Her life, so painful during her youth, is beautiful and serene towards evening.

Her sufferings are known, and no one asks who was the original of that portrait by Lefebvre which is the chief and sacred ornament of her salon.

Her face has the maturity of fruits that have ripened slowly; a hallowed pride dignifies that long-tried brow.
At the period when the marquise came to Paris to open the new house, her fortune, increased by the law of indemnities, gave her some two hundred thousand francs a year, not counting her husband's salary; besides this, Laurence had inherited the money guarded by Michu for his young masters.
From that time forth she made a practice of spending half her income and of laying by the rest for her daughter Berthe.
Berthe is the living image of her mother, but without her warrior nerve; she is her mother in delicacy, in intellect,--"more a woman," Laurence says, sadly.

The marquise was not willing to marry her daughter until she was twenty years of age.

Her savings, judiciously invested in the Funds by old Monsieur d'Hauteserre at the moment when consols fell in 1830, gave Berthe a dowry of eighty thousand francs a year in 1833, when she was twenty.
About that time the Princesse de Cadignan, who was seeking to marry her son, the Duc de Maufrigneuse, brought him into intimate relations with Madame de Cinq-Cygne.