Widowed by her husband's sudden death, the aged Marquise arrives dying, sees a phantom by night, and demands Valentine's marriage be hastened.
Marquise de Saint-Méran, grandmother of Valentine de Villefort through her late daughter Renée, arrives in Paris stricken: her husband the Marquis died suddenly of an apparent 'apoplectic stroke' six leagues from Marseilles, and she has escorted his leaden coffin ahead. Aged, proud and rigid in her legitimist convictions, she is herself gravely unwell—feverish, sleepless, and convinced she saw a white 'phantom' enter her chamber by night and touch her orangeade glass. Certain she too is about to die, she summons Villefort and demands he hasten Valentine's marriage to Franz d'Épinay—son of the murdered royalist General d'Épinay—so that she may bless it before the end, and calls a notary to secure all the Saint-Méran fortune to Valentine.
She drains the orangeade she believes the spectre touched. Her arrival wrecks the Morcerf ball for the Villeforts and, unknowingly, makes her an enemy to Maximilian Morrel's hopes by pressing the very match Valentine dreads.
An aged noblewoman with white hair thrown back from a yellow forehead, sunken eyes swollen with grief, feverish and trembling, stern even in her weakness.
The dying grandmother forcing Valentine's marriage, first victim of the poison stalking the household.