Georgie was an unusual client for us. Her family history read like a Hollywood thriller – but not one you’d like to be starring in. Yet she was the most extraordinary example of a girl done good, that I just couldn’t resist wanting to help this utterly charming self-made joy.
Striking in looks, blonde and statuesque, George Bernard Shaw must have had this 32-year-old in mind when he wrote: “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
Georgie, who’s English on her dad’s side and French on her mother’s, was happy to escape her English ancestry and create a new identity in Paris. She first trained as a legal secretary under the formidable Celeste Dupré, a dark-haired Catherine Deneuve look-alike who was Head of Private Clients at the powerhouse firm Simmons and Simmons.
Working under Mme Dupré, Georgie saw in her a role model that she desperately wanted to please. From offices in the chic Madeleine district, one of the richest neighbourhoods in the capital, Georgie worked her way up from legal secretary to Paralegal and through many years of online courses and night school, she finally passed the Bar so that she herself could practice Corporate law. Brava!
Now with her own glittering career firmly on a steady path to make partner before she was 35, Georgie felt it was time to visit some of the past she had tried so desperately to escape.