In which a young noblewoman, newly freed from the convent where she was to take her vows, returns to the ancestral Parisian mansion left to her by her late grandmother, amid reflections on her past confinement and the quiet decay of the family home. She reunites cautiously with her distant yet gracious parents, who begin to shepherd her reintroduction to society, while she sets about restoring the faded grandeur of her inheritance and composing letters to her closest friend.