THE MARQUIS VON A*** WAS A YOUNG MAN who lived for pleasure. He was pleasant and likeable, but, all in all, had a lax opinion of female virtue. It came to pass, nonetheless, that a lady upset his equanimity. She was called Madame von P***, a rich upper-class widow, distinguished by intelligence, refinement, and gentility. She was proud and exalted in feeling and thought.

The Marquis broke off all of his prior connections, determined to live for this lady alone. He courted her with the greatest diligence, made every imaginable sacrifice in order to convince her of the violence of his affection, and offered her his hand in marriage. The Marquise, however, had not yet forgotten the unhappiness of her first marriage, and preferred any of life's hardships to entering into a second.

This woman lived in secluded retirement. The Marquis had been an acquaintance of her late husband. She had always allowed him to come calling, and her door remained open to him after the death of her husband.

Gallant language toward women, deftly wielded by a man of the world, could not fail to please. The persistence of this man's courtship, reinforced by his personal qualities, his stature, his youth, signs of the most intimate and truest love, and then, on her side, the woman's loneliness, a temperament made for tender feelings, in a word, everything that could conspire to seduce a female heart, succeeded in this case as in others.