Carville

In Normandy, near the sea, in the village of Carville, lived the beadle and schoolmaster Hautemare and his wife — pious, narrow, honest people, without children. One day they went to the foundling hospital in Rouen and adopted a little girl, whom they named Lamiel. They brought her up strictly, in fear of God and of the devil, and taught her her catechism; she learned to read in the books of devotion and in the old chapbooks of brigands' tales, which she preferred.

Stendhal's opening pages, with their bitter comedy of village piety, are among the most finished of the novel.

Lamiel grew up lively, clever, curious, and bored. Everything she was told was forbidden seemed to her the only thing worth doing. She loved the stories of the robber Cartouche and of Mandrin more than the lives of the saints.

The château of Carville belonged to the Duchesse de Miossens, an old, proud, nervous and very bored great lady, who lived in fear of the liberals and of the Revolution, and who governed the village as her fief. The duchess, needing someone to read aloud to her and to keep her company, took Lamiel, at about fifteen, into the château as her reader. Lamiel learned there the manners of a great house — and its emptiness.

The duchess's son, the young Duc Fédor de Miossens, a gentle, timid youth, a pupil of the École Polytechnique, came to the château on his holidays, and was soon in love with Lamiel; she found him dull.