violence.
A Norman peasant explains how Saint Michel acquired the Devil’s rich farmland through bargains, crops, and local cunning.
An innkeeper buys a stubborn widow’s farm on a life annuity, then grows impatient when she remains stubbornly healthy.
Two homesick Breton soldiers share every Sunday—until a cowgirl’s kindness divides them.
On a bright beach, a painter walks beside his disabled wife while a friend tells the harsh story behind their silent marriage.
A peasant clown leaves the hospital with a healed leg and twenty-five francs, then spends his reward on a hazardous return to pleasure.
A traveler visits a notorious countrywoman whose prosperity depends on the children society pays to stare at.
