Mimi Pinson Reading Order

What is a grisette and how does Mimi Pinson fit the type?

The grisette was a specific social type in early nineteenth-century Paris — a young working-class woman, typically employed in the dressmaking, hat-making, or similar trades, who lived independently in the Latin Quarter, pursued love affairs with students and artists, and was characterized in the literature of the period as cheerful, generous, warm-hearted, and free-spirited. The name derives from the grey cloth (gris) of their typical work clothes. The grisette was a Romantic idealization of the working-class young woman as a figure of authentic feeling uncorrupted by bourgeois calculation — she gives freely (including sexually), without the mercantile calculation that the Romantic critique attributed to the respectable middle class. Mimi Pinson is the canonical literary grisette: her act of selling her only dress to help a sick friend is the defining grisette gesture, the expression of a generosity that the bourgeois world (which cannot afford such gestures) admires but cannot imitate. The type was both a genuine social observation and a Romantic myth — the real seamstresses of the Latin Quarter were both more complex and more precarious than the literary tradition acknowledged.