Corinne knew enough of France to realise that all this was amazing. The average Frenchman, whom Bigourdin represented, is passionate but not romantic. If he sets his heart on a woman, be she the angel-eyed spouse of another respectable citizen or the tawdry and naughty little figurante in a provincial company, he does his honest (or dishonest) best to get her. _C’est l’amour_, and there’s an end to it. But he envisages marriage from a totally different angle. Far be it from me to say that he does not entertain very sincere and tender sentiments towards the young lady he proposes to marry. But he only proposes to marry a young lady who can put a certain capital into the business partnership which is an essential feature of marriage. If he is attracted towards a damsel of pleasing ways but devoid of capital, he either behaves like the appalling Monsieur Camille Fargot, or puts his common sense, like a non-conducting material, between them, and in all simplicity, doesn’t fall in love with her. But here was a manifestation of freakishness. Here was Bigourdin, man of substance, who could have gone to any one of twenty families of substance in Périgord and chosen from it an impeccable and well-dowered bride—here he was snapping his fingers at French bourgeois tradition—than which there is nothing more sacrosanct—putting his common sense into his cap and throwing it over the windmills, and acting in a manner which King Cophetua himself, had he been a Frenchman, would have condemned as either unconventional or insane.