The Dressmaker's Little Errand-Girl (Le petit trottin)

Toulouse-Lautrec was often commissioned to create illustrations like this one for the sheet music of popular songs. The print shows a dress-maker’s errand girl: a trottin. Like grisettes, couturières, shop girls, and other female workers in the textile and fashion industries, a trottin had to go out and about in Paris by herself and therefore would have been subjected to advances by the many suiveurs, or older men, who followed women workers in the streets and attempted to solicit sexual favors from them. It has been suggested that the man’s cane is a phallic symbol and that the urinal in the background is a metaphor for the degraded sexual encounter this scene implies. Toulouse-Lautrec’s jaunty line suggests, however, a joviality that is at odds with such a sinister interpretation.