A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
Where does the story take place?
A dinner-table skeptic challenges tales of telepathy and prophecy, then offers two unsettling examples from his own experience.
A bachelor’s playful affair takes a nervous turn when a fortune-teller links a beloved black cat to a past romantic disaster.
A man defends an unforgivable marriage by tracing the grief, resemblance, and desire that brought a father to it.
A society observer explains why a fashionable countess is said to have killed her daughter without committing a crime.
A rebellious law student smuggles a shopgirl into his strict Breton landlady’s house and learns her rules have unexpected limits.
A drunken wrong turn at a country wedding leaves a determined bachelor facing a second ceremony he never planned.
At a quiet spa, a traveler meets a frail young woman and her nervous father, whose strange afflictions share one terrible cause.
A miserly Norman farmer resists his son's marriage, then finds his rigid household altered by love, loss, and the demands of survival.
A boisterous sergeant seeking nightlife in a quiet Breton town follows one wrong turn into a social disaster.
An imperious old maid’s final illness exposes the private life she never allowed anyone to see.
An aging bachelor revisits the one love he never declared and asks the question that could make his quiet life seem wasted.
Alone in the house of her whole life, an elderly woman writes to a friend about memory, aging, and the objects that preserve vanished lives.
A nervous bridegroom’s wedding-night embarrassment sends him into Paris in search of a drastic remedy.
Amid Cannes’s flower festival, two fashionable women compare the vanity and danger hidden inside the wish to be desired.
A young marquise determined to escape her jealous husband hires an expert accomplice to produce evidence no court can ignore.
A man with no obvious catastrophe explains why thirty years of repetition and one drawer of old letters have made life unbearable.
A dying woman hires an advocate to find the son who vanished after discovering the secret at the center of her household.
A lavish wedding breakfast paid for by an estranged daughter turns awkward when the groom chooses the wrong song.
A husband’s teasing questions about his wife’s first marriage turn posthumous jealousy into a dangerous demand for honesty.
An art dealer lends a cash-strapped baroness a Renaissance Christ and trusts her to invent a profitable story around it.
Letters hidden inside an old chasuble reveal a bedridden woman’s intimate meditation on the object that holds birth, love, illness, and death.
In a fashionable Paris salon, the privilege of cutting a brioche marks favor, rivalry, and the changing fortunes of its celebrated hostess.
A doctor’s defense of a desperate mother leads him to recount a widow’s struggle with pregnancy and public shame.
On his wedding night, a reformed libertine receives an urgent summons that brings his abandoned past into his new marriage.
