_Mlle Giraud_ follows the course of a man’s marriage to a girl who stubbornly refuses to consummate the union. Adrien has been warned against marrying Paule by a young matron of his acquaintance, but since Mme. Blangy will give him no reason for her warning, he ignores it. After several months he suspects this woman, still his wife’s inseparable companion, of being a blind for some illicit affair of Paule’s. He tracks the two to an apartment which he examines in their absence and finds to be a lush love-nest, with some details reminiscent of the boudoir of the _Girl with the Golden Eyes_. Among other things, he finds there that volume, along with Diderot’s _La Religieuse_, Gautier’s _Maupin_, and “Feydeau’s latest, _La Comtesse de Chalis_.” Adrien’s life as a civil engineer has kept him out of Paris for some years and left him so unaware of homosexuality among respectable women that none of these suggestive details arouses his suspicion. It is only upon his meeting M. Blangy, separated for several years from his wife, that Adrien learns of the lesbian relationship between the two women. The two husbands institute a joint campaign to separate their wives, but it is too late. For the few months Adrien has spent in travel to escape insupportable domestic tension, Paule has been free for the first time in her life to indulge her tastes as freely as she likes, and her health has been gravely affected. During the collapse which follows upon Adrien’s taking her to North Africa, Paule cries out one day against the wickedness of segregation in boarding schools where loneliness drives girls to emotional dependence upon their own sex. ‘I believe it is not so often men who ruin women,’ she says. ‘It is women who ruin each other.’[2] At this her husband begins to regard her as morally ill rather than depraved, and his new sympathy brings her to the verge of normal passion for him. But at this crucial moment, Paule’s recapture by Mme. Blangy destroys all possibility of subsequent adjustment. The conflict ends with Paule’s complete subjection by her lesbian friend and her death from meningitis, supposedly the direct result of sexual excess. Adrien, learning later that Mme. Blangy has begun the conquest of another girl, manages under the guise of accident to drown the seductress. M. Blangy, who guesses the truth, tells him he has done the world a service in removing “cette reptile,” and the author leaves little doubt that he himself agrees.