This collection opens with a bawdy anecdote and ends with Marcel Proust. The 43 stories spanning 400 years, starting in the 16th century (many newly translated by a variety of hands), include Charles Perrault’s classic version of Bluebeard, Voltaire’s pioneering science fiction, prose poems and dream narratives, supernatural chillers, a Jules Verne duel in a balloon and the first adventure of “gentleman-burglar” Arsène Lupin, subject of a recent hit Netflix series. Gustave Flaubert’s refined character study, A Simple Heart, runs to 31 pages, but the book also finds space for 28 of Félix Fénéon’s “three-line novellas” based on brief items in regional newspapers. (Editor Patrick McGuinness rightly praises the one that reads simply: “Verniot, septuagenarian beggar from Clichy, has died of hunger. 2000 francs were hidden in his mattress. But let’s not generalise.”)
This is a title that is almost militantly capacious in its refusal to set limits to what counts as a “short story”. There is surprisingly little about food but rather more explicit sex than you would expect in an equivalent British collection and quite a few lasciviously detailed descriptions of women’s bodies. The title character of Marquis de Sade’s Augustine de Villeblanche offers a philosophical defence of lesbianism: if nature really cared about reproduction, “why should a woman be able to serve her purpose only a third of her life?... let us remember that [nature’s] resources are vast, that nothing we do offends her, and that it lies outside our power to commit a crime against her laws”. Augustine is eventually seduced at a carnival ball, while dressed as a man, by a young guy disguised as a girl. Even stranger is Jean Lorrain’s The Man Who Loved Consumptives, in which a man called Fauras is seen at the theatre alongside a skeletal young woman with a “disturbing and spectral pallor”. Observers speculate whether the “monomania” that leads him to “love only those who are close to death” makes him “the next thing to a necrophiliac” or, rather, “a tender-hearted, elegiac soul”.
Honoré de Balzac is celebrated for novels about grasping peasants, disputed wills and young men on the make. But he is represented here by A Passion in the Desert. A soldier in Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign is captured by Arabs, makes his escape and finds shelter in a cave, which turns out to be inhabited by a panther. She has fortunately just eaten and there is an almost ecstatic description of her glistening white fur, sinuous tail and the “many small marks like velvet [which] formed beautiful bracelets round her feet”. Marvelling at “such youth and grace in her form”, the soldier declares her to be “as beautiful as a woman!” They become firm friends before an inevitable tragic conclusion.
When it comes to politics, Victor Hugo’s Claude Gueux offers an overt polemic against capital punishment, and in favour of penal reform, through an account of a decent prisoner provoked to murder by the pointless cruelty of a “mediocre and obstinate” director of workshops, one of the world’s many “pig-headed little agents of fate who believe themselves to be Providence”. Rather more subtle is Émile Zola’s strikingly modern story of a young man who becomes obsessed with advertising and ends up filling his house with “every crackbrained invention or shoddy article on sale in Paris... The fireplaces, equipped with ingenious smokeless hoods, belched forth asphyxiating fumes; the electric bells remained obstinately silent; the carefully planned modern lavatories turned out to be noisome cesspits…” Since he is determined to be “embalmed in a casket in accordance with a recently patented instant chemical process”, even his coffin bursts open.
There are also some gems by less famous figures. Octave Mirbeau’s On a Cure describes the proto-existential crisis of a man of letters who loses faith in everything and retires to a mountain village, “where all is ash, charred stone, dried-out sap, where everything has already entered the silence of dead things!” Equally powerful is The Unknown Woman by the little-known Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, in which, rather like Alfred Hitchcock’s film Rear Window, the narrator reconstructs a family tragedy unfolding next door from hints observed through the window. It is unlikely that any reader will enjoy everything in this book, published alongside another volume taking the French short story up to the present day, but it scores high marks for quality and variety.
• The Penguin Book of French Short Stories: Vol 1, edited by Patrick McGuinness, is published by Penguin (£30). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
