At Mont Oriol, a fashionable spa in Auvergne, cure and pleasure become a single glittering business. Wealthy banker Andermatt transforms the resort into a stage for commerce, spectacle, and therapeutic promise, while rival doctors, ambitious owners, and curious visitors circle the springs with equal parts faith and calculation. Into this world come the Ravenel family, including Christiane de Ravenel, a young wife whose delicate health, emotional unease, and longing for a child give the novel its emotional center. Her husband's relatives, the skeptical Marquis de Ravenel and the teasing Gontran, add family tension and social wit, while Christiane's marriage to Andermatt reflects the pull of money, convenience, and shifting class loyalties. Maupassant uses the spa's concerts, "Casino," and comic routines to expose vanity, pretension, and the era's fascination with modern medicine. Doctor Latonne, with his grand theories, theatrical diagnosis, stomach-washing, and absurd "automatic gymnastics," embodies the novel's sharp satire of pseudo-science and status. Beneath the irony runs a romance shaped by illness, desire, and the hope that the waters may heal more than the body. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.