She has travelled for nine days from Revolution-torn Paris, carrying a secret message from her Anglophile master to Prime Minister Pitt.
She is rescued by Samuel Plampin of Trinity, 45, Doctor of Divinity, King's Reader in Hebrew at the University, and Vicar of St Peter's Babraham.
"Come down off it, Tim Tolliday," says a villager to Plampin's coachman in the 'George' one evening, when the latter has been defending "Emmy Grays" and "Parson's Mamzell".
Plampin grows irritable and finds himself at loggerheads with Sophie's brother Charles, a cocky young Captain of Hussars, who regards the English doctor as grotesque and a poor match for his sister.
She grows uneasy and three times begs Plampin to take her back to England: but he is now enjoying the Bibliothèque nationale and the art treasures recently taken from Italy by Bonaparte.
No longer believing in scholarship or the future, he abandons his life-work, A Natural History of Enthusiasm (planned as a sly Gibbonian counterblast to all things Romantic).
He finds solace for his unhappiness by tutoring bright young students, by botanizing among the hedgerows and woods of East Anglia, and by visits to the North and the West Country.
One day a letter from old Madame Letourneur brings news that both Sophie and Victor Duroc are dead, drowned in the crossing of the Beresina in November 1812 during the Retreat from Moscow.
"[7] He reads to the hushed gathering a letter dictated to an orderly by Captain Charles Letourneur, now a mutilé de guerre, describing the horrors of the Crossing of the Beresina and the details of Sophie's death (she had abandoned the safety of Danzig to nurse her wounded husband during the retreat).
One of the dons acidly quotes Scripture: "The lips of a strange woman drop as a honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil: But her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword.
"[9] Its depiction of the Napoleonic war-lust gripping France in the early 19th century foreshadows that of Hitler's Germany: The policy of Appeasement, which Lucas deplored, colours other passages: "To the English, she reflected, clear-headedness is indecent – one's mind's must always be properly clothed in a chaste modicum of cloud... For the present she decided after all to shut her eyes, English-fashion, and drift.
[12] Doctor Dido is the familiar story of the middle-aged bachelor who falls in love with a woman much younger than himself, and pays for much bliss with much unhappiness.
[14] It is, in addition, a satire on University life, contrasting the parochialism of Cambridge with the world-shaking events on the Continent, the malice of the Combination-Room with the kindliness of individuals.
It disapproves of the monasticism imposed on dons by the ban on married Fellows: Like the earlier Cécile (1930) and the later English Agent (1969), Doctor Dido traces the tension between 18th-century rationalism and, in varying forms, Romantic unreason.
"[18] Forrest Reid in The Spectator disagreed: "It has far too much vitality to be depressing," he wrote, "and for the reader at least, if not for Dr Plampin, there is the consolation of humour, wit, and irony.
"The futility and loneliness which overwhelm the returned Dr Plampin," noted Desmond Shawe-Taylor in the New Statesman, "are so touchingly conveyed that we find ourselves at last really concerned for this author of A Natural History of Enthusiasm who had been unable to buttress his own heart against the unreasonable tides of passion.
[25] Priority, however, was given to Lucas's new novel, The English Agent, written in his retirement (published posthumously by Cassell in 1969), and the planned reprint of Doctor Dido came to nothing.