Tale
Cruel Tales
Contes cruels
Opening lines
Pascal nous dit qu’au point de vue des faits, le Bien et le Mal sont une question de «latitude».
Pascal tells us that, from the point of view of facts, Good and Evil are a question of “latitude”.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
Short tales in which satire sits alongside the fantastic. A businessman imagines projecting advertisements onto the sky of Paris; an inventor offers theatres a machine for producing glory; two courtesans, the demoiselles de Bienfilâtre, see one of them fall into disgrace because she has begun to love; a widowed count refuses to accept the death of his wife, Véra, and goes on living as if she were there.
Context
The collection appeared in Paris in 1883. It brings together stories of very varied tone, satires of bourgeois materialism, fantastic tales and vignettes, closed by an epilogue, L'Annonciateur. It gave its name to a genre, the cruel tale, based on reversals of fortune and the icy indifference of the world. Three years later, the author published L'Ève future, a novel in which an inventor builds an artificial woman.
Who it is for
Short stories, to be taken separately and in whatever order one likes; the volume was not composed as a continuous book.
Prizes and reception
Recognised as the birth certificate of the cruel tale, it was translated into English by Robert Baldick for Oxford.
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The pages consulted to check this page.