Paris

Paris is both the setting of the sisters’ beginnings and a recurring stage on which wealth, vulnerability, and justice are sharply contrasted. The city offers education and the promise of employment, but for the orphaned Therese it also becomes a place where poverty exposes her to exploitation; at the end, it is where her sister’s recognition and Monsieur de Corville’s intervention begin to reverse her wrongful condemnation, and where Juliette enters a convent.

Early Life and Orphanhood

Before the sisters’ fortunes diverge, Paris is the home of their wealthy banker father and the place where Juliette and Justine receive their education. They are raised together in a celebrated abbey, with access to teachers, books, and accomplishments expected of young women of their station. Their education is abruptly separated from security when their father’s bankruptcy ruins the family and he dies of grief; their mother follows him into the grave a month later.

The orphaned sisters are left to distant relatives who show little concern for them. Each receives a hundred crowns from an inheritance largely consumed by creditors, and the convent releases them with their dowries rather than taking responsibility for their future. Juliette greets this freedom with apparent satisfaction, while the twelve-year-old Justine is more conscious of the calamity and approaches her new circumstances with melancholy. Paris thus belongs both to their privileged childhood and to the moment when that childhood’s protection ends.

Work and Exposure to Exploitation

Years later, Paris is the setting of Therese’s attempt to support herself after losing her parents. Born there, she gradually spends her small inheritance while refusing positions she considers unsuitable. As her resources diminish, she finds herself increasingly despised and less able to obtain assistance. Her account presents the city not as a reliable refuge for a respectable orphan, but as a social world in which need weakens her bargaining position.

A landlady recommends that Therese seek help from Monsieur Dubourg, a wealthy Parisian tradesman. After waiting a long time in his antechamber, she is admitted while he is still in disorder from bed and his servants are preparing his coiffure. She explains that she is not yet fourteen, poor, parentless, and struggling to find work. Dubourg responds by asking whether she has always behaved well and challenges her expectation that the wealthy should aid someone who cannot be useful to them. His encounter turns a request for practical help into pressure to submit to his demands.

Therese leaves the encounter humiliated and resolves not to return. She pays her landlady, Desroches, and condemns the man who has exploited her poverty. Yet she soon hears that Dubourg has obtained a government trusteeship which will increase his income by more than five hundred thousand pounds a year. The reversal gives the Paris episode its moral force: Therese’s refusal brings no visible punishment upon the aggressor, while her own urgent need remains unresolved.

Desroches later finds Therese a position in the household of a Parisian usurer who lives on the rue Quincampoix. He shares a third-floor apartment with a woman he calls his wife, and presents probity as the household’s chief virtue even though he has enriched himself through lending on collateral and stealing from the public. His rules for Therese make the contradiction material: three ounces of bread a day, half a bottle of river water, one of his wife’s old dresses every eighteen months, and three crowns’ wages at the end of each year if they are satisfied with her service. The apartment offers work, but on terms that preserve the employers’ comfort by keeping the servant close to hunger.

Wealth, Crime, and Unequal Fortune

Paris also supplies the social world in which Juliette’s rise is measured. By twenty-six, Madame de Lorsange has made a succession of wealthy conquests, including foreign ambassadors, Farmers-General, bishops, a cardinal, and knights of the King’s Order. Her prosperity is built not only on seduction but on crimes committed for money: she robs a lover entrusted with a substantial sum and secures another legacy of one hundred thousand crowns through an arrangement involving a third party. She also commits several infanticides to protect her figure and conceal her intrigues.

The narration places this success beside Therese’s recurring destitution. Juliette’s Parisian standing displays how wealth and social access can insulate wrongdoing, while Therese’s experience shows how readily poverty turns a request for assistance into an opportunity for abuse. The contrast does not mean that the city itself explains either sister’s character; rather, Paris makes visible the different consequences their circumstances and choices produce. Juliette’s crimes remain undiscovered as she acquires new dupes, whereas Therese’s innocence does not prevent successive hardships.

Return, Recognition, and Rescue

The sisters’ paths eventually meet away from Paris, after Therese has been tried at Lyon for murder, theft, and arson and is being taken to Paris for confirmation of her sentence. At Montargis, Madame de Lorsange hears the prisoner’s case and asks to hear her story. Therese tells it under an assumed name, explaining the hardships that began when she was orphaned and spent her small inheritance in Paris. The journey toward the capital for a sentence that may be confirmed there brings Juliette face to face with the life her own prosperity has left her unable to recognize until the testimony ends.

When Therese finishes, Juliette is overcome by an attachment she cannot explain. She asks the prisoner to reveal her name and birth, then recognizes in her the sister she lost: Justine, whom the account continues to call Therese. The recognition transforms Paris from the destination of a condemned prisoner into the place from which a possible rescue can be organized. Monsieur de Corville, moved by the sisters’ reunion, writes to the Lord Chancellor, guarantees Therese’s innocence, and asks that she be kept at his château until the case is clarified. He takes responsibility for her before the guards, and she is released into his protection.

After the reunion, Juliette leaves for Paris with some money and enters a Carmelite convent. She gives Monsieur de Corville the rest of her possessions to be made into a pious legacy, and in time becomes an example to her order through her piety, judgment, and conduct. Paris therefore closes the sisters’ divided histories in different ways: it is the city from which their childhood security vanished, the setting of Therese’s vulnerable search for work, and the destination associated with both her threatened legal sentence and Juliette’s chosen penance.