The tale is set along Balzac’s beloved Loire Valley, at the wine-growing town of Sancerre. A weakling who was not expected to live, Monsieur de la Baudraye, has wed a talented young beauty, Dinah Piedefer, thirty years his junior, from a Calvinist family that had converted to Catholicism. De la Baudraye is a spider of a man of the type whom one encounters in the provinces, full of a kind of strongly directed miserliness and love of purchasing adjoining estates (reminding me of Grandet in Eugenie Grandet).