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.