A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How the prose reads.
A daring flirt makes her persistent admirer earn his chance during a wild-boar hunt at a Norman château.
In a Corsican mountain pass, a traveller hears how a timid orphan became the island’s most feared outlaw.
A Parisian family’s summer outing opens a brief, charged interval between ordinary life and a happiness that cannot last.
Keeping vigil beside their revered mother, two austere children open the letters that preserve her private life.
In court, a wife's plea for divorce reveals a husband whose worship of ideal beauty has become a fevered obsession.
A peaceable French merchant endures a Prussian officer’s insults until one final humiliation forces him to fight.
When a timid civil servant’s elderly mother is declared dead, grief soon competes with inheritance, office protocol, and his wife’s practical schemes.
A traveler in the Auvergne keeps meeting a solitary old woman whose grief finally breaks through her reserve.
Six years after separating over her affair, a proud baron wakes on a train opposite the wife he barely recognizes.
A nostalgic former clerk recalls the sunny Sunday walk when helping a lost couple led him far from his map and his innocence.
A road trip through Normandy leads to a chapel keeper who sells homemade saints and measures his drunkenness by degrees.
On his wedding night, an ardent Norman sportsman must choose between his waiting bride and suspected poachers.
A narrator studying a famously irresistible man finds the strongest clue to his charm in a woman’s portrait at home.
A reluctant officer accepts a respectable woman’s devotion and finds that her passion will not permit an easy retreat.
A respected man returns to a Breton inn and confronts the human cost of a long-forgotten encounter.
A sharp-tongued rail traveler records the sights, absurdities, and unsettling stories encountered along the French Riviera.
After her only son is murdered, an elderly Corsican widow devises a patient and ruthless way to keep her vow of revenge.
After forty years in the same dim office, an aging bookkeeper takes a spring evening walk and sees the life he never lived.
An old woman explains why a ring of a child’s blond hair has made her consider herself a widow all her life.
A suspicious husband takes his wife on a nocturnal hunt, convinced the quarry will expose her betrayal.
A French settler in colonial Algeria recalls the restless woman whose freedom never fit the life he tried to give her.
A respectable provincial woman visits Paris determined to sample the glamorous vice she has imagined from newspapers and fashionable gossip.
An old marquis confesses why one visit to a dead woman’s locked bedroom left him afraid of darkness for life.
Two hungry strangers sharing a slow train along the Mediterranean coast discover an unusual way to ease each other’s need.
