France enters Poor Things chiefly through Paris, a place where different laws and commercial customs give Bella Baxter a way to support herself after Duncan Wedderburn abandons her. Its hotel rooms and nearby cafés form a compact social world in which sex, money, work, and politics are discussed with an openness Bella has not encountered in Britain.

Paris as refuge and workplace

When Bella needs a cheap room for the exhausted Wedderburn, she approaches the Hôtel de Notre-Dame. The manager, Millie Cronquebil, offers a small cubicle for twenty francs for the first hour, payable in advance, with the same charge for each additional hour or fraction. The arrangement makes the hotel’s economy plain from the outset: privacy is rented by the hour, and payment is due before the guests leave. Bella has little money or luggage, while Wedderburn waits in a nearby café drinking absinthe; Millie even asks whether he might run away.

While they wait for a room, Millie invites Bella to share coffee and conversation. She recalls that she was once Millicent Moon of Seven Dials in London, but that hotel regulations there made it difficult for beginners to establish themselves. She moved to Paris, where newcomers to the trade were encouraged, began in a subordinate role at the Hôtel de Notre-Dame, and eventually became indispensable to its manager. After he died in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, she took over the business. Her personal history makes Paris more than a temporary stop for Bella: it is a place where a woman can build an independent livelihood in a trade that British regulation constrains.

Sexual commerce and economic independence

Millie explains that her hotel operates as a knocking-shop: men pay to marry a stranger for an hour or less. She contrasts this business with Britain, where knocking is illegal, and says that in France a clean, intelligent woman can obtain a licence or work in a licensed establishment. Many customers are married men, and some also keep mistresses. In Millie’s account, the transactions expose the distance between respectable marriage and the sexual arrangements men pursue outside it. Bella, who has travelled with Wedderburn before marrying the respectable husband she anticipates, is herself described as having occupied the place of his mistress.

After Wedderburn leaves her in Paris, Bella spends three days earning wages at the hotel. She describes the work as labor done for cash rather than pleasure and is surprised by her popularity among the French clients. Millie advertises her as the beautiful Englishwoman who can compensate customers for the pains of Agincourt and Waterloo, turning national history into a commercial joke. To spare Bella possible embarrassment later, Millie assigns her only Frenchmen, although Bella suspects that the arrangement may also protect the English clients. The hotel thus gives Bella immediate material independence, while its management carefully regulates which customers she meets.

Cafés, argument, and the city’s social world

Paris also appears through the café next door, where Millie and Bella talk over coffee. Millie argues that money and love are the important things; Bella answers by naming cruelty. Their exchange sets the hotel’s practical worldview against Bella’s attention to suffering, a difference that resurfaces when she later discusses social reform. Millie regards the hotel trade as a business that should remain separate from politics, but Bella finds political conversation beyond its doors.

Her closest friend at the hotel, Toinette, is a socialist, and the two discuss how to improve life for the miserable. Toinette dismisses Victor Hugo’s insights as sentimental and urges Bella toward Émile Zola’s novels. Bella describes the surrounding quarter as containing the University and cafés frequented by writers, painters, and other scholars; academics and revolutionaries gather in different establishments. Their own café is chiefly frequented by revolutionary hoteliers, who argue that the rich will surrender wealth only through a sweeping transformation of society. Paris is therefore both Bella’s workplace and an intellectual landscape: its cafés connect ordinary conversation to competing literary and political convictions.