Short stories
Original stories in French for each level, with comprehension questions. Tap any word to hear it, tap a dotted word to see its meaning, and listen to the whole story read aloud.
Beginner
Short stories
18 original stories written for this level, each with a comprehension check.
La boulangerie
Every morning Léa buys a baguette in Lyon, but today the baker has a surprise for her.
Le chat de Madame Roux
A big orange cat visits Thomas every evening in Bordeaux. Whose cat is it?
Un dimanche à Nice
The Dubois family spends a sunny Sunday at the beach in Nice, and little Jules has one problem.
Le nouveau collègue
It's Karim's first day at an office in Lille, and he doesn't know anyone yet.
Au marché
On Saturday morning, Paul and his grandfather go to the market in Toulouse with a long shopping list.
La lettre de Mamie
Manon's grandmother doesn't like phones. She writes letters from her house in Brittany.
Le train pour Paris
Hugo takes the TGV from Marseille to Paris and sits next to a very talkative lady.
Ma chambre à Strasbourg
Inès describes her small student room in Strasbourg, and the one thing she loves most about it.
Le café du coin
Monsieur Petit runs a small café in a Paris neighborhood and knows every customer's order.
La fête surprise
It's Camille's birthday, but nobody seems to remember. Or do they?
Le vélo bleu
Arthur rides his old blue bike everywhere in Nantes, even when the sky is grey.
Le cours de cuisine
Emma and her friend Noé take a crêpe-making class in Rennes. One of them is not very good at it.
La bibliothécaire
In Montpellier, a librarian always finds the right book for every reader. But what about her?
Le match du samedi
Every Saturday, Lina plays football in Saint-Étienne. Today her team plays against the best team in town.
Une journée de Chloé
Chloé is a bus driver in Toulouse. Her day starts very early and ends with her favorite moment.
Le voisin musicien
Every night, someone plays the piano in Élise's building in Dijon. She isn't happy about it, at first.
La randonnée
Sarah and her dad go hiking above Lake Annecy. The path is long, but the view is worth it.
Un jour de pluie à Brest
It's raining again in Brest, so Gabriel and his little sister look for something to do indoors.
Nonfiction
2 original articles: explainers, news-style pieces, columns and workplace texts, each with a comprehension check.
Elementary
Short stories
18 original stories written for this level, each with a comprehension check.
Le portefeuille oublié
After a great dinner in a Lyon bouchon, Julien realizes he has left his wallet at home.
Quand j'étais petit
Grandpa Robert tells his granddaughter about his childhood on a farm in Normandy in the 1950s.
Le pneu crevé
On a hot summer day in Provence, a couple gets a flat tire on a small country road.
Le gâteau raté
Antoine wanted to make the perfect birthday cake for his mother. Nothing went as planned.
L'entretien d'embauche
Yasmine had a job interview at a bookshop in Toulouse. The morning started badly.
Des vacances en Bretagne
The Moreau family wanted sun for their holiday in Brittany. They got rain, wind, and a surprise.
Le colis
A parcel mix-up in a Paris building leads Sofiane to a neighbor he had never spoken to.
Jour de grève
Mathilde's train to Bordeaux is canceled because of a strike, so she tries carpooling for the first time.
Le mauvais soir
Théo bought concert tickets months ago to surprise his girlfriend in Montpellier. He just didn't check the date.
La brocante
At the huge Lille flea market, Nadia buys an old box for two euros. Inside, she finds a photo and a mystery.
Le semi-marathon
Karine, forty-five, decided to run her first half-marathon in Bordeaux. Training was the easy part.
La nouvelle coloc
Baptiste was worried when a stranger moved into his shared flat in Grenoble. She turned out to be full of surprises.
Le mariage en Alsace
Everything was ready for Pauline's sister's outdoor wedding in an Alsace village, until the storm arrived.
La panne de courant
One winter evening in Clermont-Ferrand, the electricity went off. The Girard family had to find something to do.
