Juliette

Juliette, later known as Madame de Lorsange, is Justine’s elder sister and the novel’s central contrast to her. The sisters begin with the same bereavement and meager inheritance, yet Juliette converts her freedom into a rise through sexual commerce, calculated exploitation, and murder, while Justine’s hardships deepen her commitment to virtue. The contrast is not merely a difference in fortune: it structures the novel’s argument about prosperity, crime, and the possibility of moral change. At the story’s end, Justine’s death becomes the occasion for Juliette to abandon the life she built and seek religious atonement.

Identity and Background

Juliette and Justine were educated together in a celebrated Paris convent, where both had access to instruction, books, and accomplishments. Their circumstances changed abruptly when their father’s bankruptcy left him so distressed that he died; their mother followed a month later. Creditors consumed most of the family’s resources, and two distant relatives left each girl only a hundred crowns. The convent released the sisters, giving them a short time to leave and the freedom to choose their futures.

The sisters respond differently to this shared dispossession. Juliette, whose character is described as already firmly formed in adolescence, is pleased to be free and gives little thought to the family tragedy. Justine, three years younger, experiences their situation with melancholy and apprehension. The difference anticipates their opposing courses, but their later estrangement does not erase the kinship that surfaces when Justine recounts her history to Juliette.

From Orphanhood to Social Standing

On leaving the convent, Juliette seeks out Madame Duvergier, a woman whose name she had heard from a former schoolmate. She arrives with a small parcel and admits that she is nearly fifteen. After Madame Duvergier examines her, she offers a place in her household and lays out a program of obedience, economy, discretion, and deception in dealing with men. When Juliette discloses that she has a hundred crowns, Madame Duvergier takes the money, claiming she will risk it in the lottery for her. The next day, Juliette’s sexual services are put on sale. The episode establishes the practical terms of her early ascent: dependence on a powerful intermediary, the loss of her small inheritance, and the conversion of her circumstances into a marketable livelihood.

Juliette soon rises beyond the subordinate position in which she began. An elderly, wealthy man becomes her early patron, and she learns to secure substantial maintenance and enter fashionable social life. In less than four years, she ruins six men, including one whose income is lower than the others’; their losses increase rather than diminish her social desirability among those who pursue her. Her success exposes a world in which conspicuous dishonesty can attract admirers and where wealth and reputation are detached from moral conduct.

At twenty, Juliette becomes the mistress and then the wife of the Comte de Lorsange, a man about forty. He gives her his name, an income of twelve thousand pounds, a house and servants, and the prospect of inheriting his remaining fortune if he dies first. These advantages provide the security and standing that her earlier arrangements had not. Juliette nevertheless wants wealth and social identity without the restraint of marriage. She secretly arranges her husband’s death and conceals the crime so successfully that she avoids pursuit. She emerges as a rich widow and countess, continuing her former way of life with a more polished public manner: her changed status alters its presentation, not its underlying conduct.

By twenty-six, Juliette has added further crimes to her record. She kills two lovers in separate schemes, one to seize money entrusted to her and the other to obtain a large legacy promised through a third party. The narrative also reports that she has three or four infanticides, motivated by fear of damaging her figure and by a wish to conceal her affairs. These acts remain undiscovered, and new admirers continue to approach her. Her material success is thus repeatedly reinforced by impunity, making her a direct counterexample to any simple expectation that wrongdoing brings immediate worldly ruin.

Beliefs and Moral Contrast

Juliette’s life is set against Justine’s, whose account frames the sisters’ eventual reunion. For much of the narrative, Juliette’s wealth and social ease stand opposite Justine’s repeated suffering. Their contrast tests the claim that virtue is rewarded in ordinary life: Juliette’s crimes bring titles, property, and influence, while Justine’s moral commitments do not protect her from calamity. The account of Juliette’s rise makes that imbalance concrete rather than abstract, tracing it through inheritance, patronage, marriage, and the concealment of crime.

The book also places Juliette in the orbit of arguments against religious belief without presenting those arguments as a settled account of her final convictions. Comte de Bressac attacks religion and denies the existence of a Supreme Being, describing religious institutions as instruments of domination. In a different episode, Justine’s experience of the monks’ staged apparition and sacrilegious use of religious symbols becomes part of her testimony about the abuses committed in the convent. These episodes establish a sharp distinction between libertine disbelief and institutional hypocrisy on one side, and Justine’s persistent faith on the other. They are contextual contrasts in Juliette’s story, not evidence that she personally participates in either episode.

Reunion with Justine

When Justine’s account ends, the name she has used is disclosed, and Juliette recognizes her as the sister she lost. Madame de Lorsange is overcome by the story and asks the prisoner to reveal her identity. Justine understands whom she is addressing; the sisters recognize each other and fall into one another’s arms, their grief and relief too great for speech. The reunion restores a family bond that their divergent lives had obscured, but it also forces Juliette to confront the suffering that Justine has endured while she herself prospered.

Monsieur de Corville acts immediately on the sisters’ recognition. He writes to the Lord Chancellor, accepts responsibility for Justine’s innocence, and asks that she be held at his château rather than returned to prison while her case is reviewed. With the guards’ agreement, he takes her into his care. Juliette joins him in receiving her sister there, and both make sustained efforts to restore Justine’s comfort: she is fed, given a fine bed, treated with medicines, bathed, and provided with clothes. A surgeon removes the mark left by Rodin. The episode gives Juliette’s compassion a practical form: she uses the resources of her household to tend to the sister whose life has been the inverse of her own.

Conversion and Ending

The sisters’ renewed life together is brief. Near the end of summer, a storm interrupts an outing at Corville’s country estate. When the open windows are threatened by the storm, Justine hurries to close the shutters; lightning strikes her and kills her. Juliette initially faints, then refuses Corville’s request to have the body removed. She says that she must look upon Justine in order to remain firm in the resolve she has formed.

Juliette interprets the death through the novel’s providential moral framework. Justine had observed her duties and suffered almost unbroken misfortune, while people who preyed upon her had enjoyed apparent success. Juliette rejects the idea that this prosperity proves crime is truly fortunate: she treats the lightning as a warning against being seduced by the villains’ temporary good fortune, and as the event that makes her face her own irreligion and criminal past. The contrast between the sisters, once a narrative demonstration of virtue’s earthly vulnerability, becomes for Juliette a demand for repentance.

She leaves Corville’s house at once, takes some money, and gives up the remainder of her property, recommending that it be made into a pious legacy. In Paris she takes the Carmelite veil; within a few years, she is described as an exemplary member of the order, respected for her piety, judgment, and regular conduct. Her ending is therefore a deliberate reversal of the life established after her first husband’s death: the woman who sought fortune without restraint relinquishes her possessions and enters a religious community. The narrative presents that choice as atonement and as Juliette’s response to Justine’s fate, while preserving the stark irony that the sisters’ earthly outcomes remain unequal: Justine dies, and Juliette survives to repent.