e for several years. While in residence there a young gentleman happens to meet her and eventually is successful in courting her. While the remain lovers for close to a decade, he cannot marry her while her husband lives. This motivates him to marry someone else, leaving Mme. de Beauseant figuratively and literally deserted. Early on in the narrative we observe how the bourgeois material society defines its boundaries. We are told that this society revolves around a select few individuals who because of wealth and position are the society: “When M. le Baron Gaston de Nueil...had spent two or three evenings...with the friends who made up Mme de Sainte-Severe’s circle, he very soon had made the acquaintance of the persons whom this exclusive society considered to be ‘the whole town’”.
The environment of social life among the elite group of bourgeois and former aristocracy is stilted and uninviting to Gaston. In Balzac’s depiction of the aristocratic gentility we see the poignancy of women trapped in a changing world in which their way of life is all but a distant memory, much as it was in France in the nineteenth century. We also see the author’s observation powers with respect to human nature as he describes these dispossessed creatures hanging on to reality through a refusal to let go their dignity: “They might be sealed up in the houses where you see them; their faces and their dresses are literally part of the fixtures of the town, and the province in which they dwell. They are its tradition, its memory, its quintessence, the genius loci incarnate”.
The clergy who are admitted to town in small numbers are attracted to the bourgeois because of the routine dullness of their own society. They associate with them to bring and element of entertainment to their drawing rooms as a baker “put leaven into his dough”. Gaston is initially attracted to the denizens of this world out of pure interest and ...