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But to buy a bed and everything necessary to outfit it constitutes a considerable expense for a working woman who does not have a cent to spare and who is, moreover, without clothes or underwear … My ambition was to put together a life annuity and save enough to buy myself a little house in the country … I wanted to end my days there. To realize this dream, I had to sew my heart out, so I sewed with fervor.

I rented a small room. I paid thirty francs rent in advance, including the tip for the concierge. This room was a horrible little hovel, but it had one virtue that I appreciated enormously: it was clean. The walls were whitewashed. It was not comfortable, but it was home. I also had bought a few kitchen utensils and some dishes, which allowed me to eat at home and to realize some savings on my food.1

Jeanne joined the great many workers, mostly female, who occupied the sixth, seventh, and eighth floors of buildings along Parisian streets—sixièmes, largely windowless rooms (because buildings were taxed according to the number of windows and doors) that often held a dozen people each, their hallways sometimes extending through the walls of adjoining buildings, creating a parallel “street in the sky” occupied entirely by village arrivals. In some districts, the Parisian arrival city was defined by this “vertical stratification,” the established urban classes on the lower floors and the rural-arrival poor in the top two or three (an ordering that was later reversed by the elevator, introduced after the 1880s).

By Jeanne Bouvier’s time, Paris had developed discrete, identifiable, segregated arrival cities. The city-born upper and middle classes increasingly lived in neighborhoods to the west, and village-born workers, would-be workers and the perpetually jobless occupied the districts in the center and the new, sprawling arrival cities to the northeast, east, and south, just outside the old city walls. As the central Paris of Haussmann and his successors became an increasingly beautiful web of boulevards and squares, its arrival-city majority were pushed farther and farther to the periphery.

Jeanne Bouvier’s own life was both horizontally and vertically stratified, as she lived on the top floors in back-street neighborhoods jammed into the interstices of central Paris, mainly in the ninth arrondissement, in clusters of residential hotels and garnis (weekly-rental dormitory rooming houses, usually organized by trade). Many of these stayed in place until the 1960s, when the village arrivals of Paris were finally and forcefully moved into new, concrete high-rise blocks in the outer suburbs.

Jeanne, like the majority of Europe’s arrival-city residents, would never return to her village, except for one or two brief visits—during which she was shocked to find that she no longer understood the regional dialect.* None of her Paris neighbors were planning on returning, either. Centuries of circular, seasonal migration had built links between village and city, and those circular migrations, involving hundreds of thousands of people across Europe from the Middle Ages onward, did not fully dwindle into permanent settlement until the First World War. Savoyard farmers came to Paris to work as chimney sweeps and carriage drivers in the winter; stonemasons and builders visited from the farms of Limousin; a constant supply of maids and prostitutes arrived for the season from Brittany. Then, as the city became less lethal and the countryside increasingly overcrowded, more and more of these farmers began staying in the city during the planting season. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, in Jeanne Bouvier’s lifetime, the majority of Europe’s rural migrants were staying in the city for life, despite their almost universal initial expectation of a return.

Although she wouldn’t return, Jeanne Bouvier would be able to buy herself a bed, on the installment plan, and eventually save enough money, through obsessive budgeting and rigid self-discipline, to live in