International Short Stories

A duke throws away a piece of hard army bread—and watches a starving soldier snatch it from the mud. In François Coppée’s “A Piece of Bread,” that small act opens onto a life Henri de Hardimont never imagined.

The collection begins in France during the bitter winter of 1870, with war pressing close and hunger making old comforts seem impossibly distant. Across stories by French writers from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth, translated into English, meet lives shaped by sudden reversals, hard choices, and unexpected encounters. Here, a fashionable young duke must reckon with the gulf between his own hardship and a comrade’s lifelong want—and with the shame of having looked away. What can one piece of bread reveal about the man who throws it aside, and the man who picks it up?

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Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.