Free summaries
French Literature — page 6
452 public-domain french literature books, summarised. Page 6 of 10.
A Man of Business
Honoré de Balzac
In a city where debt is a social language, the most dangerous man is not the one with the most money, but the one who best understands the art of avoiding payment.
The Story of the Duchess of Cicogne and of Monsieur de Boulingrin: 1920
Anatole France
A cynical, elegant retelling of the Sleeping Beauty myth, this prose narrative suggests that even when destiny strikes with supernatural force, human beings will stubbornly insist on finding a rational—or political—explanation.
En Route
J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
A cynical man of letters attempts to bridge the chasm between his jaded, worldly existence and the absolute, terrifying silence of a Trappist monastery.
Mlle. Fouchette: A Novel of French Life
Charles Theodore Murray
A waif of the Parisian gutters, toughened by neglect and cruelty, finds her own path to grace through a series of dramatic encounters that peel back the layers of her hidden, tragic identity.
Artist and Model (The Divorced Princess)
René de Pont-Jest
A tale of social climbing, illicit passion, and the heavy price of scandal, this narrative traces the unraveling of a marriage between a Russian princess and her husband, and the subsequent path toward redemption for all involved.
A journey round my room
Xavier de Maistre
A housebound traveler finds that the true scale of the world is not measured in leagues, but in the infinite landscapes of the human mind.
The Piccinino, Volume 1 (of 2)
George Sand
A young artist finds himself entangled in the dangerous intrigues of a Sicilian princess and a notorious bandit, discovering that the lines between social class, romantic obsession, and historical legacy are far more treacherous than he imagined.
Le chevalier de Maison-Rouge
Alexandre Dumas
A desperate, clandestine race against the guillotine unfolds amidst the suffocating paranoia of the French Revolution, where the line between hero and traitor vanishes in the shadows of the Terror.
Honorine
Honoré de Balzac
A man of immense wealth and political standing quietly maintains a secret, obsessive vigil over his estranged wife, who lives in self-imposed, impoverished exile. Their path to reconciliation is a delicate, agonizing study of pride, guilt, and the limits of romantic devotion.
Unconscious Comedians
Honoré de Balzac
The gears of Parisian ambition turn on a strange, hidden machinery of vanity and influence, and to see them is to lose one’s innocence forever.
A Frenchman in America: Recollections of Men and Things
Max O'Rell
A witty French lecturer crisscrosses the United States, documenting the quirks of a bustling, expanding nation with the sharp eye of an outsider and the humor of a practiced storyteller.
A Virgin Heart: A Novel
Remy de Gourmont
In a quiet corner of Normandy, an innocent young woman learns that the desires of her heart and body are far more intertwined than tradition admits.
Droll Stories
Honoré de Balzac
These robust, irreverent tales capture the spirit of sixteenth-century France, blending ribald humor with a sharp, observant eye for the human comedy. They serve as a brilliant, playful mirror to the manners and appetites of a bygone era.
The songs of Bilitis
Pierre Louÿs
A young woman moves from the quiet mountains of Pamphylia to the vibrant Isle of Lesbos and the coastal sanctuaries of Cypros, discovering her own sensuality, heartbreak, and eventual place among the sacred courtesans of antiquity.
The War of Women, Volume 1
Alexandre Dumas
A soldier’s secret romance collides with a nation’s fractured loyalties, where political deception transforms personal rivalries into open rebellion on the waters of the Dordogne.
Hans of Iceland, Vol. 2 of 2
Victor Hugo
A doomed prisoner in a dark cell counts his remaining heartbeats while counting down the hours to the guillotine.
Massimilla Doni
Honoré de Balzac
A noble Venetian youth finds his ideal love suspended in spiritual purity, only to have his earthly senses awoken by an opera singer in a decaying palace.
Z. Marcas
Honoré de Balzac
Behind a door in a Paris lodging house lives a forgotten political genius, whose immense intellect is crushed by the self-serving mediocrity of the state.
Odette's Marriage: A Novel, from the French of Albert Delpit, Translated from the "Revue des Deux Mondes," by Emily Prescott
Albert Delpit
A woman marries the son of the artist she secretly loves, bound to a dark romance that inevitably destroys two households.
Ramuntcho
Pierre Loti
A shadow of illegitimacy overhangs a young mountain athlete whose ferocious vitality collides with deep-seated village prejudice, illegal cross-border trade, and the solemn, unyielding sanctuary of the convent.
The Hated Son
Honoré de Balzac
A frail, neglected child grows into an ethereal outcast along the stormy Normandy coast, where the weight of a violent father's hatred turns every breath into a quiet act of survival.
Pride: One of the Seven Cardinal Sins
Eugène Sue
A wealthy heiress hides her identity, a proud hunchback fights for orphans, and two sisters unwittingly race toward the truth of their shared bloodline in 1830s Paris.
Omega: The Last days of the World
Camille Flammarion
A comet races toward a twenty-fifth-century Earth, forcing a transformed humanity to confront its mortality across vast, sweeping eons of cosmic time.
The Learned Women
Molière
A battle of wits and wills turns a domestic household upside down when a formidable mother insists on marrying her sensible daughter to a pretentious pseudo-intellectual poet.
