What the Shadow Demands

The scene is the prison of La Roquette,* in the cell of a condemned man. ‘Gentlemen, I thank you. You have brought me paper, envelopes, a pen, an inkwell’ (he arranged these objects before him on the table as he spoke), ‘thank you indeed....

A Case Without Precedent

The library belonging to Monsieur le Président Barbeville of the bench was his haven of delight. He called it: my bachelor’s den. Every morning, while still in his dressing-gown, he would ascend. Having abandoned his chambers, where he had nothing to do since his retirement...

52 and 53 Orfila

To one side of a wide road planted uniformly with trees, whose close-cropped foliage made each of them resemble a sugarloaf on a frail stem, was a flat, yellowish wall, with two identical wings at either end. The paint on the entrance gate was...

On the Threshold

At the Chateau de la Fourche, everything was melancholy and grandiose: the gallows name,* to begin with, redolent of a more severe and primitive justice, meted out in seigneurial times; the four dark avenues whose lamentations sounded like an ocean; the moats...

The Man with the Bracelet

October: the ambiguous and sinister aspect of certain outlying streets during these rainy and livid days of the late season, especially at dusk when, once the sickening grind of the daily task has been acquitted, the bestial instincts inside us come to...

Night

I Love the night with a passion. I love it as one loves one’s country, or one’s mistress, with an instinctive, deep, invincible love. I love it with all my senses, with my eyes that can see it, with my sense of smell...

Pft! Pft!

Once upon a time, exactly where I could not say (for in truth, the land has been called by every name and exists at all times), lived a woman whose exact appearance I cannot sketch either. Every man saw her differently and each was right,...

The Little Summer-House

I Had suffered serious losses in enterprises, alas less solid but quite as honourable as the Panama Syndicates,* the Southern Railways, and suchlike. So the day came when I was forced to make my assets ‘earn their keep’, as they say....