Its central figure is Veronique, the wife of a Limoges banker
named Grasselin, and greatly her senior, to whom she has been married
by her parents before she has had the time to know anything of love
and its behests. Led by her goodness of heart to patronize a youth in
her husband's employ, she falls in love with him, as he with her, and,
through weakness, becomes his mistress. A murder, of which the young
Tascheron is accused, and, as the issue proves, quite justly,
interrupts this culpable idyll; and the assassin is condemned and
executed, without revealing the secret of his liaison, and without
Madame Grasselin's interfering to save him, otherwise than vaguely,
through the Cure of the district. None the less, she is aware that the
act has been committed indirectly through the young man's love for
her. Smitten with remorse, after the execution, she quits Limoges,
and, removing into the country, endeavours there by a life of charity
and devotion to religion to redeem her lapse from her wifely duty.
Then, finally, she dies in presence of the Archbishop, of Bianchon the
great doctor, and of the Procureur-General and other witnesses, whom
she has sent for to listen to her confession of moral complicity, the
death scene being narrated with much theatrical emphasis.
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