Twenty-eight-year-old Marie Madeleine Ditte worked as a cook, and in March 1873, when she first feared she might be pregnant, asked the concièrge of her building what she could take to restore her menstrual periods. A little later she also chatted with a pregnant neighbor whom she met on the stairway of her building, and from whom she obtained the name of a midwife. Ditte's employer, a doctor, soon thereafter dismissed her for “bad conduct,” forcing her to look for a new job and new housing. Ditte moved across Paris to a furnished room and immediately found a job in a workshop making rugs. She now lived near Madame Clèmence Baronne, a compatriot from her home town in the Haute Marne about 150 miles to the east. In June she confided to Mme. Baronne that she had not had her periods for three months. She then sought help from a fresh-produce peddler who told her that she needed to drink a beverage including extracts of the plants rue or savin. When she asked her pharmacist for these herbs, or for something to bring on her periods, he replied that he did not know the right ingredients. Finally, Ditte went to the unlicensed midwife recommended by her former neighbor whom she had met on the stairway of the building where she had served as a cook.