Geneviève's Two Lives

The novel gives Geneviève real emotional depth as a woman caught between her marriage to Dixmer and her real feelings for Maurice, but says relatively little about the marriage itself before the novel's events begin. This two-chapter story imagines how a young woman came to marry a man considerably older than herself for reasons of family arrangement rather than affection, and how that arrangement, and the woman living inside it, changed once real feeling finally entered the picture.