Saint-Lazare appears in Simone de Beauvoir’s account as a place connected with the precarious lives of women in prostitution. The references do not provide a general history or description of the institution; instead, they locate it within an argument about how poverty, family circumstances, illness, and motherhood could constrain women’s choices. Beauvoir notes that many women there had children, and describes an individual who, after years of work and exhaustion, asked to be hospitalized there.

Saint-Lazare in the account

Beauvoir reports that more than half of the women at Saint-Lazare had at least one child, and that many were raising between three and six. She also mentions a woman who had given birth to fourteen children, eight of whom were still alive when a physician knew her. These figures make motherhood part of the material circumstances under discussion, rather than a separate issue: Beauvoir observes that an unmarried mother might enter prostitution in order to feed her child.

The case of the woman seeking care

One case follows a woman whose circumstances changed over several decades. At nineteen, while still living with her family in the provinces, she became pregnant after a relationship with a much older man, a director. She had to leave her family and gave birth to a healthy daughter, whom she raised. After nursing the child, she went to Paris and found work as a nanny. At twenty-nine she began to carouse; the account says that she later became a prostitute and remained in the trade for thirty-three years. By then weak and exhausted, she was asking to be hospitalized in Saint-Lazare. The sequence connects pregnancy and family rejection with relocation and employment, then records the long interval before her request for care; it does not give a fuller account of her subsequent circumstances.

Material conditions and significance

The institutional reference sits within Beauvoir’s broader claim that prostitution’s misery is chiefly material, not evidence of an innate moral or psychological defect. She describes women as vulnerable to exploitation by pimps and hotelkeepers, without security or money, and exposed to illness, police control, humiliating medical examinations, and the consequences of unwanted pregnancy. The mention of Saint-Lazare thus anchors a general argument in the circumstances of women who had children, endured prolonged economic insecurity, and could eventually seek hospitalization. The account presents the institution through those circumstances, not as an independently documented setting.