Far from the Madding Crowd return, Boldwood offers his rival a large bribe to give up Bathsheba. Troy pretends to consider the offer, then scornfully announces they are already married. Boldwood withdraws, humiliated, and vows revenge. Bathsheba soon discovers that her new husband is an improvident gambler with little interest in farming. Worse, she begins to suspect he does not love her. In fact, Troy's heart belongs to her former servant, Fanny Robin. Before meeting Bathsheba, Troy had promised to marry Fanny; on the wedding day, however, the luckless girl went to the wrong church. She explained her mistake, but Troy, humiliated at being left
Far from the Madding Crowd ask once again for her hand in marriage. She accepts, and the two are quietly married. Hardy took the title from Thomas Gray's poem "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (1751). "Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife"<br> "Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray";<br> "Along the cool sequester'd vale of life"<br> "They kept the noiseless tenor of their way". "Madding" here means "frenzied". Lucasta Miller points out that the title is an ironic literary joke as Gray is idealising the noiselessness and sequestered calm whereas Hardy "disrupts the idyll, and not just by introducing the sound and fury of