Le Tour de France
When the Tour de France came through his Pyrenees village, ten-year-old Ethan waited all day for a few seconds of cycling.
La ratatouille de Mamie
Elsa tries to cook her late grandmother's ratatouille from Avignon. The recipe has a secret ingredient.
La mauvaise gare
Kenji, visiting Paris for the first time, has a train to catch, but Paris has more than one big station.
La nouvelle maîtresse
It's Amandine's first day as a primary school teacher in Marseille, and she is more nervous than her pupils.
Nonfiction
2 original articles: explainers, news-style pieces, columns and workplace texts, each with a comprehension check.
Intermediate
Short stories
40 original stories written for this level, each with a comprehension check.
Les petits mots
Clément has just moved into a flat in Lyon, and every evening an anonymous note complains about his noise.
Le déménagement
Inès is moving into a fifth-floor flat in Marseille with no lift, and all her friends have promised to help.
Le mauvais Saint-Martin
Lucas books a summer holiday house for his friends, but he doesn't read the address very carefully.
Le premier repas
Nathan, a vegetarian, meets his girlfriend's parents in Colmar for the first time, and lunch is a huge plate of sausages.
Le stand de fromages
Every Saturday, Léa buys cheese at a market stall in Annecy, which is strange, because she has a secret.
L'annonce de tante Odile
At the yearly family lunch in the Dordogne, seventy-eight-year-old Aunt Odile has an announcement to make.
La fête des voisins
Aurélie organises a party for the neighbours in her Paris building and invites everyone, even the man who never says hello.
En pyjama dans l'escalier
One Sunday morning in Toulouse, Simon takes the rubbish down in his pyjamas and the door slams shut behind him.
Papa passe son permis
At fifty-six, Jade's father, who has never driven in his life, decides to get his driving licence.
Le pacte de la plage
Twenty-five years ago, two twelve-year-old boys in Le Havre made a promise. Today is the day.
Coincés dans le village
A retired couple from Lille rents a huge camper van for a trip to Provence and follows the GPS a little too faithfully.
Les tomates disparues
In a community garden in Nantes, the best tomatoes vanish every night, and the strict president is determined to catch the thief.
Un week-end chez tonton
Max, a single thirty-four-year-old, is sure that looking after his niece and nephew for a weekend will be easy.
Sept minutes
Sarah's friend drags her to a speed-dating evening in Strasbourg, and it is every bit as bad as she expected.
Le train de nuit
Élodie takes her first night train to the Alps, full of romantic ideas, and finds herself next to a champion snorer.
La fève
Thomas has a secret plan for his family's Epiphany cake, but he has forgotten one family tradition.
Les messages de maman
Every Sunday, Hugo's mother leaves him a long voicemail, and every Sunday he doesn't listen to it.
Le cheval de Camargue
Julien is terrified of horses, but for their tenth anniversary his partner has booked a horse ride in the Camargue.
Chez Madame Lebrun
Unable to afford a flat in Bordeaux, Kenza moves in with a strict eighty-one-year-old widow who has a list of house rules.
Le mauvais numéro
Nina sends a message to her grandmother's new phone number, but a stranger in Grenoble answers.
Dîner à midi
On her first day as an intern in a Montreal video-game studio, Inès is invited to a team "dîner" and gets the time badly wrong.
La page du lundi
Every Monday, a young accountant in a Nantes office finds a mysterious poem left in the photocopier, and he decides to find out who writes them.
La veille de l'oral
The night before an important geography exam in Dakar, a power cut sends a student out into the street to revise under the only working lamp.
Le colocataire invisible
A student in Liège shares a flat with a roommate he has never once seen, only the notes he leaves on the fridge.
La lettre de motivation
Lucas dreams of working for a Geneva chocolate maker, but when he sends his cover letter, he attaches the wrong version.
Le voleur de yaourts
In a small Lille agency, someone keeps stealing food from the office fridge, and the team leader decides to find out who.
