Tcherepnin, Gretchaninoff and some other Russian composers wrote a number of teaching pieces in late Romantic style that would be accessible to late beginners/early intermediates. You might want to look at a few things by them. It's a different world from French music, and not all the pieces are equally good, but they are definitely short and expressive and designed to be playable by students in the early stages.
The Sicilienne by Schumann from Album for the Young is often popular with adult early intermediate students; it's gentle and moody and there's room for a more mature mode of expression. Also it is short and uses a lot of repetition.
Same thing with Old French Song by Tchaikovsky from his Album for the Young. Kids could play it, but an adult could do more with it, and it's short and quick to learn due to repetition.
This is earlier romantic, but you could also look at the Schubert waltzes. He wrote dozens, maybe hundreds, and they are well represented on imslp.org. Definitely mid-intermediate in difficulty, and many of them are like 16 measures. Not all of them are equally interesting, but maybe you could download a collection and sight-read the melody line until you found one you liked well enough to learn properly.
The A minor Chopin waltz mentioned above is one of the easiest Chopin waltzes, but it is still many pages long and at least a couple of minutes in length. There are some very short easier Preludes from Chopin's op. 28: no. 4, 6, 7 and 20. Good for someone who is willing to put in the time to not only learn the notes but make them sound beautiful. The difficulties are not in learning the notes. (These Preludes are still harder than anything else mentioned in this post.)
