Francine

From her throne of silks and chiffons, Madame Francine runs a house where wealthy wives come to be transformed, and she measures people the way she measures cloth — by what they can bear. She watches Mimi rise from draper's assistant to fitter, testing her against the impossible Mrs. Bennett, and sees in the younger woman a talent and hunger that mirror her own long apprenticeship. As the war money floods in and her own years begin to tell, Francine's gaze on Mimi carries both pride and the quiet arithmetic of succession. She is the door through which Mimi's ambition must pass.