Marie-Jeanne Bertin, the daughter of an Abbeville sergeant, began an apprenticeship at a fashion house in Paris in 1760 then quickly climbed the career ladder. In addition to her unfailing taste in jewellery arrangement, she showed great commercial management skill and became, in September 1776, the first trustee to the brand-new community of women fashion merchants. Her shop, Au Grand Mogol, rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, then later rue de Richelieu, was renowned in Paris for supplying hats and all sorts of toiletry necessities. The very particular place attributed to her by Queen Marie-Antoinette from 1776 to 1792 contributed to the establishing of her reputation at court and especially abroad. Her notoriety is proven by quotes from numerous relations and Memoirs on the elegant life of the time, and by the references to her supplies in European court archives from 1776 to 1808. All these documents claim her creations as superior to that of her competitors. Even though Miss Bertin is not the only woman fashion merchant mentioned amongst the suppliers to the French court, her name, embellished by the first name Rose, revealed post-mortem by a fictional biography which her family rejected, benefitted as from the nineteenth century from particular fame mainly due to the importance given to Queen Marie-Antoinette. It is probably due to this royal preference, to the exorbitant sums on her invoices, to the stories and anecdotes which highlight the untameable personality of a female company director, that M.-J. Bertin became the archetype of tyrannical fashion suppliers announcing the influence of great nineteenth century creators, Leroy then Worth, ancestors of twentieth-century Parisian haute-couture.