At the beginning of 1923 Elizaveta Yurievna Skobtsova, her mother Sofia Borisovna Pilenko, her husband Daniil Yermolaevich Skobtsov, her son Yuri and her two daughters, Nastya and Gayana, arrived in Paris. The elder, Gayana, had been born back in Russia, when Elizaveta Yurievna’s first marriage was already ending in divorce. Coming to France meant neither the end of the family’s distress nor deliverance from exhausting labour. Elizaveta Yurievna permanently ruined her eyes, short-sighted as they already were, taking in commissions for sewing and doll-making. Matters improved somewhat when her husband Daniil Yermolaevich passed the examination and became a taxi driver. He was now assured a more regular income — forty to fifty francs a day. But financial worries receded into the background when Nastya fell gravely ill. At first her parents did not grasp how serious it all was. It seemed to them that the girl was simply very slow in recovering from the influenza the whole family had gone through in the winter at the turn of 1925–1926. But soon Nastya’s condition began to cause alarm, all the more so because not one of the doctors called in could determine why she kept losing weight and wasting away. Only when her condition became critical was a young doctor found who made the diagnosis at once: meningitis. Nastya was placed in the famous Pasteur Institute. Through the intercession of Mechnikov’s widow, the mother was given special permission to stay with the sick child and nurse her. For almost two months she was witness to the slow dying of her daughter. The portrait sketches Elizaveta Yurievna made to amuse Nastya caught the girl’s thin face in fever, unnaturally calm: three of them are marked with different hours of 7 March 1926. Nastya died that same day (source: Fr Sergei Hackel, Mother Maria).
The chapter goes on in the book.