Orphanhood

Orphanhood in the novel is a rupture that removes not only a family but also the material and social protections on which a young woman’s survival depends. Juliette and Justine inherit almost nothing after their parents’ deaths, and their separation sends them into sharply different lives. Justine’s later experiences show how an orphan’s need for shelter and work can be turned against her; a wealthy exploiter’s account of his business finally makes that vulnerability part of a deliberate system for procuring and controlling poor girls.

Loss of Family and Inheritance

The sisters’ orphanhood begins with their father’s financial ruin. A catastrophic bankruptcy leaves him in circumstances so harsh that he dies of grief; their mother dies a month later. The sisters are then placed in the hands of two distant relatives, who show little concern for them. Creditors have consumed most of the inheritance, leaving each girl a hundred crowns. No one volunteers to take responsibility for them, so the convent opens its door, hands them their dowries, and releases them to make their own way.

The abruptness matters: the sisters are given only twenty-four hours to leave, and their small inheritance is both their remaining resource and the means by which society relinquishes responsibility for them. They have received an education, but education does not supply a home, continuing support, or a dependable livelihood. Once their parents are gone, the burden of finding those things falls entirely on two girls still at the threshold of adulthood.

Two Responses to the Same Precarity

Juliette greets release from the convent with apparent relief and gives little thought to the losses that have left the sisters on their own. She argues that their age and appearance can keep them from starving and presents libertinage as a practical alternative to marriage, which she describes as restrictive and offering little happiness. Her proposal is a response to their exposed circumstances, even as it points the sisters toward opposing moral choices.

Justine, twelve years old, experiences the same change as a calamity. Pensive and melancholy, she is more conscious of the horror of their situation and refuses Juliette’s invitation. She would rather face death than what she regards as dishonor, and she will not immediately share a home with her sister once Juliette has chosen a course that appalls her. They part without promising to meet again. Their orphanhood is thus the common starting point of a separation: Juliette treats independence as an opening, while Justine approaches it through innocence, vulnerability, and the hope that someone will treat her kindly.

That hope meets an early rebuff. After leaving the convent, Justine seeks out her mother’s former dressmaker, expecting kindness because the woman had once cared for her. She explains her distress and asks for employment, but the woman barely recognizes her and drives her away. The encounter makes the change in Justine’s status concrete: past affection offers no protection once she is poor and dependent, and an orphan’s need does not itself oblige others to help.

Poverty Narrows Justine’s Choices

In the account she later gives Madame de Lorsange, Justine connects her orphanhood to a continuing loss of economic security. She says she was left a small inheritance and expected to obtain a suitable position, refusing work that she considered beneath her; while living in Paris, she gradually spent what she had. As her resources dwindled, she found herself increasingly despised and less able to hope for support. Her retrospective account frames her early course not as a single misfortune but as a narrowing series of options: a little property is consumed, work remains elusive, and the need for assistance grows as the prospect of receiving it recedes.

When Justine is not yet fourteen, a woman with whom she lodges recommends that she seek help from Monsieur Dubourg, a wealthy tradesman whose influence might improve her situation. Justine waits a long time before being admitted and explains that she is a poor orphan unable to find a position. She hopes he will help her find a means to live, while also expressing the pain of seeking a menial place when she was not born to that condition. The encounter shows how an orphan’s lack of family support pushes her to seek help from strangers whose wealth gives them power over the terms of assistance.

Justine eventually refuses to expose herself to another encounter with Dubourg and leaves her lodging after paying what she owes. But her decision does not bring justice or security: a week later, she learns that Dubourg has received a government trusteeship that will increase his income by more than five hundred thousand pounds a year. The contrast between his rising fortune and her desperate search for work makes the protection of wealth visible as a social advantage unavailable to her. Her orphanhood is not the cause of his success, but it leaves her without the support or influence that might shield her from his demands or secure her livelihood.

Orphanhood as a System Exploits

A later episode enlarges Justine’s individual experience into a wider account of organized exploitation. A wealthy libertine describes obtaining girls from places where the need to live and the lack of ways to do so wear down courage and pride. He claims that he deliberately searches such places because destitution makes people more susceptible to recruitment. In his account, poverty is not an incidental backdrop: it is the condition that makes vulnerable people available to those who profit from them.

He goes further, describing how he uses his influence in the city to encourage commercial and economic fluctuations and raise prices. He says that these pressures reduce opportunities for work while making survival more difficult, increasing the number of people whom misery places within his reach. The result is a chilling reversal of the customary promise that work and social stability protect the poor. Here, the powerful man claims to weaken those protections because deprivation enlarges his supply of recruits.

His offer to Justine makes the relationship between vulnerability and recruitment explicit. He needs a replacement for a trusted intermediary who had isolated poor women until they begged for help and, when that did not hasten their submission, kidnapped them. He offers Justine command over four people and wages of ten thousand crowns to take the role. Her experience of poverty is precisely why he considers her useful: he expects someone who has navigated hardship to know how to draw others who are trapped in it into his enterprise. The offer turns her history into a proposed instrument of exploitation, while the conditions attached to it expose how economic dependence can make apparent employment serve coercive ends.

Narrative Significance

Orphanhood gives the novel a material basis for the sisters’ divergent fortunes. Their parents’ deaths and the near-total loss of their inheritance leave them without a dependable household, while the people and institutions they encounter do not replace what they have lost. Juliette and Justine respond differently, but neither begins with the security that would make choice free of necessity.

Justine’s repeated search for work and support, followed by the libertine’s account of recruiting through manufactured hardship, reveals a larger pattern: poverty is not simply endured by the vulnerable but can be used by the powerful as a means of control. The novel therefore treats orphanhood as both a personal bereavement and a social exposure. The loss of family sets the sisters in motion; the scarcity that follows gives other people leverage over their labor, safety, and future.