These three stories, the last of Yourcenar's fiction to be translated into English, were written between 1927 and 1930 when the author was in her mid-twenties. "A Blue Tale" is a sensual, fantastic attempt to describe reality in tones of blue. Drawing on an ancient oral tradition, Yourcenar offers a tale of the credulity of men who are lured by riches - in this case, sapphires.

"The First Evening" was originally written, though left unfinished, by Yourcenar's father, Michel de Crayencour. He exerted a strong influence on his daughter's life and on the early stages of her writing career. Yourcenar revised and completed this tale depicting a jaded French intellectual and man-of-the-world whose wedding night is disrupted by shocking news, and it was published under her name after her father's death.

"The Evil Spell," like Memoirs of Hadrian, is set in the Mediterranean, a physical and spiritual place that fired Yourcenar's literary imagination. The tale reveals Yourcenar's fascination with the occult, a realm she would find herself attracted to more than once later on - most notably at a crucial turning point in The Abyss.