Two weeks afterward, however, the papas fell out. Cafétier exacted more than Commis could promise, and Commis declared Mademoiselle Clothilde _pas grand' chose_: her eyebrows were too white, and her toes turned in. The marriage was declared "off," and the young people were ordered to fall out of love the quickest possible. "Too late!" they cried. "You have seen each other but four times." "Quite enough," declared the lovers. "You shall not marry," shouted the parents. "We _will_!" screamed their offspring. Nevertheless they could not, for the French law gives almost absolute power to parents. Mademoiselle would have no _dot_ unless her father chose to give her one, and no French marriage is legal without paternal consent or the almost disgraceful expedient of _sommations respectueuses_. Mademoiselle threatened to enter a convent. Cafétier assured her that no convent opens cordial doors to _dot_less girls. Juliet was ready to defy all the Capulets when she had seen Romeo but once; Corinne was ready to fling all her laurels at Oswald's feet at their second interview; Rosamond Vincy planned her house-furnishing during her second meeting with Lydgate; even Dorothea Brooke felt a "trembling hope" the very next day after her first sight of Mr. Casaubon. How, then, could one expect poor Clothilde to yield up her undersized, thin-moustached, and very unheroic-looking Henri, having seen him _four_ times? There was one way out of her troubles,--that to which Alphonse Daudet's and André Theuriet's people gravitate as needles to their pole. She walked one dark midnight upon the jetty alone. Nobody saw the end; but the next Sunday, three weeks to a day from the one when the two had countermarched in matrimonial procession, Mademoiselle Clothilde was laid in her grave. The whole French social system revolves around the _dot_. "How dare you speak to my father so!" I once heard a daughter reproach her mother. "How dare you, who brought him no _dot_!" "It is a pity Madame Marais has no more influence in her family," I heard remarked in a social company. "It is a pity, for she is a good woman, and her husband and sons are all going to the bad." "Yes, it is a pity," answered another; "but, then, what else can she expect? She brought no _dot_ into the family."