Both mother and father are for once agreed that the association with Sara must be terminated, and Geneviève is withdrawn from her school and tutored by friends of the family. In the woman tutor she takes an intellectual interest only, for she is too closely bound to her mother to feel emotion for another woman of the same age. Her reaction to the man, a married physician, is more complex. She is not conscious of sexual attraction, is in fact repelled by the idea of sex and marriage, largely from observing her parents’ experience. She has also absorbed from Sara (an illegitimate child) a contempt for the conventions. As a feministic declaration of independence—on the conscious level—she asks her mentor to give her a child by him which will then be wholly hers to bring up. The good doctor, recognizing the immaturity and relative impersonality of her feeling for him, contrives to remain detached, fatherly, and helpful. Geneviève’s mother confesses to her later that she herself at a particularly trying stage of her unhappy marriage, was for a time in love with the doctor, and one infers the profundity of the daughter’s identification with her from the fact that the girl subconsciously turned to the same man. Roland-Manuel’s _Le Trille du Diable_ (1946) is reminiscent of Lacretelle’s _La Bonifas_ in that its setting is a declining village and its heroine’s history is traced from about 1870 until after the first World War. But Florence Benoit, unlike Marie Bonifas, is a ruthless egotist who never serves anyone’s interest but her own. Spoiled daughter of a pretentious speculator, she anticipates wealth and a brilliant marriage as her due, and when M. Benoit dies impoverished she makes life a veritable hell for her mother and younger brother. She then steals a mediocre but kindly man from his fiancée and leads him much the same sort of life, later attempting also to dominate and possess her only child, a son sufficiently like her to defy her in the end. Her earliest conquest is Augustine Virot, daughter of her father’s bookkeeper, a tall not too attractive girl with whom her association is innocent until after their hearing a charity concert in the neighboring city of Santerre. On this occasion Florence, then about fourteen, conceives a romantic infatuation for the violinist Soline, largely under the spell of his spectacularly brilliant encore, _Le Trille du Diable_. Although Florence does not see Soline again until she is past middle age, she nurses an undying passion for him which leads her into all manner of absurdities and against which all subsequent emotion seems pallid. As the title of the novel indicates, the author intends the meretricious musical number and its aftermath to epitomize an unwholesome flight from reality.