Le guide débutant
On his first day as a tour guide in the Marrakech medina, a young history student leads his group straight into trouble.
La nuit au dépanneur
A French exchange student in Québec City is trapped by a snowstorm in a corner shop with its owner and a very talkative stranger.
Votre départ
On a Friday evening in Brussels, Sophie gets a short voicemail from her boss and spends the whole weekend convinced she is about to lose her job.
Un entretien à Lausanne
Mathis walks into a job interview above Lausanne and recognizes the director as the camp counsellor he once played a terrible prank on.
Le kayamb de monsieur Payet
During her last placement in a retirement home on Réunion, a student nurse tries to reach an old man who no longer speaks to anyone.
La plus belle femme de Sainte-Anne
A young postman in Martinique has to deliver a parcel addressed only to "the most beautiful woman in Sainte-Anne".
Les tomates du labo
A PhD student in Grenoble is getting impossible results from his tomato plants and starts to suspect sabotage.
Le zémidjan
A motorbike-taxi driver in Cotonou finds a forgotten package on his bike and realizes a young woman's future depends on it.
Le micro allumé
Working from home in Bordeaux with her sick little boy beside her, Camille says one sentence too many during a video meeting.
L'accent de France
A French teacher on exchange in Chicoutimi, Québec, finds that his pupils laugh at the way he speaks, until a winter accident changes everything.
Les lettres de l'Expo
Working in a Brussels antique shop, a history student finds a bundle of love letters from 1958 that end with a mysterious meeting.
Trois jours à Fès
Sent to Fès to get a contract signed in three days, a young buyer from Lyon can't understand why the workshop owner keeps talking about everything except business.
L'apprentie horlogère
A young apprentice watchmaker in La Chaux-de-Fonds damages a precious watch and must decide whether to tell her strict master.
L'auditeur de vingt-trois heures
An intern at a night-time radio station in Abidjan wonders about the caller who requests the same old love song every evening at eleven.
Upper-intermediate
Short stories
40 original stories written for this level, each with a comprehension check.
Le grand saut
A Bordeaux accountant gives up a secure job to become a baker, and one morning her former boss walks into her shop.
Le chat en visioconférence
During the most important video call of his quarter, a sales director's cat reveals a secret from his past to forty colleagues.
Partir à la campagne
A Parisian couple moves to a hamlet in the Creuse, where the locals keep their distance until the village school is threatened.
Les poubelles de la rue Paradis
Fed up with a rubbish collectors' strike in Marseille, a retired teacher goes to the depot to give the strikers a piece of her mind.
Des tomates sur le toit
An unemployed landscape designer in Roubaix wants to turn the roof of her tower block into a vegetable garden, against the advice of her grumpiest neighbour.
Mamie Josette, deux millions d'abonnés
A Toulouse grandmother becomes an internet star while making her cassoulet, and a frozen-food brand comes knocking.
Cherche appartement désespérément
A young night nurse who cannot find a flat in Paris tries intergenerational housing with a very demanding old man.
Un mois sans smartphone
A Lyon journalist accepts his editor's challenge to spend a month with an old flip phone and keeps a diary of the experience.
Candidat malgré lui
When nobody in his Jura village will stand for mayor, a painfully shy cheesemaker is pushed into the race.
Du haut-fourneau à l'éolienne
A report on a former Lorraine steelworker, afraid of heights, who retrained to maintain wind turbines.
La famille sans voiture
When their old car dies on the motorway, a Strasbourg father talks his family into living for a year with a cargo bike instead.
Désactivé
A top-rated food delivery rider in Montpellier is suddenly cut off by the app he works for, with no explanation and no one to call.
L'affaire du platane
A plan to cut down a century-old plane tree for a new cycle lane sets a Nantes neighbourhood at war with itself.
La poubelle de l'année
An Angers family signs up for a zero-waste challenge, and the father turns it into a fierce competition with the neighbours.
