Mahiette

Mahiette is a mother from Reims whose journey to see a prisoner at the pillory becomes an act of recognition: she tells the history of Paquette la Chantefleurie, then identifies the recluse called Sister Gudule as the same woman. Her place in the novel is that of a witness and storyteller, carrying a private past into the present through memory and a tiny embroidered shoe.

Identity and Background

Mahiette is a provincial visitor in Paris, traveling with her child while the crowd moves toward the pillory. She has seen a pillory before, in Reims, and speaks with the practical familiarity of someone who knows what the spectacle will involve. Her account of Paquette is also rooted in Reims: she remembers Paquette as a young woman there and describes the family circumstances that preceded her misfortune.

Mahiette presents herself as a settled contrast to Paquette’s earlier life. In imagining what Paquette might have become, she describes a prosperous, plump mother with a husband and child, while speaking from the position of a woman who has a family of her own. The contrast gives her story its personal edge: Paquette’s fate is not remote history to Mahiette but a life that might have taken another course.

On the Way to the Pillory

As the women hurry toward the spectacle, Mahiette’s child stumbles along, absorbed in a cake rather than the path. Mahiette is indignant at the delay and warns the child not to bite it. The small domestic episode places her among the ordinary onlookers, concerned with keeping a child in hand even as the public punishment draws near.

The journey is governed by conflicting estimates of time. One companion fears the prisoner will be taken directly to the pillory; another insists there are still two hours. Mahiette has the experience to answer that she has witnessed a pillorying in Reims, but it is Paquette’s story—not a description of the punishment—that becomes the conversation’s central subject. Mahiette begins telling it while the group continues walking, refusing to make the narrative depend on stopping along the way.

Mahiette’s Account of Paquette

Mahiette recounts Paquette’s background in detail. Paquette was the daughter of Guybertant, a minstrel associated with the barges at Reims, and of a mother whose family connection was to a Paris master brazier and coppersmith. After Guybertant died, Paquette and her mother were left poor. The mother taught her embroidery and toy-making, but this work brought in very little: Mahiette contrasts their meager earnings with the twelve sous Guybertant had once made by singing at a coronation.

Mahiette locates Paquette’s decline amid the deprivation of 1461. In a winter when the women lacked firewood, Paquette’s flushed cheeks drew attention and helped give rise to the names Chantefleurie and Pàquerette. The turning point Mahiette describes is the sight of a gold cross around Paquette’s neck when she came to church. Paquette was only fourteen, and Mahiette presents the ornament as the first public sign that the young woman’s circumstances had changed. Her account frames that change against poverty, youth, and the small earnings of women’s handiwork, rather than treating Paquette’s history as mere gossip.

Recognition of the Recluse

Later, when one woman identifies the recluse as Sister Gudule, Mahiette supplies the name she knows: Paquette la Chantefleurie. The recognition is not left as an abstract claim. Mahiette puts a finger to her lips and signals her companion to look through the window; there, in the corner toward which the recluse’s gaze is fixed, lies a tiny shoe of pink satin embroidered with gold and silver designs.

The shoe gives Mahiette’s recollection a concrete point of contact with the present scene. Her earlier tale has made Paquette recognizable as a person with a past; the name and the carefully worked object now join that past to the recluse before them. Mahiette thus serves as the link between the crowd’s casual talk and a private history, turning an outing to witness punishment into the discovery of an identity.