Ellénore's experience before she meets Adolphe, and a fortiori afterwards, is in direct contradiction to the ‘parody of a well-known saying’ of Adolphe's father, ‘Cela leur fait si peu de mal, et à nous tant de plaisir!’, ‘It [i.e. a casual affair] does them so little harm and gives us so much pleasure’ (Ch. I, p. 118). The novel as a whole is a darkly ironic commentary on that particular general maxim, one which is obviously untrue in the case of a woman like Ellénore, but also of a man like Adolphe, whose pleasure from the affair is short-lived. (Yet at a deeper level – and by a double irony very characteristic of Constant – would it not be true to say that Ellénore despite everything considers the world well lost for Adolphe, and that he comes to feel far more for her than he is fully aware of at the time?) The first underlying irony is that Adolphe, a specialist in la plaisanterie, nonetheless takes his father's quip seriously, and it brings him to despair and loneliness; the second irony is that since humour is so ingrained in him, it is natural for Adolphe to warm to anything that subverts the ‘banal formulae’ of society: yet what could be more unthinking than such humour as a rule of conduct, more pernicious than mere banality? Adolphe's spirit of contradiction and distrust of ‘general axioms which allow for no exceptions or nuances’ (Ch. I, p. 114) lead him into a different and more deadly trap.