Paul Eldridge's talent as a poet, as a short-story writer and as the co-author of several best-selling novels is by now well established. In this new volume of short stories, he demonstrates his brotherhood to the Gallic tradition in literature. These stories are ironic in conception and delicate in treatment. They are reminiscent of Maupassant, but a Maupassant who is aware of the present-day temper. Many of the stories are laid in Paris and in them there is the authentic perfume of the boulevards, glistening in the rain, the poule, lonely and alert, at her little table on a café terrace, the sophisticated skeleton in the bourgeois' closet.