Le recruteur virtuel
A laid-off logistics manager in her fifties faces a job interview conducted by an artificial intelligence.
Les chèvres de Mathilde
A Paris engineer leaves her consulting job to take over an old goat farmer's herd in the Ardèche, with the former owner watching her every move.
Deux cortèges
A union railway worker and his climate-activist daughter in Rennes mock each other's protests, until both marches meet on the same day.
Une étoile sur cinq
A Dijon bistro owner is hit by a wave of scathing online reviews from a mysterious "Napoléon B." and sets out to unmask the culprit.
Quarante-deux degrés à l'ombre
A report from a building site near Nîmes, where a foreman reorganises everything to protect his crew from a heatwave.
Le règlement intérieur
To end the washing-up war in a Grenoble flatshare, a computer science student invents an app that awards points for every household chore.
La valise du grenier
Clearing out her late grandmother's flat in Lyon, Clémence finds a suitcase that was not to be opened before its owner's death.
L'hortensia de Plougastel
Three Breton siblings who no longer speak to each other discover that their father's will comes with a strange condition.
Le soir de la rue Gay-Lussac
A history student finds an archive photo from May 1968 that contradicts her grandfather's favorite story.
La sacoche du taxi jaune
A Dakar taxi driver finds a bag full of money under his passenger seat, and he is not the only one looking for its owner.
Tempête à Kamouraska
Snowed in at a Québec inn, a French traveler watches the landlady investigate a missing diamond ring.
Le boulanger de trois heures
A Bordeaux baker discovers that someone is getting into her bakehouse at night, not to steal but to bake.
La lampe de Stanisław
A history teacher from the northern coalfield finds out what really happened to the Polish miner her family never talks about.
Le portrait d'Ixelles
A young man in Brussels inherits a worthless painting from his great-aunt, until a stranger offers him a fortune for it.
Le coffre 314
In Geneva, a young lawyer and her greedy uncle open the safe-deposit box her grandmother left her.
Les lettres du Robert
Interviewing her Martinican grandmother for a school project on migration, a teenager finds a bundle of letters from a forgotten fiancé.
Le voleur du Vieux-Port
Things keep vanishing from a café terrace in Marseille, and the owner thinks he knows who the thief is.
Le carnet de Joseph
In the autumn of 1945, a young Alsatian forced into the German army comes home from a Soviet prison camp and keeps a diary.
Le maquis de tante Adjoua
A young Ivorian living in Lyon inherits his aunt's open-air restaurant in Abidjan and flies over to sell it.
L'alibi du plombier
A burly plumber from Roubaix accused of burglary would rather risk prison than reveal where he was that night.
La clé d'Oran
A young woman travels to Oran with the key to the flat her grandmother's family left in 1962.
Le corbeau de Saint-Aubin
Anonymous letters are poisoning a Burgundy village, and a retired gendarme reluctantly agrees to find out who is writing them.
Le temps des sucres
A young graphic designer from Montreal inherits her grandfather's sugar shack in the Beauce instead of the uncle who has run it for forty years.
La montre du Doubs
A watchmaker in the Swiss Jura is asked to repair a pocket watch that stopped in 1943, and its story leads back to her own family.
Le Vaval a disparu
Just before carnival in Guadeloupe, a group's giant carnival king vanishes, and a teenage girl sets out to find it before a feud breaks out.
Le faussaire de la rue Lepic
An elderly, unsuccessful Montmartre painter tells his great-nephew that one of his paintings hangs in a museum under someone else's name.
Advanced
Short stories
20 original stories written for this level, each with a comprehension check.
Le voisin du dessus
In his diary, a retired history teacher in Lyon gathers evidence against the upstairs neighbor who paces above his head every night.
Le dîner des vertueux
At a Paris dinner party, three couples compete to prove who lives the most ethical, planet-friendly life.
L'horloger de la rue des Granges
Every year on the same day, a widow brings the same stopped pocket watch to a watchmaker in Besançon.
