Catherinette

And then again, on 25 November, Saint Catherine's Day (Saint Catherine is of course the patron saint of unmarried women), the done thing was to get hold of a catherinette, an unmarried girl of twenty-five or over, to drag her of to the rue de Cléry, to borrow a stepladder from the bistro opposite the statuse of Saint Catherine (they were quite used to lending it!), and get the girl to climb up and offer the statue a bunch of flowers you'd thoughtfully bought beforehand, giggling the while.

If no marriage had been concluded by the age of twenty-five, the young woman became a "catherinette" and soon a spinster.

Obviously a girl can be a catherinette only once in her lifetime; it's always beautiful and a little sad, like one's first love.

The card thus presents a conundrum: is she a modiste making her way in the world of work through the needle trades, or is she a catherinette, whose principal ambition is to wed?