she then prevails on Chabanes, whom everybody trusts, to carry messages to and from Guise. This becomes dangerous when Montpensier returns to the castle. Through Chabanes, Guise says he must see Renée face to face and, when she agrees, Chabanes smuggles him into her bedroom. A noise wakes up Montpensier who, finding Renée 's bedroom door locked, in fury starts breaking it down. When he bursts in, he finds Chabanes standing calmly and the princess fainted on the tiled floor. Chabanes says things are not what they seem and that Renée, in a state of nervous collapse, needs putting to bed. She never recovers from the shock. Chabanes is murdered by followers of Guise in the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre and Guise swiftly makes an advantageous marriage. When the princess hears the news, she dies unable to overcome the grief of having lost the respect of her husband, the heart of her lover, and the best friend there ever was.Major themes Love versus duty is the overriding theme of the book. An attractive and thoughtful young woman is torn between her desire for another man and her responsibilities as a wife. In this, she prefigures both the author's later novel The Princess of Cleves and the tragic heroines in the plays of Jean Racine. Her fate reflects the danger of uncontrolled emotion in a strictly regulated society, where a woman's reputation is destroyed by perceived imprudence. Style Compared with the floweriness and pomposity of much preceding French fiction, Madame de La Fayette writes in a pared-down prose which almost has the air of a dispassionate observer. Background Novellas by Jean Regnault de Segrais pioneered what has become the modern French novel. Following Spanish models, he used a simple linear plot line and replaced artificial classical names with real French names. But he left locations vague, psychology inconsistent, and external events prevailed over internal emotions. Madame de La Fayette's developments in her first work were bold and unprecedented. The principal character is based on a real French woman in named places at a specific time in history, with her emotional trajectory described and analysed. Breaking away from the improbabilities of heroic and pastoral romances, believable characters live through the actual dramatic events of the period, recreated with accuracy, and it is their internal conflicts which are the subject of the novel. Publication history The first edition, in octavo with 142 pages,