Part One: The Salon

André Mariolle was a man who had never done anything. He was rich enough not to need to; he was gifted enough to have done almost anything — he had a little talent for music, a little for painting, a little for writing, and a great deal of taste — and he had done none of it, because he did not care to be second-rate, and because nothing had ever seized him completely. He was nearly forty, a little shy, a little proud, solitary, sensitive, much liked by the few who knew him; he lived alone in a pleasant apartment in Paris with his old servant, and read, and played the violin, and looked at pictures, and dreamed.

One day his friend Massival, a composer, persuaded him to come to the salon of Madame Michèle de Burne.

Everyone in a certain Paris talked about Madame de Burne. She was young — not yet thirty — a widow; she had been married to a man who had made her very unhappy, a cold, tyrannical, jealous man who had treated her, in their few years together, as a possession; and since his death she had sworn never to belong to anyone again. She was lovely: slender, elegant, fair, with a clear, mocking intelligence and a gift for listening that made every man feel he was being understood. She lived with her father, an amiable old gentleman, and she kept a salon where she gathered the most brilliant men she could find — writers, musicians, painters, sculptors, a few men of fashion — and collected them, and played with them, and let each of them believe that he was perhaps a little nearer to her than the rest. Each of them was a little in love with her. None of them had ever had more than her smile.

Among them were a famous novelist, Gaston de Lamarthe, who studied her as material for his books and said that she was the type of the modern woman — a woman who wants to be loved, and does not love; Massival, the musician, who played for her; a great sculptor; a count, a baron, a few young men; and her one rival, whom she kept by her as a foil.

Mariolle was received with charming attention; she had heard of him, and wanted him, as she wanted every new and interesting man. She asked him to come again. He came again. And within a few weeks, without having meant to, he was in love with her — completely, as he had never been in love with anything; he, who had never given himself to anything, gave himself to her.

She saw it, and was pleased; and she drew him in, with the skill of long practice — a glance, a confidence, a word that seemed to be meant for him alone. And then, when she had him, she held him at a distance, like the others: kind, amused, a little teasing, never quite within reach. He suffered, and could not keep away.

He told her at last that he loved her. She was not offended; she smiled, and said that she liked him very much, and that he must not spoil their friendship. He went away in despair, and resolved not to go back, and went back.

In the summer she went to the coast of Normandy, and he followed. They went together, with friends, on an excursion to Mont-Saint-Michel — the great abbey on its rock, rising out of the vast sands and the tides; and there, on the ramparts, in the evening, with the sea coming in across the bay, something in her gave way — curiosity, or a moment's tenderness, or simply the beauty of the place — and she let him take her in his arms. That night, at Avranches, in the little hotel, she became his.

The details of the Mont-Saint-Michel excursion are given here in substance; the exact setting of the scene in which Madame de Burne yields may differ slightly from the novel.