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An isolated house rumored to hide a fortune draws visitors after its secretive owner dies.
A landowner discovers the exact price of being noticed in a government office.
A wealthy village family's corrupt business and private rivalries draw a poor young bride into a struggle over money, conscience, and power.
A possible lottery win gives a comfortable couple a sudden view of riches—and of each other.
On Christmas Eve, a resentful shoemaker meets a strange customer and gets a chance to trade poverty for wealth.
A stranded fugitive boards a living spaceship and begins planning how to make its extraordinary power his own.
A mock scientific essay defines the perfect swindler and catalogs the small cons that make fraud look respectable.
When a timid civil servant’s elderly mother is declared dead, grief soon competes with inheritance, office protocol, and his wife’s practical schemes.
When a fisherman’s arm is trapped in a trawling cable, his captain brother must choose between saving him and saving an expensive net.
A resentful farm boy assigned to care for an old horse turns an ordinary chore into a test of mercy.
A farm girl’s pregnancy forces her hard-nosed mother to weigh family honor against the price of a weekly coach ride.
A nephew’s Good Friday prank sends a kindly Jesuit to the sickbed of his fiercely anticlerical uncle.
A thrifty Norman widow takes in a small dog, then discovers that protecting her property carries an unwelcome cost.
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.
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.
A traveler visits a notorious countrywoman whose prosperity depends on the children society pays to stare at.
A miserly woman refuses to replace her husband’s ruined umbrella—until an insurance policy suggests a way to avoid paying.
An anticlerical village joiner wants a lucrative church contract, but the parish priest sets a spiritual price for the work.
When an ostrich supposedly swallows a priceless diamond aboard ship, five ordinary birds become the stakes in an escalating auction.
A shipwreck survivor in a diving suit is mistaken for a god, but keeping up the role may cost him the treasure he came to recover.
A young builder finds a chest of silver beneath his fiancée’s garden and discovers that getting rich is harder than finding treasure.
A professional burglar poses as a landscape painter, only to find that art criticism is the least predictable hazard of the job.