Monsieur Bergeret in Paris
Anatole France
An ironical portrait of fin-de-siècle Paris, where political conspirators, urban intellectuals, and domestic pets all navigate the ridiculous, fractured realities of a society undergoing intense ideological upheaval.
A Love Episode
Émile Zola
A young widow’s awakening passion for her neighbor collapses against the fierce, possessive jealousy of her sickly daughter, turning a quiet Parisian romance into a devastating psychological tragedy.
Clio
Anatole France
This collection of historical sketches and essays serves as a meditation on the persistence of human memory and the fragility of worldly power. It remains a work of quiet elegance, bridging the distance between the ancient world and the French seventeenth century through a series of evocative, loosely connected…
Chantecler: Play in Four Acts
Edmond Rostand
A proud rooster believes his song alone summons the dawn, sparking a journey through a world of talking animals where he must defend his faith against vanity, jealousy, and the encroaching darkness of the night.
Poems & Poèmes
Natalie Clifford Barney
The heart is a vast, uncontainable landscape where love, memory, and the "stab of beauty" collide. This collection of verse explores the ache of devotion and the fierce, solitary quest for a selfhood that transcends the conventions of one's time.
Quotes and Images From The Tales and Novels of Jean de La Fontaine
Jean de La Fontaine
The wit of the seventeenth century finds its sharpest edge in these tales, where human folly, romantic misadventure, and clever deception collide. Beneath the courtly veneer, a keen observer dismantles the masks worn by society to reveal the appetites underneath.
Ballads and Lyrics of Old France, with Other Poems
Andrew Lang
Across the bridge of time, a scholar’s devotion recovers the fragile, ephemeral ghosts of French verse and folk song. This collection serves as a bridge between the vibrant, sun-drenched melodies of the Renaissance and the haunting, melancholy echoes of a fading past.
Samuel Brohl and Company
Victor Cherbuliez
A desperate, disgraced man reinvents himself as a Polish nobleman to gamble his future on a wealthy heiress. His performance is flawless, but the deception is a fragile house of cards waiting for the slightest breeze.
Zibeline
Massa, Philippe, marquis de
A young American heiress, cast out of convention by her immense wealth and bold spirit, finds herself navigating the intricate social tiers of Paris while seeking the man who embodies her ideals.
The Barber of Paris
Paul de Kock
A calculating barber acts as the cold-blooded instrument of a bored nobleman’s desires, but his latest abduction—a young girl named Blanche—unwittingly threatens to unravel his own dark past.
The New Book of Martyrs
Georges Duhamel
The hospital wards of the Great War become the lens through which a witness records the quiet, agonizing, and often transcendent transformation of men into martyrs.
East of Paris: Sketches in the Gâtinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne
Matilda Betham-Edwards
A veteran traveler traverses the quiet corners of Eastern France, uncovering the history, hospitality, and enduring cultural spirit of provinces that often escape the notice of the conventional tourist.
Calvary: A Novel
Octave Mirbeau
An obsession with a woman who embodies the moral decay of a bustling, indifferent capital city drives a young man to the brink of his own destruction.
Facino Cane
Honoré de Balzac
The promise of unimaginable wealth in a forgotten Venetian vault haunts this tale of a blind exile, proving that the most desperate man in Paris is the one who sees gold in his sleep.
La Grenadiere
Honoré de Balzac
A disgraced English noblewoman hides away in the idyllic French countryside, racing against a terminal illness to prepare her two young sons for absolute orphanhood.
The man with the broken ear
Edmond About
A frozen Napoleonic officer wakes up into the prosperous, practical world of Second Empire France.
Over Strand and Field: A Record of Travel through Brittany
Gustave Flaubert
A pair of open-minded travelers set out on foot to map the landscapes, ruins, and human realities of mid-nineteenth-century Brittany.
The Napoleon of the People
Honoré de Balzac
A veteran’s campfire yarn transforms history into holy myth, reframing a emperor’s rise and fall through the blind, glowing faith of the men who bled for him.
A Woodland Queen ('Reine des Bois')
André Theuriet
In the dense forests of eastern France, a timid heir's quiet isolation gives way to the vibrant rhythm of country life and unexpected love.
The Invasion of France in 1814
Erckmann-Chatrian
When Napoleon's empire crumbles, the mountain hamlets of the Vosges learn that war is no longer something French soldiers wage on foreign soil.
The Merrie Tales of Jacques Tournebroche
Anatole France
A collection of ironical tales of human vanity, where medieval paladins rely on miracles to fulfill drunken boasts and pious citizens quickly abandon their morals when left alone.
Gerfaut
Charles de Bernard
A young woman's flirtatious diversion turns into a desperate struggle for survival when her distant, urban lover pursues her to her husband's country estate.
The Follies of a Day
Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais
A restless Spanish estate turns into a battleground of wits as a valet outsmarts his master to save his wedding day.
Ascanio
Alexandre Dumas
A maestro’s hammer strikes an anvil inside a stolen cardinal’s refectory, where rivalries, royal caprice, and pure passion collide in the shadow of the Renaissance French court.