The Old Wives' Tale

Sophia rehabilitates from the illness that struck her at the end of Chapter 4. She awakes to find herself in an unknown room, attended by strangers: a doctor, a woman named Laurence, and her primary caregiver, Madame Foucault. These are friends of Chirac, to whom he brought Sophia when she fainted. Madame Foucault runs a boardinghouse, renting out rooms in an establishment on the Rue Bréda, and has taken Sophia under her wing as an act of goodwill. As she recovers, Sophia doesn’t dwell on the end of her marriage: “It was remarkable that she seldom thought of Gerald. He had vanished from her life as he had come into it—madly, preposterously” (388). One day, Sophia hears Madame Foucault sobbing, and to relieve some of the woman’s worries, Sophia insists that she pay for the care she has received.

The announcement comes through Paris that a war has begun (the Franco-Prussian War), but Sophia pays little attention to such things. She’s invited to a social occasion with Laurence but declines and is struck by her own lack of interest:

Acutely aware as she was of her youth, her beauty, and her charm, she wondered at her refusal. She did not regret her refusal.