time; with no trust in her pseudo-mother--for poor Marie, had
in truth been born before her father had been a married man, and had
never known what was her own mother's fate,--with no enjoyment in her
present life, had come solely to this conclusion, that it would be
well for her to be taken away somewhere by somebody. Many a varied
phase of life had already come in her way. She could just remember the
dirty street in the German portion of New York in which she had been
born and had lived for the first four years of her life, and could
remember too the poor, hardly-treated woman who had been her mother.
She could remember being at sea, and her sickness,--but could not quite
remember whether that woman had been with her. Then she had run about
the streets of Hamburg, and had sometimes been very hungry, sometimes
in rags,--and she had a dim memory of some trouble into which her father
had fallen, and that he was away from her for a time. She had up to
the present splendid moment her own convictions about that absence,
but she had never mentioned them to a human being. Then her father had
married her present mother in Frankfort. That she could remember
distinctly, as also the rooms in which she was then taken to live, and
the fact that she was told that from henceforth she was to be a
Jewess. But there had soon come another change. They went from
Frankfort to Paris, and there they were all Christians. From that time
they had lived in various apartments in the French capital, but had
always lived well. Sometimes there had been a carriage, sometimes
there had been none. And then there came a time in which she was grown
woman enough to understand that her father was being much talked
about. Her father to her had always been alternately capricious and
indifferent rather than cross or cruel, but, just at this period he
was cruel both to her and to his wife. And Madame Melmotte would weep
at times and declare that they were all ruined. Then, at a moment,
they burst out into sudden splendour at Paris. There was an hotel,
with carriages and horses almost unnumbered;--and then there came to
their rooms a crowd of dark, swarthy, greasy men, who were entertained
sumptuously; but there were few women. At this time Marie was hardly
nineteen, and young enough in manner and appearance to be taken for
seventeen. Suddenly again she was told that she was to be taken to
London, and the migration had been effected with magnificence. She was
f