Paris, 1878. After their father's sudden death, the van Goethem sisters find their lives upended. Without his wages, and with the small amount their laundress mother earns disappearing into the absinthe bottle, eviction from their lodgings seems imminent. With few options for work, fourteen-year-old Marie is dispatched to the Paris Opera, where for a scant salary of seventy francs a month she will be trained to enter the famous Ballet. Her older sister, Antoinette, finds work and the love of a dangerous young man as an extra in a stage adaptation of Emile Zola's Naturalist masterpiece L'Assommoir.

Adult.,Brodart.

Adult.,Brodart.