No single reading of Adolphe can do justice to its immense richness: the present study is no exception to that rule. What I have tried to do in the following pages is to tease out and examine certain strands from the extraordinarily complex web of parallel and contrast, echo and allusion in both characters and situation which is generated and developed in the novel. I hope that I will have encouraged readers to carry on this task for themselves, for it is work essential to an understanding of Constant's art. Adolphe is in the nature of a moral conundrum. In order for us to be able to assess the degree of responsibility incumbent on any of its characters, Constant clearly intended that we should proceed by an appreciation of that interplay of character and circumstance which he has arranged with such minute care. I have taken as the starting-point for my analysis the first three chapters of the book: by following the expectations so artfully aroused there through to their frequently paradoxical or ironic realisation, I have sought to emphasise the novel's intricate unity. The chapter I have devoted to the ‘portrait’ of Ellénore gives, in common with other volumes in this series, an explication of a passage of central importance in the novel. Here I have tried to relate linguistic analysis of the kind first demonstrated so incomparably by Erich Auerbach in Mimesis to a study of the dramatic situation in Adolphe, to the literary tradition in which the novel belongs, and to the framework of social attitudes and assumptions within which it was written.