Madwoman of Chaillot - Adolfe?

Adolphe is the former lover of the Madwoman, and their aborted affair haunts the play. They had courted in the 1890's "when the Tsar entered Paris," but had broken apart years afterward, and Adolphe had married a woman named Georgette whom he never loved. "That's the way men are," the Madwoman explains. "They love you because you are good, spiritual, and transparent, and when they get the chance they leave you for some woman who is ugly, colorless, and opaque" (pp. 166-167). Thirty years after that, but still before the play begins, they met again, but that time Adolphe did not recognize his countess Aurélie, and instead he stole a melon from her. Finally, at the end of the play, "all the Adolphe Bertauts of the world" come to return her melon and demand her hand (p. 178). But now she refuses. This is the story of Adolphe Bertaut, and it is a puzzling one since it seems at first to have so little relationship with the rest of the play.