Histoires perfides

The stories are set within a frame narrative involving two characters. The main narrator — a writer in search of an “original subject” — finds in the second character, a former lawyer born in Shandong, an imaginary Asian kingdom, the material for each story, which unfold at different periods of the storyteller’s past life — now an old man — in Shandong.

A previously unpublished version of the second story, “Le Palais merveilleux de la Petite Ville,” has recently been unearthed and published. In the collection, it follows “La grâce royale,” “Les Lois,” “Les limites de l’endurance” and “Service compassion.”