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. Pieter, she notes, does not ask questions, deciding instead to trust his wife, just as he did ten years before, when she came to him on their wedding night with holes in her ears. In the context of this summons, we learn that Vermeer has died—two months previously—and that once Griet had her own children, she stopped hoping to see him or wondering about him or his family.

When she arrives at the Vermeer house, there are children outside on the bench just as there were ten years before, and Franciscus, the eldest, who was a baby when Griet left, says he recognizes her as “the lady in the painting.” Griet learns that the painting hangs in van Ruijven’s daughter’s house, van Ruijven himself having died a year earlier, but that it had been hung in the Vermeer home at Vermeer’s request, only being returned after his death. Maria Thins tells her that Catharina is the one who asked to see her and that she is waiting in the great hall with van Leeuwenhoek, the executor of Vermeer’s will.

When Griet enters the house, she “became fully aware that [Vermeer] was dead” and mourns the fact that he “would paint no more paintings” (228). She sees Cornelia, “now about the age [Griet] had been when [she] first became a maid” (228), and notices that everything in the house looks the same, but “older, dustier, more battered” (229). Catharina is clearly very angry, and has difficulty speaking to Griet, only managing to explain to her why the family fell into debt. It is van Leeuwenhoek who finally identifies the reason for Griet’s invitation, noting that Vermeer sent him a letter ten days before his death making a request that only Catharina can fulfill, which is to give Griet the pearl earrings she wore in the painting, which Catharina has not worn since.

At first, Griet refuses them, but Catharina reminds her that “[h]e has decided for you and for me. They are yours now, so take them” (232). Griet takes the earrings, says a respectful goodbye to Catharina and van Leeuwenhoek and leaves. On her way out, she meets Cornelia, who offers to take the earrings for herself. Griet slaps her for her insolence, just as she did upon first meeting her years before.

She goes back to Market Square and stops by the eight-pointed star at its center to decide what to do with the earrings, which she cannot take home to Pieter and her family. She pawns them for twenty guilders, plans to give fifteen of it to Pieter to settle the Vermeers’ old debt and hide the remaining five guilders ”somewhere that Pieter and my sons would not look, some unexpected place that only I know” (233). The novel ends with Griet’s observation that “Pieter would be pleased with the rest of the coins, the debt now settled. I would not have cost him anything. A maid came free” (233).