An unnamed narrator considers the world’s most beautiful women in the years following Buttercup’s birth. The first is a maid named Annette, who works for a French duke and duchess. The duchess sees that her husband finds the maid attractive and begins feeding Annette chocolate to make her less appealing. Annette happily marries a chef, and the duke falls in love with his mother-in-law instead. Later, the most beautiful woman in the world is an Indian woman named Aluthra, until a plague ravages her skin. The next most beautiful is a British woman named Adela; however, she begins to fret that she will lose her beauty as she ages and ruins her complexion with worry lines. At this point, Buttercup is nearly the most beautiful, but she doesn’t groom or wash herself. She prefers riding her horse and teasing her farmhand, Westley. She orders him around mercilessly, to which he only responds, “As you wish” (31). As Buttercup grows older, she notices the village boys paying her more attention and the village girls growing cold and distant. Goldman briefly interjects to explain the author’s less-than-reliable use of parentheses to clarify textual details.

One day, Count Rugen of Florin hears of Buttercup’s beauty and comes to see for himself.