In the introduction to her exhaustive and accomplished biography of Sophie Dawes,[28] from which a part of the matter for this resume is drawn, Mme Violette Montagu, speaking of the period in which Sophie lived, says that "Paris, with its fabulous wealth and luxury, seems to have been looked upon as a sort of Mecca by handsome Englishwomen with ambition and, what is absolutely necessary if they wish to be really successful, plenty of brains." It is because Sophie had plenty of brains of a sort, besides the attributes of good looks, health, and by much a disproportionate share of determination, and because, with all that she attained to, she died quite ostracized by the people with whom it had been her life's ambition to mix, and was thus in a sense a failure--it is because of these things that it is worth while going into details of her career, expanding the precis with which this chapter begins. Among the women selected as subjects for this book Sophie Dawes as a personality wins 'hands down.' Whether she was a criminal or not is a question even now in dispute. Unscrupulous she certainly was, and a good deal of a rogue. That modern American product the 'gold-digger' is what she herself would call a 'piker' compared with the subject of this chapter. The blonde bombshell, with her 'sugar daddy,' her alimony 'racket,' and the hundred hard-boiled dodges wherewith she chisels money and goods from her prey, is, again in her own crude phraseology, 'knocked for a row of ash-cans' by Sophie Dawes. As, I think, you will presently see. Sophie was born at St Helens, Isle of Wight--according to herself in 1792. There is controversy on the matter. Mme Montagu in her book says that some of Sophie's biographers put the date at 1790, or even 1785. But Mme Montagu herself reproduces the list of wearing apparel with which Sophie was furnished when she left the 'house of industry' (the workhouse). It is dated 1805. In those days children were not maintained in poor institutions to the mature ages of fifteen or twenty. They were supposed to be armed against life's troubles at twelve or even younger. Sophie, then, could hardly have been born before 1792, but is quite likely to have been born later. The name of Sophie's father is given as "Daw." Like many another celebrity, as, for example, Walter Raleigh and Shakespeare, Sophie spelled her name variously, though ultimately she fixed on "Dawes." Richard, or Dickey, Daw was a fisherman for appearance sake and a smuggler for preference. The question of Sophie's legitimacy anses from the fact that her mother, Jane Callaway, was registered at death as "a spinster." Sophie was one of ten children. Dickey Daw drank his family into the poorhouse, an institution which sent Sophie to fend for herself in 1805, procuring her a place as servant at a farm on the island.