chunk: Cruchot des Bonfons marries Eugénie hopeful of becoming fabulously wealthy. However, he dies young, and at the end of the book Eugénie is a very wealthy widow of thirty-three having now inherited her husband's fortune. At the end of the novel, although by the standards of the time she should be unhappy – childless and widowed – she is instead quite content with her lot. She has learned to live life on her own terms, and has also learned of the hypocrisy and shallowness of the bourgeois and that her best friends will come from the lower classes.