Edgar Degas. Nathalia Brodskaya

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      In The Serious Client, for example, a curvaceous prostitute (whose body is modelled almost entirely in Degas’ fingerprints) reaches out to encourage the timid bowler-wearing client. In several of these images, the notorious acerbity and terseness of Degas’ conversational wit finds a nice visual equivalent in the oblique and abbreviated way that he refers to the presence or approach of the male client.

      In the Salon shows a black-suited client with a top hat and stiffly-starched shirt collar entering a room filled with prostitutes disporting themselves in the most carelessly abandoned poses. In Repose and The Customer, we see no more than the client’s nose and a narrow strip of the black fabric of his trousers. One of the most voluptuous of the brothel monotype prints, Two Women (Scene in a Brothel), combines two potent male fantasies: lesbianism and interracial sex.

      If we are to believe the authors of The Pretty Women of Paris, lesbianism, or ‘tribadism’ as they so quaintly put it, was common practice amongst Parisian prostitutes, although its extent may well have become exaggerated in their overheated imaginations. These lesbian encounters are described in the book with that curious mixture of moral disapproval and salivating prurience that still characterises attitudes to sex in much of the British popular press.

      So we read of the ‘disgusting caresses’ common to French prostitutes and the ‘Sapphic ties, of which Parisian unfortunates are generally so fond’, and of Janvier, ‘an insatiable devotee of lesbian love’, who ‘pursues her prey in the corridors of the Opera like a man’, of Nina Melcy, mistress of a British Member of Parliament, who ‘adores her own sex, but only when there is an important debate in the House’, and of Juliette Grandville who is ‘often Sappho by day and Messalina by night, rushing eagerly to the arms of her masculine adorer with the glorious traces of some girlish victim’s excitement on her feverish ruby lips.’ To see lesbian activity was clearly exciting to many men in 19^th-century Paris.