'What should I do?' 'What can I do?' 'What will it mean for me?' Personal and urgent, these questions are at the core of story-telling and fictional narration cast in terms of plot and action as a thematics of difficult ('hard') choices. Scenes of men and women faced with such choices recur throughout the history of the novel in France, from Madame de La Fayette's La Princesse de Clèves (1678) and Balzac's Le Père Goriot (1835) to André Malraux's La Condition humaine (1933) and Annie Ernaux's Une Femme (1988). As a set, these scenes provide literary expressions to concerns with personal identity that vary over time more in detail and circumstance than in essence. For the novels mentioned, the decisions range from remaining in or retreating from courtly society (La Fayette) to moving with a spouse to another part of France or staying instead in one's native region (Ernaux). Both cases provide dramatic content for metaphysical concerns with existence set forth as a problematics of the individual in his or her world.