When he had taken his thirty-first mistress, and had made the discovery that in love, money does not create happiness two-thirds of the time, that they had all deceived him, and made him perfectly ridiculous at the end of the week, Charles Dupontel made up his mind to settle down as a respectable married man, and to marry, not from calculation or from reason, but for love. One autumn afternoon at Auteuil, he noticed in front of the club stand, among the number of pretty women who were standing round the braziers, a girl with such lovely delicate complexion that it looked like an apple blossom; her hair was like threads of gold, and she was so slight and supple that she reminded him of those outlines of saints which one sees in old stained-glass church windows. There was also something enigmatical about her, for she had at the same time the delightfully ingenuous look of a school girl during the holidays, and also of some enlightened young lady, who already knew the how and the why of everything, who is exuberant with youth and life, and who is eagerly waiting for the moment when marriage will at length allow her to say and to do everything that comes into her head, and to amuse herself to satiety. Then she had such small feet that they would have gone into a woman's hand, a waist that could have been clasped by a bracelet, turned up eyelashes, which fluttered like the wings of a butterfly, close on an impudent and sensual nose, and a vague, mocking smile that made folds in her lips, like the petals of a rose. Her father was a member of the Jockey Club, who was generally _cleared out_, as they call it, in the great races, but who yet defended his position bravely, and continued that, and who kept himself afloat by prodigies of coolness and skill. He belonged to a race which could prove that his ancestors had been at the court of Charlemagne, and not as musicians or cooks, as some people declared. Her youth and beauty and her father's pedigree dazzled Dupontel, upset his brain, and altogether turned him upside down, and combined they seemed to him to be a mirage of happiness and of pride of family. He got introduced to her father, at the end of a game of baccarat, invited him to shoot with him, and a month later, as if it were an affair to be hurried over, he asked for and obtained the hand of Mademoiselle Therese de Montsaigne, and felt as happy as a miner who has discovered a vein of precious metal. The young woman did not require more than twenty-four hours to discover that her husband was nothing but a ridiculous puppet, and immediately set about to consider how she might best escape from her cage, and befool the poor fellow, who loved her with all his heart.