Contes tendres by André Theuriet is a collection of short stories written in the late 19th century. The pieces offer gentle, closely observed portraits of ordinary French lives at moments of hardship, love, memory, and moral testing. Recurring figures include aging workers, dreamy students, modest provincials, and women navigating affection and propriety, all sketched with sympathy and quiet irony.
The opening of the collection presents a series of vignettes: in the Paris outskirts, an old gardener-turned-tramp is offered kindness and later helped into shelter, leaving his leaking hut in tears; two lost botanizers in Savoie are welcomed by the lively Claudine, whose playful warmth ends with a stinging slap for an overbold guest, before she sends them off with real rhododendrons; a painter who rose and fell in fame tenderly reunites with his Breton first love, refuses her financial help, and, crushed by ruin, takes his life; across from a dawn window, a young teacher-candidate readies for exams, works, fails, weeps, counts her last coins, and departs; watching boarders return to Lakanal, the narrator recalls adolescent desire and a foiled tryst with a circus rider that earned him punishment; a war widow’s vigil turns poignant when she feeds a passing mobile who silently realizes her missing son was likely killed; a cautious married woman edges toward an affair, but a storm and a ride in a funeral van feel like an omen that halts it; and finally, a friend begins the tale of a sumptuous door curtain once fashioned from a chasuble bought in Valencia. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