La plume d'emprunt
An Abidjan speechwriter is hired to write a groom's wedding speech, and the bride turns out to be the woman who once left him.
L'entretien
A young recruiter at a Lyon start-up interviews a fifty-seven-year-old candidate who doesn't play by her rules.
La voisine idéale
A retired woman in Bordeaux describes everything she does to help the young nurse who has moved in across the landing.
La dernière nuit du gardien
On the night before his lighthouse is automated, a Breton keeper keeps watch for the last time.
Joyeux anniversaire, Lou
An Instagram mother in Annecy stages her daughter's fifth birthday for her forty-eight thousand followers.
L'affaire du chat Moustique
In a village in the Drôme, the mayor tries to settle a bitter dispute between two neighbors who both claim the same cat.
L'interprète
During a tense negotiation in Brussels, an interpreter chooses not to translate an insult word for word.
Mémoires d'un parapluie
A proud umbrella, waiting at the Paris lost property office, tells the story of its many owners.
La maison de Honfleur
A brother and sister clearing out their late mother's house in Normandy find a box of letters addressed to someone they have never heard of.
Le coach
An exhausted executive at La Défense hires a life coach, who transforms his life in unexpected ways.
Les mardis de Claire
A husband in Toulouse becomes convinced that his wife is hiding something every Tuesday afternoon.
Le guide de Québec
A tour guide in Old Quebec who embellishes his stories is challenged by a know-it-all Parisian in his group.
La file d'attente
A Parisian woman joins a long queue in the Marais without knowing what it is for.
Le tailleur de la rue Blanchot
A Dakar tailor knows that his most demanding customer is not the important man he claims to be.
L'été des cerises
An old cherry grower in the Ardèche reluctantly hires a Syrian engineer for the harvest.
Le double
A cautious Geneva actuary keeps being told he was seen in places he has never been.
Le silence de monsieur Lambert
A notoriously talkative retired notary loses a bet and must stay silent for a whole family holiday in Saint-Malo.
Nonfiction
20 original articles: explainers, news-style pieces, columns and workplace texts, each with a comprehension check.
Le dernier kiosque
A Lyon columnist learns that the newspaper kiosk at the foot of his street is about to close, and goes to say goodbye to the man who runs it.
Column
Éloge de la file d'attente
A Parisian columnist defends the queue outside his bakery, and tells the story of an elderly woman who never misses it.
Column
Lettre à celle qui me succède
A teacher retiring from a one-class village school in the Cantal writes to the young woman who will take over her classroom in September.
Letter
Une nuit de garde
A reporter spends a Saturday night with the pharmacist on duty in a small town in the Vosges, behind the little night hatch.
Reportage
La faute au mistral
A columnist in Avignon reflects on the Provençal habit of blaming the mistral for everything, and on what happened when the wind stopped.
Column
Le car rapide
A travel writer in Dakar takes one of the city's famous painted minibuses, gets on the wrong one, and finds out what the young conductor hanging off the back is really for.
Travel writing
Le traversier de Tadoussac
On the free ferry across the Saguenay fjord in Quebec, a French traveller is taken in hand by a talkative retired woman who has made the crossing thousands of times.
Travel writing
Lettre des Marquises
A young nurse posted on the remote island of Hiva Oa writes to her mother in Nantes, who keeps asking when she is coming home.
Letter
Une nuit à Ouessant
A storm strands a travel writer on the island of Ouessant, off Brittany, where an old former lighthouse keeper keeps watch at his window.
Travel writing
Le volcan poli
On Réunion Island, a traveller who missed the chance to see the Piton de la Fournaise erupt meets an old woman who once watched its lava stop at a church door.
Travel writing
L'erreur de Méchain
In 1805, the astronomer Delambre opens the papers of his late colleague Méchain, who helped him measure the meridian that would define the metre, and finds a secret.
History
Paris sous les eaux
During the great Paris flood of January 1910, a young sewer worker rowing through the streets is called to the aid of the landlady who has been threatening to evict him.
