3 french shorts stories

I’ll admit, I approached this expecting the usual dusty gravitas of 19th-century literature—only to be gut-punched by how *alive* these stories feel. Haigh’s narration is a revelation: she doesn’t just read Flaubert, she *channels* him. Her Herodias is all icy command, her voice dropping to a velvet growl when the tetrarch’s lust curdles into paranoia. And in *Saint Julian*, she somehow makes a saint’s descent into madness sound both tragic and darkly comic, like a Shakespearean fool stumbling toward grace. The production is crisp, with just enough atmospheric silence to let the horror of *The Dance of Death*—a plague-ridden waltz with the Grim Reaper himself—sink in. That said, this isn’t flawless. The pacing in *Herodias* occasionally feels *too* measured; Flaubert’s dense historical asides (all those Roman titles and courtly maneuverings) can bog down the momentum, and Haigh’s enunciation, while precise, sometimes borders on over-articulation. And if you’re squeamish, *Saint Julian*’s opening hunt scene—visceral even by modern standards—might make you flinch. But these are quibbles. What lingers is the sheer *craft*: how Flaubert packs entire philosophies into a single metaphor (that leprous beggar in *Saint Julian* will haunt me for weeks), and how Haigh’s performance turns subtext into a knife twist. For fans of literary horror, historical fiction with teeth, or anyone who thinks classics are ‘boring,’ this is your wake-up call.