stories

Tartarin is an enthusiastic hunter in the southern French town of Tarascon (where game is unfortunately very scarce) and although at forty-five he has never left his sunny and comfortable home town, he has nevertheless acquired great renown as a hunter because of his ability to shoot down caps thrown in the sky, his formidable collection of weapons, his extensive (reading) knowledge of wild-game hunting all over the world and his elaborate accounts of the lion-hunting expedition that he (…)

This timeless tale of a little she-goat’s dream of finding true liberty in the high mountains by the author of Tartarin de Tarascan is probably the best-known short story in all of French literature, familiar to every Gallic citizen young and old.
(2,200 words)
Translated specially for this site
The original text can be consulted in the annex here. MONSIEUR SEGUIN’S GOAT
To M. Pierre Gringoire, lyrical poet in Paris.
You’ll never change, my poor Gringoire!
What? You’ve been (…)

We follow the quite famous author Gustav von Aschenbach and his elevated thoughts (at the beginning: they tend to go steadily downhill as the narrative unfolds) from his native Munich to the Adriatic coast and to Venice, where he is plunged into the thralls of physical desire for a very handsome fourteen-year-old boy whose family is staying at the same hotel on the Lido, and who quite innocently (?) sets our man off on dithyrambic meditations on the lessons of Plato’s The Banquet and (…)

Spiegel, a starving but very resourceful cat, strikes a bargain with the town sorcerer to be fed and fed and fed again until such time as he becomes nice and round and plump with cat’s fat – an essential ingredient for the sorcerer’s witchcraft –, but when the fatal day finally comes for Spiegel after a glorious period of sumptuous dining and chasing after the feminine element of the cat world, the sorcerer discovers to his eternal dismay that he had woefully underestimated Spiegel’s (…)

Two farmers in the Swiss countryside who had always lived and worked in harmony fall into disagreement over the stretch of abandoned land between their properties, and the dispute degenerates into a bitter feud between their families, including notably their children Sali and Vreni who had always played together on that abandoned piece of land and who were becoming ever closer as they advanced in age.
Under the elegant, ever-so-charming pen of the author of the unforgettable Clothes Make (…)

Voltaire’s brilliant parody of the ideological notion that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds [1], ironically sub-titled "Optimism", that was written in three incredibly productive days(!) and has retained its charm, its venom and its Enlightenment message for mankind ever since.
This 34,000-word English translation was done by an unidentified translator for an edition of Candide that was printed in New York in 1908.
An e-book, with the original text in an annex, is (…)

In this stark investigation of the feminine condition in a rigid society ruled by pitiless moral strictures, the young widow Marquise of O... finds herself in an unexpected condition with no idea of how or why this situation came to be, and courageously puts an ad in the local paper proposing marriage to the person responsible for this state of affairs. We then flash back, in rapid succession, to a violent military assault on the fortified town of which her father was the governor, to an (…)

In the midst of the campaign of racial extermination of the thousands of white-skinned people left on Haiti (then called St. Domingo) after the successful uprising of slaves there in 1804, a young officer desperately seeks shelter and food for his small company of civilians in a wayside house, where he is lured into a very false sense of security by the family of the local killer-in-chief. We follow the ups and downs of the attempts of the officer to survive in the face of (…)

Ludwig Tieck was one of the leading figures in the German romantic movement at the beginning of the 19th century, a movement that brought themes of the mysterious, the magical, the fantastic and the unexplainable into German-language letters at the time.
It was in a way a precursor of the fantasy and science-fiction themes in the literature of our own times!
Here we have a tender love story featuring notably a magnificent young woman, her ardent but too-poor lover and an alchemist who (…)

A traveling salesman discovers that his hotel room leads directly to a private lodge in the neighbouring theatre, where a performance of Mozart’s opera “Don Juan” is about to be given. Delighted, the music lover rushes over to the lodge, where not only is the performance exceptional, but where he also has a quasi-supernatural encounter with Donna Anna herself, the outraged and distressed victim of the infernal charmer Don Juan.
The story enables the future author of The Life and Opinions (…)