Mademoiselle de Chartres must marry, and so marries the Prince. She “would rather marry him than any one else, but… had no special love for him.” Cleves sees this—“it gave him much pain to see that what Mademoiselle de Chartres felt for him was only esteem and gratitude, and he could not flatter himself that she nourished any warmer feeling”—and complains about it to her before they wed. Does this idea of arranged marriage in any way change your opinions about possible adultery?
6. Wow, do these people gossip! We get the first of several digressions—about Henry II and Diane de Poitiers—and will soon get more. Why do you suppose they talk about each other so much? How can you compare that to our celebrity culture?