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. (This is an automatically generated summary.)