A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How the prose reads.
In colonial Algeria, a traveler’s affair with a married woman leads him from sensual confidence into a reckless encounter under her husband’s roof.
A bachelor’s playful affair takes a nervous turn when a fortune-teller links a beloved black cat to a past romantic disaster.
An old colonial officer recalls a seven-man punitive expedition whose celebrated success depended on ruthless deception and force.
A former prosecutor recalls the admired schoolmaster accused of feeding children sweets laced with glass and broken needles.
Five penniless boating friends find their carefree life on the Seine transformed by the quick-witted young woman who takes the helm.
A rebellious law student smuggles a shopgirl into his strict Breton landlady’s house and learns her rules have unexpected limits.
A forgotten spa diary records twenty-five days of treatments, flirtation, boredom, and selective moral philosophy.
A nephew’s Good Friday prank sends a kindly Jesuit to the sickbed of his fiercely anticlerical uncle.
A drunken wrong turn at a country wedding leaves a determined bachelor facing a second ceremony he never planned.
A Paris office clerk explains how one disastrous Sunday cured him of the country—and of marriage.
A frightened countess helps a wounded stranger cross a border, beginning a wordless bond neither dares disturb.
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 veteran practical joker recalls the night suspicion made him his own victim and the chemical prank he played as a boy.
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.
A lifelong sportsman considers marriage at fifty, then travels to Paris to test whether neglect has left him unfit for it.
A young marquise determined to escape her jealous husband hires an expert accomplice to produce evidence no court can ignore.
A shopkeeper’s unwanted kiss becomes a scandal, and the charming friend sent to repair it proves no model of restraint.
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.
Three drunken artists in military costumes capture a burglar and turn his arrest into an improvised campaign.
A country doctor recounts the lifelong devotion of an itinerant chair mender to a village chemist.
