Jane is certainly different from Hugues's first wife. She believes that Hugues will soon die, and she has designs on his property. She insists on being invited to Hugues's house, ostensibly to view a religious procession which will pass before it, in fact to assess his wealth. While there Jane handles and mocks some of the relics of his first wife that Hugues has religiously preserved, including a tress of her hair. Enraged, Hugues strangles Jane with the profaned hair of his wife, and the novel ends on the complicated chord of the exhausted Hugues sitting with the murdered woman, as the bells of the city ring out, both ironically and sympathetically, for the return of the relic of the Holy Blood to its shrine.

An important minor character in the novel is Hugues's servant, Barbe. This simple and devoted woman's greatest pleasure is to attend divine service and spend the day with the nuns at the Béguinage, which she does one Easter Sunday:

After grace had been said, they sat down at table in the long refectory. But Barbe, barely touching her food and then without any pleasure, watched as the healthy, rosy-cheeked nuns and a few other family visitors like her did justice to this festive Sunday dinner. On that day they served the unctuous, golden sacramental wine of Tours. Thinking she might drown her cares, Barbe emptied the glass she had been served. But she felt a headache coming on.

Tours does not itself produce much wine.But it is the natural point from which the astonishing sweet white wines made further down the Loire to the west-Vouvray, Bonnezeaux, at a more humble level Coteaux du Layon — are shipped onwards to their eventual consumers in Belgium and elsewhere.  These wines are made from Chenin blanc, a grape which can be vinified dry, when it tends to be an acquired taste — even very fine examples can have a disconcerting nose of wet wool. In bad years it is versatile enough to produce an exceptional sparkling wine, age-worthy when made by a good producer such as Foreau, and frequently more interesting than champagnes costing two or three times as much. But when conditions allow it to be made "moelleux", the Chenin blanc achieves its finest expression. In great years these are almost immortal wines, piercingly sweet, but braced with a thrill of acidity.

Barbe drinks this splendid wine at a crucial moment. One of the nuns is about to warn her concerning Hugues's moral character, for his liaison with Jane has become the subject of censorious gossip. On the point of being made aware of her proximity to corruption, Barbe knocks off her glass of rich, sweet wine. It is the sacramental accompaniment to her movement from a world of innocence to a world of grievous loss and knowledge, to the imminent pains of which it warningly points in the headache which it summons.