Madame Aubin

A one-act prose drama stages a tense domestic confrontation in a hotel room where a woman, torn between her renewed conscience and a planned elopement with a lover, vacillates over abandoning her marriage. The lover alternately cajoles and threatens to continue the escapade, while the husband unexpectedly returns, reveals he has arranged a duel and departs with the rival, leaving the woman to reckon with fear, remorse, and memories of her earlier capriciousness. The play examines honor, gendered double standards, marital conflict, and the clash between passion and moral hesitation, resolving its crisis through offstage masculine violence and the woman's interior reckoning.