Here are some of the stories.

THE WILL

I knew that tall young fellow, Rene de Bourneval.  He was an agreeable man, though rather melancholy and seemed prejudiced against everything, was very skeptical, and he could with a word tear down social hypocrisy.  He would often say: 

“There are no honorable men, or, at least, they are only relatively so when compared with those lower than themselves.”

He had two brothers, whom he never saw, the Messieurs de Courcils.  I always supposed they were by another father, on account of the difference in the name.  I had frequently heard that the family had a strange history, but did not know the details.  As I took a great liking to Rene we soon became intimate friends, and one evening, when I had been dining with him alone, I asked him, by chance:  “Are you a son of the first or second marriage?” He grew rather pale, and then flushed, and did not speak for a few moments; he was visibly embarrassed.  Then he smiled in the melancholy, gentle manner, which was peculiar to him, and said: 

“My dear friend, if it will not weary you, I can give you some very strange particulars about my life.  I know that you are a sensible man, so I do not fear that our friendship will suffer by my I revelations; and should it suffer, I should not care about having you for my friend any longer.

“My mother, Madame de Courcils, was a poor little, timid woman, whom her husband had married for the sake of her fortune, and her whole life was one of martyrdom.  Of a loving, timid, sensitive disposition, she was constantly being ill-treated by the man who ought to have been my father, one of those boors called country gentlemen.  A month after their marriage he was living a licentious life and carrying on liaisons with the wives and daughters of his tenants.  This did not prevent him from having three children by his wife, that is, if you count me in.  My mother said nothing, and lived in that noisy house like a little mouse.  Set aside, unnoticed, nervous, she looked at people with her bright, uneasy, restless eyes, the eyes of some terrified creature which can never shake off its fear.  And yet she was pretty, very pretty and fair, a pale blonde, as if her hair had lost its color through her constant fear.

“Among the friends of Monsieur de Courcils who constantly came to her chateau, there was an ex-cavalry officer, a widower, a man who was feared, who was at the same time tender and violent, capable of the most determined resolves, Monsieur de Bourneval, whose name I bear.  He was a tall, thin man, with a heavy black mustache.  I am very like him.  He was a man who had read a great deal, and his ideas were not like those of most of his class.  His great-grandmother had been a friend of J. J. Rousseau’s, and one might have said that he had inherited something of this ancestral connection.  He knew the Contrat Social, and the Nouvelle Heloise by heart, and all those philosophical books which prepared in advance the overthrow of our old usages, prejudices, superannuated laws and imbecile morality.