Throughout the book, it seems that one of Bertrande’s main aims was to keep her high place in society. The de Rols family was a fairly esteemed family as the peasants of Artigat went (Davis 25). Since the very beginning Bertrande was concerned for her reputation in the village. Bertrande wanted to maintain this honest reputation that she had already established when her parents originally tried to separate her and Martin and even Coras said that her refusal to leave Martin “offered great proof of her honnesteté.” (Davis 28). With Martin gone, she was “neither wife nor widow” and because of this void of status, unlike other women who “were most dependent on the good will of their husbands and sons when they were left as widows,” she was unable to claim any inheritance. doctors of the time who “insisted that a wife was not free to remarry in the absence of her husband, no matter how many years had elapsed, unless she had certain proof of his death.” (Davis 33). Finally, she was back living with her mother, because no one in their society would have trusted realism about how she could maneuver within the restraints placed upon her gender by society. Without Arnaud she was unable to start a new life and regain her old reputation in Artigat, and she didn’t want to have to leave the village to seek a new life and make her own way (Davis 32). Staying with Arnaud was a way for to have all the benefits of marriage but with a man who would actually care deeply about her and care for her in a way that her old husband never did. She “dreamed of a husband and lover who would come back, and be different” (Davis 34). Her relationship with the “new” Martin was like a “dream come true,” and he was someone she could talk to with ease and