Mme Perrin

Mme Perrin is Louise’s former employer and the person who helps place Louise’s daughter, Stéphanie, in a Paris school. Her intervention is presented as kindness toward a hardworking employee, but it also binds Louise more tightly to her employer’s expectations. When Stéphanie’s conduct brings the family before a school disciplinary council, Mme Perrin’s generosity becomes a source of reproach, and Louise is made to answer not only for her daughter but for her worth as a mother.

Identity and Background

Mme Perrin employs Louise before Louise begins working for Myriam and Paul. The evidence gives little account of her life outside that employment, but it establishes her as a person with enough influence to propose a different educational path for Stéphanie: a Paris lycée with a better reputation than the school the girl was expected to attend in Bobigny. She presents the offer as a good deed for Louise, whom she regards as poor, hardworking, and deserving of help.

The arrangement is not simply an exchange between two equal parties. Mme Perrin has the power to offer an opportunity and later to define what Louise owes in return, while Louise’s position as an employee makes refusal or disagreement difficult. The school’s subsequent complaint also reaches Louise through Mme Perrin, who summons her to discuss the consequences. The relation therefore links domestic employment to decisions about a worker’s family and to judgments made by institutions beyond the employer’s household.

Stéphanie’s Schooling and Conduct

After Stéphanie enters the Paris school, trouble begins within weeks of her starting troisième. She disrupts lessons, laughs at inappropriate moments, throws objects across the room, and answers teachers with obscenities. Other pupils find her both funny and exhausting. She hides the school’s notes, warnings, and summonses from Louise, begins skipping classes, and smokes cannabis before midday while lying on benches in a square in the fifteenth arrondissement.

The sequence matters because Louise is not initially in possession of the information that would let her respond to the school’s concerns. At the disciplinary hearing, staff ask why she failed to answer requests for meetings and telephone messages. The account shows that the school had tried to contact her, but it also shows that Stéphanie concealed communications and that Louise did not appear to know the full scale of the problem. The mismatch between institutional expectations and what Louise has been able to monitor becomes part of the case against her.

The Disciplinary Hearing

Mme Perrin summons Louise one evening and explains her disappointment. She says she feels betrayed and that Louise’s daughter has made her lose face before the head teacher, whom Mme Perrin had taken considerable time to persuade to accept Stéphanie. The hearing is due the following week, and Louise is expected to attend. Mme Perrin describes the council as a tribunal and tells her that it will be Louise’s task to defend her daughter.

At three o’clock, Louise and Stéphanie enter a cold, round room with broad green-and-blue windows. About ten people—teachers, advisers, and parent representatives—sit around a large wooden table. They describe Stéphanie as maladjusted, undisciplined, and insolent, while one participant qualifies the accusation by saying that she is not a bad girl but cannot be reasoned with once she starts. The council also challenges Louise for not responding to the school’s earlier attempts to arrange meetings.

Louise pleads for another chance. In tears, she describes how much she cares for the children in her employment, says that she punishes them when they disobey, and insists that she has principles and substantial experience in raising children. She also explains that she does not let them watch television while doing homework. Although the council says it does not doubt her efforts, the proceeding turns her into the person being assessed: the question is no longer only what Stéphanie has done, but whether Louise has been a good mother.

After a brief deliberation, the school announces that Stéphanie has become a disruptive presence whom its staff have failed to manage. They say they have tried their pedagogical methods and exhausted their expertise, and they cannot allow her to hold an entire class hostage. The suggestion that she might flourish nearer home, in a more familiar environment, leads to the decision: Stéphanie is expelled. The counselor offers help with the administrative process, but Louise does not at first understand what has been decided.

Employer, Employee, and Motherhood

Mme Perrin’s role in the episode changes from benefactor to disappointed sponsor. She had arranged the school place as a favor to a hardworking employee; after Stéphanie’s behavior becomes a problem, Mme Perrin says she feels betrayed and emphasizes the embarrassment she has suffered before the school. Her response makes the original kindness conditional in practice: the opportunity she helped secure is accompanied by an expectation that Louise’s daughter will vindicate the decision.

The hearing sharpens that pressure. Louise is asked to account for her parenting in a room of professionals, and she answers by citing the same childcare skills that make her employable: discipline, experience, and care for children. Her labor for other people’s families becomes evidence she offers in defense of her own. Yet professional competence does not protect her from being cast as a failed mother, just as the school’s institutional judgment does not account fully for the concealed warnings and the unequal demands placed on Louise as an employee.

Consequences and Narrative Significance

On the bus home, Stéphanie listens to music and looks out the window, while Louise remains silent. As they pass the market, Stéphanie slows to look at the stalls. Louise, consumed by anger at what she sees as her daughter’s carelessness, grabs her by the sleeve and pulls her with startling force. The disciplinary decision therefore does not remain an abstract institutional verdict: it follows the pair home and intensifies a conflict between mother and daughter.

Mme Perrin is a secondary figure, but her intervention exposes how class power can travel through apparently benevolent acts. By arranging access to a better-regarded school, she offers Louise’s daughter an opportunity; by presenting the resulting trouble as betrayal and a loss of face, she also claims authority over how Louise should have managed her family. The episode places a private employment relationship beside the school’s formal judgment, showing how Louise is scrutinized in both settings and how little control she has over the standards by which she is judged.