From being a respectable doctor's wife, known in the entire town, Albertine had become transformed into a most strange widow – a Frenchwoman who seemed to find it hard to make up her mind to return to her country. Worse still, each time she came back again!

She was still too young and too beautiful to avoid the malicious gossip of Boyarsk society. Too unusual to be accepted as she was. And soon too poor.

Charlotte noticed that after each trip to Paris, they settled into smaller and smaller apartments. At the school where she had been admitted, thanks to a former patient of her father's, she quickly became "that Lemonnier." One day her teacher made her come to the blackboard – but not to test her… When Charlotte stood before her, the lady looked at the little girl's feet and, with a disdainful smile, asked, "What do you have on your feet, Mademoiselle Lemonnier?"

The thirty pupils rose from their seats, craning their necks and staring. On the well-polished parquet floor they saw two woolen coverings, two "shoes" that Charlotte had concocted herself. Crushed by all these stares, Charlotte lowered her head and involuntarily screwed up her toes inside the socks, as if she wanted to make her feet disappear…

At that time they lived in an old izbaon the outskirts of the town. Charlotte was no longer surprised to see her mother almost always stretched out upon a high peasant bed behind a curtain. When Albertine got up, the black shadows of dreams seethed in her eyes, even though they were open. She no longer even tried to smile at her daughter. She dipped a copper ladle into a bucket, drank deeply, and went out. Charlotte already knew that they had been surviving for a long time thanks to the glitter of a few jewels in the case with the mother-of-pearl inlaid work…

She liked the izba, far from the fashionable districts of Boyarsk. Their poverty was less visible in these narrow, winding streets, buried under the snow.