Marie Sophie was the daughter of Auguste Pierre de Lauret (1810-1881), of the Court of Charles X of France, who emigrated to New South Wales, via England, in the 1840s and eventually bought the Wynella estate.
After her first husband, James Dalglish died, she came to England and married William Bellasis. She financed the rental of large properties such as Lulworth Castle in Wiltshire, that was later destroyed by fire but still stands; and Sundorne Castle in Shropshire that was later raised to the ground for tax reasons. They used Sundorne to help soldiers recuperate from their injuries during the Great War, in which they lost three of their own sons and a son-in-law.
She honoured the Bellasis family's close association with the Oratorian Fathers by financing the central dome of the Brompton Oratory.
From: 'The London Oratory', Survey of London: volume 41: Brompton (1983), pp. 50-57. URL: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=50008 Date accessed: 07 January 2013:
"Gribble, who died in 1894 aged forty-seven, had greatly regretted the failure to construct his outer dome. (ref. 92) The want was, in a manner, supplied when ‘a Client of Saint Philip’ (Mrs. Dalglish-Bellasis (ref. 93) ) offered to pay for it on the saint's tercentenary in 1895. The design was to be provided by the architect George Sherrin, who in 1894 had suggested an alternative domical finish to the flanking towers, (ref. 94) but the lantern was designed by his young assistant, E. A. Rickards (Plate 37a). (ref. 95) The steel-framed dome was built in 1895–6 to the silhouette, higher and steeper than Gribble had proposed, which shows so effectively from some of the quiet streets north of the Brompton Road."
Her benificence extended to discrete payments for the education of a poor boy for each of her five sons. (Courtesy Michael Goldschmidt)
Marie Sophie's sister, Anne Maria, married Edward Percy Simpson.
Marie Sophie's most striking feature was her jet black hair, the colour of which she mostly retained upto her death.
