Baudelaire admired Edgar Poe's short stories partly on the grounds that he considered them 'tout à fait anti-féminine. Dans les livres d'Edgar Poe, le style est serré, concaténé; la mauvaise volonté du lecteur ou de la presse ne pourront pas passer à travers les mailles de ce réseau tressé par la logique. Toutes les idées, comme des flèches obéissantes, volent au même but. J'ai traversé une longue enfilade de contes sans trouver une histoire d'amour.' The formal properties of the short story as described by Baudelaire might indeed appear inimical to the 'histoire d'amour'; however, the surge of short story writing by women and by non-metropolitan writers which took place in the twentieth century was accompanied by an opening up of the form and by a variety of new subject matter, including the love story. My paper will consider four short stories by two women (one metropolitan and one born in Algeria - Annie Saumont and Assia Djebar) and by two men (one metropolitan and one born in Haiti - Michel Tournier and René Depestre). It will investigate the ways in which a contemporary romance plot can function within the short story, and will consider the impact of gender and cultural difference on what Barthes terms the 'extreme solitude' of the lover's discourse, and on the model of the love story.