A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
The narrator’s attitude toward the story.
A respected man returns to a Breton inn and confronts the human cost of a long-forgotten encounter.
After forty years in the same dim office, an aging bookkeeper takes a spring evening walk and sees the life he never lived.
A respectable provincial woman visits Paris determined to sample the glamorous vice she has imagined from newspapers and fashionable gossip.
An eighty-six-year-old health fanatic studies every local death, determined to prove that caution can defeat old age.
A vain former minister recalls the ingenious deception that kept a clever bourgeois lover in his life for three years.
A celebrated cavalry officer returns from war expecting to reclaim his glamorous lover, only to confront a form of sacrifice he cannot understand.
A faithless husband grows jealous when his independent wife attracts attention, and she answers his renewed desire with a price.
A dazzling Mediterranean boat ride turns from news of disaster to a friend’s indecorous tale about snow.
A charming idler marries a wealthy Englishwoman and devises a careful scheme to preserve both his allowance and his affairs.
Ten travelers flee occupied Rouen, but their escape stalls when a Prussian officer makes one passenger’s body the price of everyone’s freedom.
A self-assured traveler plots a conquest on the road to Corsica, certain he has read his companion correctly.
A wealthy idler devotes himself to earning the red ribbon he has coveted since childhood, despite having done nothing to deserve it.
A retired notary asks for a divorce after discovering the ingenious history behind his wife’s advertised fortune.
A learned provincial doctor finds a manuscript that seems to settle the mystery of the soul—and lets one doctrine consume his reason and household.
Lonely and aging, a Parisian baron travels south to meet the grown son he secretly supported but has never seen.
A letter from a former lover forces an aging bachelor to compare his remembered youth with the man he has become.
A solitary walker falls in love with a seaside house—and with the unknown woman whose photograph hangs inside.
An old school friend visits a conservative country household and treats their hospitality as permission to remake it.
A lonely traveler reunites with a boastful school friend whose lavish home hides an unexpected family business.
A boulevardier’s sympathy for a young widow in Montmartre Cemetery leads to an affair—and a question about who is hunting whom.
An uninformed bride mistakes her wedding night for an attack, then becomes convinced a playful dog bite has doomed her honeymoon.
Three protected schoolboys share a railway carriage with a woman whose sudden crisis defeats every adult precaution.
A wealthy, childless couple offers two poor farming families money and security in exchange for adopting a son.
A married couple stages an illicit evening together, only for honest questions to become more stimulating than the disguise.
