Stories in yellow, black, white, blue, violet and red

Stories in yellow, black, white, blue, violet and red by Remy de Gourmont is a collection of short stories written in the early 20th century. Introduced by a lyrical foreword that treats prose as a poetic art, the book arranges brief, sensuous tales around colors, using each hue to frame a mood and a theme—desire, innocence, power, and the aesthetics of seeing and feeling.

The stories move from quiet encounters to sharp revelations. Yellow follows a mute courtship by a hunter and a peasant girl that culminates in a woodland tryst, where a gold coin (yellow) unlocks her trembling joy. In Black, a man obsessing over a black dahlia with a pink heart finds its living counterpart in a woman dressed in black and white with a blush of rose; they seize the day and become lovers. White contrasts two children’s budding tenderness with the girl’s fervent first communion, where the language of sacred love rivals erotic feeling—yet after mass she sweetly returns to her earthly friend. Blue presents a proud princess who “rescues” a lady-in-waiting from marital sorrow by summoning the husband she secretly loves; she claims him while masking her conquest as benevolence, treasuring the shifting “blue” mark of passion. Violet tells of a cheerful, pious “old maid” devoted to violets who shelters a scholarship boy and, Thursday by Thursday, becomes his lover, later repeating the pattern with others—charity entwined with appetite, to the anguish of her confessor. Red opens at dawn with a milkmaid fetching a wounded partridge from gorse; blood scratches and sunrise foreshadow a rendezvous the next day, sealed by a “red clasp” of a lover’s bite—desire blazing as the day begins.