The comtesse had been married in 1827; her marriage settlement was signed by King Charles the Tenth, the Dauphin, and others of almost equal rank. The comte was forty-five, she only half his age. He seems to have been a by no means ideal character, and she found her diversion in the brilliant society she gathered into her salon. For some time she seems to have been fascinated by Liszt before she could reach him with her own fascinations. Indeed she was always the pursuer, and he the pursued. This is the more strange, since, at least at first, she was extremely handsome. Ramann has thus pictured her: "The Countess d'Agoult was beautiful, very beautiful, a Lorelei: slender, of lofty bearing, enchantingly graceful and yet dignified in her movements, her head proudly raised, with an abundance of fair tresses, which waved over her shoulders like molten gold, a regular, classic profile, which stood in strange and interesting contrast with the modern breath of dreaminess and melancholy that was spread over her countenance; these were the general features which rendered it impossible to overlook the countess in the salon, the concert-room, or the opera-house, and these were enhanced by the choicest toilets, the elegance of which was surpassed by few, even in the salons of the Faubourg St. Germain. That fantastic dreams were hidden behind the purity of her profile, and passion, burning passion, under the soft melancholy of her expression, was known to but a few, at the time that her connection with the young artist began." Her "Souvenirs" justify the accusation of unusual vanity as the mainspring in her motives, but if it were only her passion for conquest that made her seek Liszt, she was punished bitterly. In 1834 she captured him, and the preliminary formalities of flirtation were hastily overpassed. But once they were embarked on the maelstrom of passion, they seem to have been of exquisite torment and terror to each other. Liszt fell into a period of atheism which, to his constitutionally religious soul, was agony. As for the comtesse, death entered upon the romance and took away one of her three children. For awhile she was only a broken-hearted mother, and the intrigue seems to have had a moment's pause, but only to return.