In one of the chapters of Les Miserables, it’s Mardi Gras and the people of Paris are dressed up in various costumes. Thenardier and his daughter Azelma are in a carriage; according to the translation, she looks like a “fishwife, clad in a low-necked gown”.
Thenardier wants his daughter to get out of the carriage and follow someone, but she says she can’t. Here’s the conversation (according to Isabel Hapgood’s translation):
What exactly is she being hired to do? If I had to guess, I’d say she’s a prostitute, but I’m baffled by the sentence “I owe my fishwife day to the prefecture”.
Or is she literally doing some kind of court-ordered community service?
It wouldn’t be court-ordered community service. Back then, no matter if she was a destitute, barely pubescent scamp, she’d be tossed in a women’s prison.
Most likely she was hired as a fishwife for Mardi Gras. Fishwives, at least earlier during the monarchy, had special permission to sell goods in certain markets, particularly fish during Lent when the eating of meat is not allowed. It was one way to give work/money to poor, nearly destitute women.
I’m not familiar enough with 19th century French culture to know why an inspector would care, but I’m guessing since being a fishwife during public holidays probably carried some monetary benefits from the state, you were expected to earn it.
Also, as I recall, both Eponine and Azelma were too young - or at least too small and bony - and unattractive to have success as prostitutes.
It sounds to me like, based on the rather confusing (to me at least) previous paragraphs, that Hugo is claiming that the state would hire carriage-loads of revelers to “prove” the Carnival. Basically that she is hired to provide a spectacle for the populace (and perhaps to spy as well).
ETA: But I see I probably have missed the mark here…
I always thought those were called mezzanine chapters. But a quick google seems to imply that I made that up somewhere along the line. Pity. I enjoyed the phrase.
Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath had them, too, but they were short and interesting. Well, they were interesting to me. I’ve heard people complaining about the ones in Moby Dick, too.
I read the book at least ten years ago and Lord knows it’s not a text where the little details stuck with me (difficult enough to follow the broad swaths) but I recall feeling pretty certain that Eponine was a prostitute on at least an occasional basis. I’d be lost to point to specific passages at this point though.
I do recall that she was originally sent to Marius’s apartment to sleep with him as a pretext for casing/robbing the place and her infatuation with him started when he just chatted with her rather than taking advantage of the obvious. That’s not evidence of prostitution (as I said, I recall it from elsewhere) but at least she seemed “good” enough for that job.
I’ll defer to almost anyone else on these points though. Like I said, it’s been too long.
I didn’t get the feeling that she was trying to seduce Marius in that scene, but it’s entirely possible that I missed some nuances in a 19th century English translation of a 19th century French book!
I didn’t get the impression that she was trying to actively seduce him, so much as that her availability in his room would get the point across by itself. His not acting on it versus her expectations of how he would act (and why her father sent her and not someone else) were what made her infatuated with him. But, again, I’m out of my depth to cite chapter and verse without much more homework than I’m willing to put into it.