If we relate the life of her father and mother, we shall show the sort of woman she was by a picture of her childhood and youth.
Monsieur Saillard married the daughter of an upholsterer keeping shop under the arcades of the Market.

Limited means compelled Monsieur and Madame Saillard at their start in life to bear constant privation.

After thirty-three years of married life, and twenty-nine years of toil in a government office, the property of "the Saillards"-- their circle of acquaintance called them so--consisted of sixty thousand francs entrusted to Falleix, the house in the place Royale, bought for forty thousand in 1804, and thirty-six thousand francs given in dowry to their daughter Elisabeth.

Out of this capital about fifty thousand came to them by the will of the widow Bidault, Madame Saillard's mother.
Saillard's salary from the government had always been four thousand five hundred francs a year, and no more; his situation was a blind alley that led nowhere, and had tempted no one to supersede him.

Those ninety thousand francs, put together sou by sou, were the fruit therefore of a sordid economy unintelligently employed.