Girl With a Pearl Earring

Griet is working at the butcher stall when Tanneke, whom she has not seen for ten years, walks up. Surprised as she is to see her, Griet carefully puts down her knife, wipes her bloody hands on her apron, and greets Tanneke, who abruptly tells her that she is being summoned to see “the mistress.” The summons given, Tanneke refuses to buy anything, and Griet reflects on how the Vermeer household had stopped purchasing meat from the Pieters so suddenly after Griet married Pieter that they still owed them fifteen guilders. Pieter calls the fifteen guilders “the price [he has] paid” for Griet and jokes that he now knows “what a maid is worth” (220). Griet’s younger son, Frans, is there with her, and her mother and older son Jan arrive before Tanneke reminds her to come that afternoon and leaves. We learn that the Vermeers now have eleven children and that Catharina lost the baby she was carrying at the time of the confrontation over Girl with a Pearl Earring.

Griet asks her mother to watch the children that afternoon and refuses to answer her mother’s question about where she is going.