“I saw mamma; she was good, very simple, and not very happy.  I dreamed of a destiny different from hers.  Why?  I felt around me the insipid taste of life, and seemed to inhale the future like a salt and pungent aroma.  Why?  What did I want, and what did I expect?  Was I not warned enough of the sadness of everything?”

She had been born rich, in the brilliancy of a fortune too new.  She was a daughter of that Montessuy, who, at first a clerk in a Parisian bank, founded and governed two great establishments, brought to sustain them the resources of a brilliant mind, invincible force of character, a rare alliance of cleverness and honesty, and treated with the Government as if he were a foreign power.  She had grown up in the historical castle of Joinville, bought, restored, and magnificently furnished by her father.  Montessuy made life give all it could yield.  An instinctive and powerful atheist, he wanted all the goods of this world and all the desirable things that earth produces.  He accumulated pictures by old masters, and precious sculptures.  At fifty he had known all the most beautiful women of the stage, and many in society.  He enjoyed everything worldly with the brutality of his temperament and the shrewdness of his mind.

Poor Madame Montessuy, economical and careful, languished at Joinville, delicate and poor, under the frowns of twelve gigantic caryatides which held a ceiling on which Lebrun had painted the Titans struck by Jupiter.  There, in the iron cot, placed at the foot of the large bed, she died one night of sadness and exhaustion, never having loved anything on earth except her husband and her little drawing-room in the Rue Maubeuge.

She never had had any intimacy with her daughter, whom she felt instinctively too different from herself, too free, too bold at heart; and she divined in Therese, although she was sweet and good, the strong Montessuy blood, the ardor which had made her suffer so much, and which she forgave in her husband, but not in her daughter.

But Montessuy recognized his daughter and loved her.  Like most hearty, full-blooded men, he had hours of charming gayety.  Although he lived out of his house a great deal, he breakfasted with her almost every day, and sometimes took her out walking.  He understood gowns and furbelows.  He instructed and formed Therese.  He amused her.  Near her, his instinct for conquest inspired him still.  He desired to win always, and he won his daughter.  He separated her from her mother.  Therese admired him, she adored him.

In her dream she saw him as the unique joy of her childhood.  She was persuaded that no man in the world was as amiable as her father.

At her entrance in life, she despaired at once of finding elsewhere so rich a nature, such a plenitude of active and thinking forces.  This discouragement had followed her in the choice of a husband, and perhaps later in a secret and freer choice.