An admirer visits an octogenarian cellist to celebrate her birthday; she, abandoning protocol, recounts, with poetic crudeness, a sexual encounter she had when she was nineteen. A middle-aged man seduces his best friend's daughter, runs away with her, abandons her without reason, and, three decades later, falls in love again, and they remain together until the end of their days. A woman gives shelter to a beggar who claims to have come from the realm of the dead and to have known her recently deceased mother. She gives him a horse, provisions, and blankets to take to her mother. Her jealous husband brutally beats her, and a few days later, the horse returns laden with riches, while the woman dies from the beating. These are some of the stories that parade through this brief narrative mosaic, which alternates between resources such as psychological penetration, meticulous realism, and fantasy. All the ambiguous springs of desire, love or heartbreak, nostalgia and creation, so explored by Pascal Quignard in his writing, unfold subtly, and at times cruelly, in these minuscule masterpieces. Drawing inspiration from, and revelation from, ancient myth, Quignard revisits modern myths and contrasts them with his own personal myths, full of intensity and verisimilitude. This philosophical and aesthetic contrast forces the reader to peer, in a new and disturbing light, into his own interiority and emotions.