Grisette (person)
The word grisette (sometimes spelled grizette) has referred to a French working-class woman from the late 17th century and remained in common use through the Belle Époque era, albeit with some modifications to its meaning.
[1]This usage can be seen in one of Oliver Wendell Holmes' early poems "Our Yankee Girls" (1830): ...the gay grisette, whose fingers touch love's thousand chords so well.
...[2]In practice, "young working woman" referred primarily to those employed in the garment and millinery trades as seamstresses or shop assistants, the few occupations open to them in 19th century urban France, apart from domestic service.
[3] The sexual connotations which had long accompanied the word are made explicit in Webster's Third New International Dictionary (1976) which lists one of its meanings as a young woman who combines part-time prostitution with another occupation.
I found I lost considerably in every attack: she had a quick black eye, and shot through two such long and silken eyelashes with such penetration, that she look'd into my very heart and reins.
He made her his mistress and helped establish her career as a courtesan in the highest circles of Parisian society, where she took several wealthy men as her "benefactors", including the Duke of Richelieu.
In the first quarter of the 19th century, grisette also came to refer more specifically to the independent young women, often working as seamstresses or milliner's assistants, who frequented bohemian artistic and cultural venues in Paris.
Janin considered the grisettes an integral part of the bohemian artistic scene, but viewed their sexual mores somewhat negatively and suggests that their independence was only superficial: Art is the grand excuse for all actions that are beyond vulgar.
The artist and war correspondent, Constantin Guys, frequently portrayed them in his sketches of Parisian life during the Second French Empire.
[11] However, their slightly raised skirts (particularly in the Guys sketches) and provocative poses also allude to the association of grisettes with prostitution.
[15] Swift's "grisette" (or "grizette" as spelled in early editions of his work) is Irish, not French, and demonstrates that the generic use of the term in English to indicate a woman of loose morals already existed by 1730.
[16] Extract from "To Betty, the Grisette" (1730):[17] ... Sets of phrases, cut and dry, Evermore thy tongue supply; And thy memory is loaded With old scraps from plays exploded; Stock'd with repartees and jokes, Suited to all Christian folks: Shreds of wit, and senseless rhymes, Blunder'd out a thousand times; Nor wilt thou of gifts be sparing, Which can ne'er be worse for wearing.
Swift's diatribe is in considerable contrast to the elegiac La Grisette, by Oliver Wendell Holmes a century later.
[18] Holmes' description of Clemence reflects a frequent 19th century perception of the grisette as an attentive and self-effacing companion to the starving artists and romantic students of bohemia.
They were (if you let the books of travel tell it) always so beautiful—so neat and trim, so graceful—so naive and trusting—so gentle, so winning—so faithful to their shop duties, so irresistible to buyers in their prattling importunity—so devoted to their poverty-stricken students of the Latin Quarter—so lighthearted and happy on their Sunday picnics in the suburbs—and oh, so charmingly, so delightfully immoral!
