Point De Lendemain

One of the first short stories ever written, Vivant Denon's slender masterpiece traces a single night in the life of a young man newly arrived in the world of Parisian aristocratic love. Infatuated with the Countess, he accepts her commission to deliver a letter to the countryside, not realizing he has been cleverly dispatched so she might pursue her own affair. At the estate, he encounters Madame de T..., a woman with designs of her own, who arranges for him to spend the night in her husband's house. What follows is a comic and unsettling education in the ways of the world: doors that lock from the outside, wrong turns, interrupted encounters, and the slow, humiliating dawning of understanding. The young man's innocence does not survive the night. By morning, he has learned something about desire, deception, and his own place in an adult world far more complicated than romance novels promised. The ending resists interpretation: was it loss? Gaining? The story leaves its narrator, and the reader, uncertain what the night actually meant, only that it changed him.