Poverty

Poverty is not merely a hardship endured by the novel’s vulnerable characters; it is a force that repeatedly determines which choices remain available to them. The bankruptcy that leaves Juliette and Justine orphaned also deprives them of security and social protection. Justine’s subsequent search for work exposes a world in which assistance is conditional, employment can be a pretext for exploitation, and even a household’s promise of subsistence comes with threats and severe deprivation. Later, a criminal enterprise describes poverty not as an accidental misfortune but as a condition it works to enlarge, because deprivation makes people easier to recruit and control.

From inheritance to destitution

The sisters’ fall begins with their father’s financial ruin. His bankruptcy leaves him in circumstances so severe that he dies of grief; their mother dies a month later. Two distant relatives discuss the orphans’ future, but the inheritance is largely consumed by creditors, leaving each girl only a hundred crowns. No relative agrees to take responsibility for them. The convent opens its doors, gives them their small dowries, and leaves them to make their own way. Poverty here begins not as a personal failing but as the consequence of family collapse, debt, and the withdrawal of kinship support.

The sisters respond differently to the same abrupt insecurity. Juliette appears relieved to be free of the convent and gives little thought to the losses that have preceded that freedom. Justine, twelve years old, is more keenly aware of the danger of their situation. When Juliette proposes that a young woman might secure her livelihood through libertinage, Justine rejects the proposal, preferring hardship to what she regards as dishonor. They part without promises of reunion. Their separation makes the consequences of poverty individual as well as shared: each sister must face economic vulnerability without the other’s support.

Work and conditional assistance

After leaving the convent, Justine seeks help from a woman who had once been close to the family. The woman scarcely recognizes her and drives her away. Justine interprets this rejection as a consequence of being poor and orphaned: former affection has not become dependable aid. Her next appeal is to Monsieur Dubourg, a wealthy tradesman whom her landlady recommends as a possible source of help. Justine explains that she is not yet fourteen, has spent her small means while trying to find a position, and needs work. Her account distinguishes poverty from unwillingness to work: she has been searching for employment, but the options available to her are shaped by age, class, and the absence of anyone prepared to protect her.

Dubourg makes assistance conditional on sexual availability rather than offering the employment Justine seeks. He argues that virtue cannot sustain her and that wealthy people expect a return when they give. When Justine refuses his demand, he attempts to force her; she escapes and reports what happened to her landlady, Madame Desroches. Instead of supporting her, Desroches blames her for failing to secure money and demands payment of the lodging debt by the next day, threatening prison. She then sends Justine back to Dubourg, telling her to appease him and bring home money. The episode shows how a supposed chain of assistance—from recommendation, to a rich benefactor, to a landlady—can become a chain of pressure, with Justine’s need for shelter and work used to limit her ability to refuse.

Justine returns to Dubourg under that pressure, but the encounter does not give her security. Afterward she resolves not to expose herself to him again, pays Desroches, and leaves the immediate debt behind. A week later, she learns that Dubourg has received a government trusteeship that will increase his annual income by more than five hundred thousand pounds. Her appeal for help has ended in danger and humiliation, while the man who exploited her poverty prospers. The contrast turns private misfortune into a recurring social pattern: need constrains the poor, but does not prevent the powerful from gaining further wealth.

Subsistence as employment

A new position appears to offer Justine a way out of dependence on Dubourg. Desroches finds a place for her in the home of a wealthy Parisian usurer who lives on the rue Quincampoix with his wife. Justine has adopted the name Therese to conceal her identity. The employer declares that probity is the household’s principal virtue and threatens to have her hanged if she steals even a fraction of a penny; yet the terms he offers expose the imbalance behind that moral language. Her annual wage is three crowns, payable only if the employers are satisfied with her service and thrift. Her food is limited to three ounces of bread a day and half a bottle of river water, and her clothing consists of one of his wife’s old dresses every eighteen months.

The work itself is extensive despite the employer’s description of the duties as modest. Justine is expected to clean a six-room apartment three times a week, make the beds, answer the door, powder his wig, dress his wife’s hair, care for a dog and a parakeet, assist in the kitchen, wash utensils, and spend four or five hours each day washing and mending household items. The contrast between the promised “free time” and the actual list of tasks reveals how a nominal job can secure labor on terms that barely meet the worker’s needs. The employer’s warning against theft is especially revealing beside the meagreness of the compensation: strict honesty is demanded of the servant in a household whose master has become rich through lending against collateral and taking from the public when he believes he can do so safely.

Poverty as an instrument of exploitation

The novel later expands poverty from Justine’s immediate predicament into a method of organized exploitation. A criminal operator explains that he seeks victims in places where the need to live, combined with the difficulty of doing so, wears down courage and pride. Destitution is useful to him because the hope of indispensable support can make people more susceptible to offers that promise a way out. The vulnerable are not simply encountered by chance: he describes his agents as searching the places where hardship is concentrated and selecting people whose limited options can be manipulated.

The scheme also treats economic conditions as something its operators can influence. The speaker claims to use his local power to promote commercial and economic fluctuations and raise prices, thereby reducing work opportunities while making survival harder. In his account, increased poverty expands the supply of people who may fall into his hands. He compares this deliberate exploitation to scarcity in basic necessities, presenting the nets cast from wealthy households into poor ones as the means by which avarice and libertinage reach those with the fewest defenses. Poverty is thus not only a precondition of recruitment; it is something the powerful can help reproduce for their own benefit.

The operator’s need for a clever woman to recruit and manage victims makes the economic mechanism explicit. He offers Justine four people to command and wages of ten thousand crowns, asking her to replace an associate who, he says, isolated vulnerable people and resorted to kidnapping when other means failed. The enormous proposed payment contrasts with the meagre wages and food offered in Justine’s earlier domestic employment. But the offer is not an ordinary advancement: it would place her in the service of a system that turns others’ need into profit. Justine recoils from the proposal and condemns the cruelty of prolonging people’s hardship for private gratification.

Narrative significance

Across these episodes, poverty repeatedly converts formal freedom into constrained choice. The orphaned sisters are technically released from the convent with their dowries, but the hundred crowns left to each cannot replace family protection or guarantee a livelihood. Justine can refuse Dubourg’s demand, but only at the cost of immediate insecurity; she can accept domestic work, but its wage and provisions are set by an employer who expects extensive labor for subsistence. Later, a wealthy criminal presents poverty itself as a resource that can be deliberately expanded and harvested.

This recurrence also distinguishes the characters’ apparent choices from the conditions under which they make them. The novel shows destitution operating through ordinary institutions and relationships—inheritance, lodging, employment, charitable appeals, and recruitment—rather than as an isolated episode. People with money can treat aid as an investment and labor as something to extract, while those without resources face narrowed alternatives and heightened exposure to coercion. Poverty therefore links Justine’s early search for a place in the world to a much larger structure in which vulnerability benefits those who possess wealth and influence.