The Muse of the Department

Madame Dinah de la Baudraye, of no fortune but superior mind and expectations, at the age of 17, marries Monsieur de la Baudraye, 44, the sickly son of yet another of Balzac's prudent survivors of the Revolution & Restoration. He becomes a great landowner around Sancerre, high in the Loire Valley (which I have visited, so I enjoyed my memories of the landscape in this story as well). For, frustrated in his attempts to recover debts from impecunious nobility who survived the Revolution, he accepts instead what is in their gift under the Restoration: various appointments to which he has no right, which he then sells at a profit to those who do.