Camille thinks of himself as superior to Thérèse simply because he has an office job and reads large books. But these aren’t very good measures of actual intelligence or personal worth. Rather, they simply indicate that Camille is obsessed with the idea of
seeming like a respectable, wealthy gentleman. Thérèse, on the other hand, has no delusions about what her life is really like: she knows she’s unhappy, but she’s accustomed to ignoring her own discontent and becoming a “passive instrument” in the lives of the people around her—something that will soon change when she suddenly feels the first stirrings of real passion.