Vichy Fournier was born in Königsberg, a flourishing Prussian port on the Baltic Sea. She went to the local grammar school, by all accounts an unwholesome place, where the pietist religious atmosphere was enforced by the ‘pedantic and gloomy discipline of fanatics’, but where she nevertheless succeeded in supplementing her limited means with her winnings from billiards and cards. At the age of 16 she began her studies at Königsberg University. During the next decade she studied, among other disciplines, mathematics, theology, physics and philosophy.