From ‘Mary’s Blog’

France, 1827, at the height of the same time periodLes Misérableswas set.

A young servant girl was working in a household ’til such time as her employers moved to Paris and took her with them. She had such a strongdevotion to the holy souls that every month without fail she used a portion of her meager earnings to have a Mass offered for the holy souls.

The servant girl fell prey to a devastating illness, and had a long sojournin hospital. So long was she away from scrubbing floors that her employers fired her. The girl’s plight isreminiscent of that of Fantine’s, the chief female characterfromLes Misérables.In France of the 1800s,Fantine slaved to feed herself and the daughter she bore out of wedlock, and resorted to selling her front teeth and becoming a street-walker.

Fantine’s life ofunmitigated hardship was fiction, but a trueportrait…