On a summer day of 1884, Ten-year-old Fatima found herself facing a tragic alternative: either becoming a prostitute or marrying her rapist. After having abused her, the perpetrator had taken her to a Q??i in Port Said’s “Arab village.” He had ordered her to declare she was an orphan and she wanted to marry him, while threatening her she would otherwise end up in a brothel. The marriage did not eventually took place and her mother abandoned her in Port Said shortly after the rape: it is possible that Fatima did indeed wind up in a house of ill-repute. But, for the time being, she was taken in by the Soeurs du Bon Pasteur in town. “Veritable sinners” like Fatima, apparently, were not lacking in Port Said and the nuns had their hands full. Among others, Claire, Anna, and Marie had all ended up in the port-city where they had apparently developed a penchant for drunkenness, debauchery, and magic. The story of Fatima, who had just moved into town, raises many questions. First, authorities disagreed on her identity: was she Algerian or was she Egyptian? While her nationality remained ambiguous, her identity as an outsider to the city was reified. Secondly, what was to do with her and others like her? Should she be repatriated or locked up in an institution? Thirdly, as many other migrant girls and women who either sought shelter with the nuns or staunchly refused to do so, she and her reputation occupied very vulnerable positions. On the whole, Fatima’s affair allows for an historical reconstruction of the jurisdictions and policing systems that overlapped in late nineteenth-century Port Said and Egypt. At the same time, her microscopic story illuminates broader histories of migration, gender, and vice as they unfolded in an Egyptian, Middle Eastern, and Mediterranean port-city. By examining the records of the Egyptian National Archives, the papers of various religious institutions, as well as British, French, and Italian diplomatic documents, my paper seeks to connect and integrate different scales of analysis. It thus aims to rejoin the lives of infamous individuals, who would have remained obscure had it not been for a few fleeting moments in which they got in trouble, to “national,” regional, and world histories. I argue that none of these scales of analysis can be shunned if historians want to remain truthful to historical actors and to their often mundane lives.