50 pages • 1 hour read
Fates and Furies
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BetaPart 2, Chapters 10-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “The Furies”
Part 2, Chapter 10 Summary
At 16, Mathilde gets the hint that her uncle’s wealth comes from working in a nefarious organization, perhaps for the mafia. At the end of her senior year, she takes a train to New York City to try to find modelling jobs for catalogs. On the train, she meets a man who propositions her and follows her to her agency. He waits outside her meeting for hours until she comes out, having failed to land work she was underprepared for.
Mathilde accepts a meal from the man. He invites her back to his apartment to negotiate a deal for a sexual relationship. Desperate for a way to be self-reliant, Mathilde returns a week later to the city. Curious as to what he had to offer, she goes back to his apartment. Mathilde learns his name is Ariel and her sexual education begins. He takes her virginity and they reach a business agreement.
Ariel teaches Mathilde how to be sophisticated while he puts her through college. She models, in order to explain her money, and gives Ariel his required Friday night and Saturday time in order to fulfill her side of the bargain. Four years pass; Ariel asks Mathilde to continue working for him at his gallery. She plays coy, but longs for the freedom college graduation will bring, as well as the chance to be with someone her own age.
Part 2, Chapter 11 Summary
Mathilde’s neglect of their dog, God, is fixed when she decides to drop the dog off in the arms of a random, unsuspecting family shopping at the local general store.
Chollie remembers a time where Mathilde was part of Lotto’s life, but he hadn’t met her yet. Chollie sees Mathilde getting off the train at Penn Station one day. He follows Mathilde and learns she’s Ariel’s girlfriend.
He returns to the dorms and takes a nap out of despair. When he awakes, he find the Lotto and Mathilde getting cozy in the common room. Chollie gets introduced. Mathilde doesn’t know that he knows she’s “a whore” and he doesn’t let on that he knows she’s lying about her morning whereabouts. He starts to create a plan to get her out of Lotto’s life for his own good.
Part 2, Chapter 12 Summary
Mathilde wakes up late and is startled by the hour. Unfamiliar with a life where she’s not being woken up every morning with coffee in bed, brought by her husband, she is confused as to where he could be. She searches his usual haunts in the house with their dog. Lotto does not respond to her calls of worry.
Mathilde is relieved when she finds Lotto having worked himself into a stupor up in his attic studio. She craves connection with him. He is cold to her roaming hands; she sets out to rememorize and appreciate all the minute details of his aging body. With his head down on the desk it’s clear he has died of an aneurysm sometime in the night. Mathilde holds onto the last of his warmth until he becomes just a corpse.
Part 2, Chapters 10-12 Analysis
In these chapters, we see more of Mathilde and Ariel’s relationship, paired with the set-up of Chollie’s revenge plot and finding Lotto’s dead body. In entering a physical relationship with Ariel, Mathilde sets herself up for the downfall of her marriage before even meeting Lotto, as the loss of her innocence under such circumstances is irreconcilable to Lotto’s values.
In Lotto falling in love with Mathilde, Chollie has to deal with the loss of Lotto as his bestfriend. Chollie is angered after he finds out about Mathilde’s life because he alone sees the irony in Lotto’s infatuation with such a person and deems Mathilde unworthy of Lotto’s affection. Mathilde, in knowing the truth about her past and her own insecurities, also believes she is unworthy of Lotto’s affection and that he is in love with a false version of her. In order to preserve their significance in Lotto’s life, Chollie and Mathilde mutually bear the secret of Mathilde’s life with Ariel, but it is an act of self-preservation, rather than out of concern for Lotto.
Chollie and Mathilde share the commonality of being solely focused on keeping Lotto’s affection because he is the only person in their life kindhearted enough to reciprocate a relationship with them outside of financial or physical transactions. In trying for so long to figure out how to control Lotto’s admiration, the shock comes from the fact that despite their competition, they both end up losing Lotto to something out of either of their control.
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By Lauren Groff
