CHAPTER NINEMadame Renée de Valmé was the daughter of a respectable Attorney in Amiens.
When she was eighteen, her father’s most distinguished client, the Prince Maxime de Vallière Châtel, saw her and fell in love with her.
It says very much for the Prince’s persuasive powers as well as for the importance of his position that he managed to overrule the very natural protests of Renée’s parents and take her away with him without too much opposition.
He established her in Paris and started to educate her. In his middle age, for he was over fifty, he found that it almost amused him nearly as much to teach Renée the arts and graces of civilisation as to initiate her into the delights of love.
She was an apt pupil and, when the Prince died suddenly of a heart attack seven years later, she wa
