The Sisters Are Orphaned by Their Parents' Bankruptcy

The Sisters Are Orphaned by Their Parents' Bankruptcy is the decisive break that transforms Juliette and Justine from educated daughters of a wealthy Parisian banker into unsupported young orphans. Their father’s financial collapse is followed by his death from grief, and their mother dies a month later. With creditors consuming almost the entire inheritance, the sisters receive only a small sum and are left to make their own way. The event separates them and sets the conditions for the divergent lives that follow.

Family Ruin and Loss

The sisters had been raised together in a celebrated convent and given instruction, books, and accomplishments. That protected upbringing ends abruptly when a disastrous bankruptcy reduces the family’s circumstances to ruin. Their father perishes from grief over the collapse; one month afterward, their mother also dies. The sequence leaves the girls parentless while they are still young, with no family home or dependable adult support to return to.

Two distant relatives discuss what to do with the orphans but do not take responsibility for them. The estate has been largely swallowed by creditors, leaving each sister only a hundred crowns. Their former convent opens its doors to them, hands over their dowries, and gives them twenty-four hours to leave. The arrangement offers a little money and nominal freedom, but no continuing protection, employment, or place to live.

Separation at the Convent

The sisters respond differently to the same loss. Juliette, whose character is already firmly formed, is pleased to be free of the convent and shows little grief over the circumstances that ended their former life. Justine, twelve years old and more pensive, feels the full weight of their vulnerability. Juliette briefly tries to comfort her, then rebukes her distress and argues that a person should avoid painful moral feeling and pursue pleasure instead.

Juliette also treats their youth and appearance as resources for survival, urging Justine to reject the expectation that marriage is the route to happiness and to consider a life of libertinage. Justine is horrified and says she would prefer death to dishonor. Because she refuses to join Juliette in the life her sister proposes, the two separate without promising to meet again. Each leaves the convent the following day, turning a shared bereavement into a lasting divergence of principle and circumstance.

Poverty and Exposure

Justine’s first attempt to find help illustrates how little their inheritance can secure. She seeks out her mother’s former dressmaker, believing that a woman who once treated her kindly might now offer employment. The dressmaker scarcely recognizes her and turns her away. With no household or reliable kin to shelter her, Justine must seek work from strangers while still very young.

Later, recounting her history as Therese, she describes having lost her parents while young and gradually spending the small inheritance they left her in Paris. As her resources diminish, so does the support available to her; her need grows while her prospects narrow. She approaches Monsieur Dubourg, a wealthy tradesman, as a poor orphan not yet fourteen, hoping he will help her find a means of living. Her account makes the inheritance’s exhaustion a continuing condition, not a single misfortune: the family’s bankruptcy begins a chain in which poverty restricts her choices and leaves her exposed to people who treat need as an opportunity for exploitation.

Later Consequences and Significance

The episode’s economic logic recurs on a wider scale when a later exploiter explains how he recruits girls from places of acute deprivation. He says that need, lack of work, and the struggle to survive weaken pride and make vulnerable people easier to draw into his operations. He claims to worsen poverty by influencing commerce and prices, enlarging the population deprived of both work and the means of subsistence. The account links the sisters’ orphanhood to a social pattern: destitution is not merely endured but can be deliberately used to produce dependence.

That same man offers Therese a highly paid position overseeing four people, presenting it as a chance to accept security. His offer exposes the coercive structure beneath apparent choice: financial reward is made available in return for helping exploit others whose circumstances resemble her own. Therese refuses. In retrospect, the sisters’ meager inheritance and abrupt expulsion from the convent mark the beginning of a conflict over what survival permits and whether hardship can ever justify turning another person’s vulnerability into a source of profit.