History
Les quatre crochets
A Louvre guard looks back on August 1911, when the Mona Lisa vanished from its wall, and on the workman in a white smock he had nodded to that morning.
History
Le compteur tournait
In September 1914, a Paris taxi driver is requisitioned to drive soldiers to the front, and one of his passengers hands him a letter to post if he does not come back.
History
Les bras du télégraphe
In 1836, a young operator on the Chappe telegraph line near Tours learns from a dying colleague how two Bordeaux bankers had been secretly using the state's signals.
History
La lueur du hangar
In 1902, the caretaker of a Paris science school cannot understand why Pierre and Marie Curie keep coming back to their freezing shed at night.
Science
La couleur des nymphéas
At Giverny in the early 1920s, a young gardener becomes the eyes of an old painter who is losing his sight while trying to finish his greatest work.
Art
Le repentir de Lascaux
A painter who copies the cave paintings of Lascaux for a replica discovers a hesitation left by an artist some eighteen thousand years ago, and must decide whether to copy it.
Art
Le pendule du Panthéon
In the spring of 1851, a grieving widow keeps returning to the Panthéon to watch Léon Foucault's pendulum, which claims to show the Earth turning.
Science
L'ex-voto
A reporter follows a Marseille art restorer as she cleans a small nineteenth-century votive painting of a ship in a storm, and a forgotten name comes back to light.
Reportage
Mastery
Short stories
40 original stories written for this level, each with a comprehension check.
Le Point-virgule disparu
In a pastiche of the French roman noir, a down-at-heel Marseille private eye is hired by a formidable proofreader to find out who stole a semicolon from a famous novelist's manuscript.
L'Horloge de Morteau
In the manner of a nineteenth-century conte fantastique, an engineer inherits a clockmaker's grandfather clock in the Haut-Doubs, along with a warning never to wind it after midnight.
Correspondance sur un mot
An epistolary story: a translator in Pondicherry writes to a Paris lexicographer to complain that his dictionary is missing a meaning of the word "dépaysement".
La Table numéro six
In the cool, object-by-object manner of the nouveau roman, a café table on the Grand-Place in Lille is observed for an afternoon while someone waits.
Le Dictionnaire des mots qui manquent
A retired French teacher in Rennes fills a notebook with words the language lacks, and becomes famous, and an enemy of the Académie française, when her grandson posts it online.
Le Parapluie, en cinq manières
A trivial mix-up with two identical umbrellas on a Bordeaux tram is retold as a police report, a précieux letter, a sports commentary and a horoscope, before a final witness speaks up.
Le Miroir en avance
An antique dealer on the rue Mouffetard buys an old Venetian mirror at auction and discovers that her reflection moves a little before she does.
La Prête-plume
In a series of emails, a Montreal ghostwriter drafts the memoirs of a former hockey star, who finds his own childhood more beautiful on the page than it ever was.
Il eût fallu que vous vinssiez
A retired Dijon notary who speaks only in the imperfect subjunctive is sent by his daughter to a speed-dating evening.
Mémoires d'un chat de Montparnasse
In the grand manner of a court memoirist, the resident cat of a Montparnasse café chronicles the rise of a dangerous new favourite.
Le vin était trop noir
A roman noir set in Burgundy: a former sommelier turned private detective is hired to find who is counterfeiting a famous estate's wine, and tastes something he did not expect.
L'Homme qui perdait ses mots
A conte fantastique: in Brussels, a conference interpreter finds that each morning one word has vanished from the language, and the thing it named has vanished from the world.
Une vie à rebours
The story of a Dakar couple is told backwards, from a widow's evening on the corniche to the morning, forty-five years earlier, when everything began.
Le Mot de la fin
A grand old actor of the Comédie-Française has spent forty years polishing his last words, but death keeps failing to show up on cue.
Les Liaisons numériques
In the style of an eighteenth-century epistolary novel, two Lyon friends who call each other "la Marquise" and "le Vicomte" exchange messages about a seduction wager on a dating app.
