Marie-Thérèse was in part raised by her grandparents and the new husband of her mother, Count Antoine Cartier D'Aure, whom her mother had married shortly after her father's death (her father was 13 years older than her mother, as her birth certificate demonstrates). At her grandparents' home she received a cosmopolitan education, learning German and English, due to her father's origins and having an English nurse. She was taught every day at their house by the village's school teacher, and from him learned Greek, Latin and how to write.