Jupe Courte

''Jupe courte'' by Catulle Mendès is a collection of short stories written in the late 19th century. It playfully satirizes Parisian manners, desire, jealousy, and shifting notions of modesty through witty, risqué contes with ironic twists. Expect elegant coquettes, blasé dandies, devoted friends, and ingenuous brides caught in audacious situations that probe the gap between appearances and appetites. The opening of the collection begins with a mischievous preface predicting a fashion revolution—bared bodies and veiled faces—as a metaphor for changing modesty. The first tales follow: a lover steals a rival’s intimate scent to win back her man, only to drive him back to the rival; a famed “repairer of jugs” (a fable on virginity) is confronted with a bride’s unbreakable vessel he himself once “fixed”; two inseparable friends link their boudoirs with an electric bell to synchronize their marital ecstasies, which leads one to yield disastrously during a daytime intrusion; a flawless beauty laments that her very perfection proves a handicap in love; a boastful cynic’s infallible jealousy trap is undone by a telltale blond hair; a Parisienne who rates lovers by the cigarettes she smokes afterward finds true stamina with a rustic; and a lady lowered from a hayloft disguised as a straw bundle is abducted by a farmhand who weighs her fate. The section closes by launching a new story in which a narrator posits that desire can transmit silently from one person to another, just as he begins a tale of his innocent young wife.