Le Chat botté de la Défense
A pastiche of Perrault's fairy tales: a penniless philosophy graduate inherits nothing but a cat, which asks only for a pair of trainers and an access badge to a La Défense tower.
Le Train de 4 h 44
A conte fantastique in the Swiss Jura: a night nurse who has missed her last train sees an unscheduled one pull into La Chaux-de-Fonds station at 4:44 in the morning.
Le Personnage en grève
A Quebec crime novelist sits down to write the twelfth adventure of her famous inspector, and discovers that he has gone on strike.
Une seule phrase
Told in one single sentence, a consultant stranded by a delayed train at Lyon Part-Dieu drifts to the end of a platform and remembers her father, a railwayman.
Vers, verre, vert
A glassblower in Biot mishears a poet's telephone order, and a love story unfolds among the homophones of the French language.
L'Île des Raisonnables
In 1763 a shipwrecked Breton sailor lands among a people who must justify every act by reason, and is put on trial for laughing.
Le Marchand de silence
A stranger arrives at the great market of Bamako selling jars that he says contain silence, and a shea-butter seller decides to find out what he is really after.
Le Registre du passeur
An archivist in Nantes finds the logbook of a Loire ferryman from the Terror and pieces together what he did one winter night in 1793.
Lettre sur l'art de réparer
A retired engineer from Saint-Étienne writes to his granddaughter at a tech start-up about the forgotten virtue of mending things.
Le Banquet des contraires
In a café on the Croix-Rousse, a mathematician and a poet resume their monthly argument over whether truth is discovered or invented, under the eye of a waiter who keeps score.
La Marge du cahier
In the spring of 1789 a young village clerk writes down his parish's grievances for the Estates General, and a widow who cannot sign asks him to add one more.
Le Perruquier de Versailles
A royal wigmaker who has kept the court's secrets for thirty years is offered a fortune for a compromising letter, and discovers who wants to buy it.
La Demoiselle du téléphone
During the 1900 World's Fair, a Paris switchboard operator forbidden to say anything but set formulas receives a desperate call in the middle of the night.
Les Recettes de Verdun
In 1916 a soldier at Verdun and his wife in the Périgord invent a code of recipes to get the truth past the army censors.
Le Linge de la ligne
In 1942 a laundress crosses the demarcation line at Vierzon every day with her baskets, until the day she is asked to carry something heavier than letters.
La Draille
A young vet sent to test GPS collars on a Provençal transhumance walks to the Alps with an old head shepherd who trusts only his goats.
La Proëlla
On the island of Ouessant in 1927, a widow has already buried her sailor husband in wax when he walks back into the village.
L'Enseigne
Restoring the old sign of a family bakery in Colmar, a conservator uncovers layer after layer of Alsace's changing nationalities.
La Cabane sur le Saguenay
A young Parisian visits her great-uncle in Quebec for a winter of ice fishing and learns that her French is not the only one, nor the oldest.
La Parole et le micro
A young radio journalist in Saint-Louis du Sénégal wants to record an old griot before his stories are lost, but he has his own ideas about what memory is.
Éloge de l'ennui
Stuck for three hours in a broken-down train with a dead phone, an essayist rediscovers a feeling he had spent years avoiding.
La Lettre de madame Valade
A notary in Périgueux holds a sealed letter that a dead client's son may receive only if he contests her will, and the son does not want to contest it.
Trois lettres
A juror at the assize court in Rennes must decide, by her inner conviction alone, the fate of a nurse who helped his own dying mother end her life.
Dialogue sur le pardon
In a village in Corrèze, the grandson of a wartime informer comes to ask forgiveness of a former Resistance member whose brother was shot in 1944.
Le Souper de madame d'Aubrac
At a Paris salon in 1772, a philosopher, an abbé and a doctor debate whether a dying man should be told the truth, and the question turns out to be less abstract than it seems.