Madame Clarisse was not _bête_. If she had been, she would never have made the fame or the money which she enjoyed, and which were entirely the result of her own tact, and talent, and industry. No mother had ever left her a snug business with a county connection. All that she recollected of a mother was a snuffy old person with a silk handkerchief tied round her head, who used to live on a fifth floor in a little street debouching from the Cannebière in Marseilles, and who used to whack her little daughter with a long flat bit of wood when she cried from hunger or other causes. When this mother died, which she was good enough to do at a sufficiently early period of the girl's life, Clarisse was taken in hand by her uncle, an _épicier_ and ship-chandler, who apprenticed her to a milliner in the town, and was kind to her in his odd way. The girl was sharp and appreciative, ready with her needle, readier with her tongue--she had a knack of conciliating obstreperous customers whose orders had been unduly delayed in a manner that delighted her mistress, a plain, blunt, stupid woman--readiest of all with her eyes. Not as regards _oeillades_, though that was a kind of sharpshooting in which she was not unskilled, but in the use of her eyes for business purposes. Mademoiselle Clarisse looked on and listened, and learned the world. No one came in or went out of the work-room or the showroom without being diligently studied and appraised by those sharp eyes and that quick brain. It was from her appreciation of the English character, as learned in the milliner's shop at Marseilles, that Mademoiselle Clarisse determined on seeking her fortune in our favoured land, should the opportunity ever present itself. Marseilles has a population of resident English--ship-owners, ship-captains, naval men connected with the great Peninsular and Oriental Company, many of whose vessels ply from that port--and these worthy people have for the most part wives and daughters, whose principal consolation in their banishment from England is that they are enabled to dress themselves in the French fashion, and at a much cheaper rate than they could were they at home. There is no gainsaying that the prices charged by the Marseilles milliner, even to the English ladies, were less than those which they would have been liable to in their native land; but these prices, which were willingly paid, were still so much in excess of those charged to the townspeople, that Mademoiselle Clarisse clearly saw that a country which produced people at once so rich and so simple was the place for her future action.