The works collected in this book were written during a time when France was, perhaps, the center of the world. Let us imagine a country that produced and filled itself in a short time with revolutionary novels, paintings, cafes, fashion, chamber music, shops, thinkers, the first automobiles, and countless art movements. We are now looking at the "Belle Époque" or the "long French nineteenth century" that lasted until the outbreak of World War I and its aftermath. Paris flourished and became an astonishing metropolis, and at the same time the capital of literature. In the "French Five," seminal literary voices were juxtaposed, a central expression of France's golden age – a unique historical and literary moment that had no equal before or after it. It is, if we will, a chamber anthology that includes five short and rare works by giant writers: Anatole France, Marcel Proust, Honore de Balzac, Emile Zola, Jules Verne. In "The Commissioner of the Jews" by Anatole France – a masterful text about memory, forgetting, and against anti-Semitism – we follow the old days of Pontius Pilate in the Roman Empire, during which he recalls his time in Palestine. In "Before Night" by the young Marcel Proust, a woman on her deathbed begins with a confession of a forbidden love that she has hidden all her life. In "Modern Stimulants", Honoré de Balzac foresees in a prophetic and insightful text the future decline of the West due to its addiction to alcohol, tobacco, coffee, and sugar. In "In Return for a Night of Love", Émile Zola unfolds a tragic and suspenseful story about the limits of a lover's giving to his love. In "An American Journalist in 2889", Jules Verne sails into the realms of fantasy about the lifestyle of Western society at the end of the third millennium.