La Femme abandonnée takes up the destiny of the Vicomtesse de Beauséant, already encountered in Le Père Goriot, after she has withdrawn from the Parisian world, abandoned by her lover. She now lives a recluse in a château in Normandy, apart from society, guarding the wounded dignity of a great lady betrayed. A young man, Gaston de Nueil, staying in the region, hears of her and, intrigued by her legend as a forsaken mistress, manages to gain access to her. Despite the difference in age and the reluctance of Mme de Beauséant — chastened by experience — a shared passion is born between them. For several years they know an intense happiness, lived in retreat and secrecy. But social and family pressure eventually weighs on Gaston: he is offered an advantageous marriage suited to his rank and his future. Yielding to the world's reason, he leaves Mme de Beauséant to marry a young girl. Thus the woman already once abandoned is forsaken a second time, more cruelly still, by the very man who had restored her hope. The ending is tragic: Gaston, measuring too late the depth of what he has sacrificed and the impossibility of being happy in his new marriage, is driven to despair. Balzac develops the theme of the superior woman, doomed by her very greatness to solitude and betrayal, and that of the young man unable to stand up to the conventions. The story, linked to Le Père Goriot through Mme de Beauséant, extends Balzac's meditation on loves condemned by society and on the ordinary cowardice of men before the pressure of the world. She is one of the great tragic female figures of the cycle.