As for Zulmar Bouffar, the brilliant operetta star who created the role of the pretty glove-maker Gabrielle in Offenbach’s La Vie Parisienne, they tell us that ‘Her best parts are her posterior beauties: even the Hottentot Venus cannot boast such a well-formed pair of sculptured marble buttocks.’

 

The residents of Degas’ brothels differ from the bland, idealised nudes exhibited at the Paris Salons not only in their physical proportions and facial types, but also in their frank display of abundant pubic hair. Nowhere is the sexual schizophrenia of the nineteenth century more apparent than in the contrast between the hairless perfection of nineteenth-century academic nudes and the relish with which the pubic hair of the women in The Pretty Women of Paris is itemised in the most minute and precise detail.

 

So we learn that Bacri ‘can boast the best bush that ever grew below a moll’s navel’; that the mons Veneris of Laure Decroze ‘is protected by a splendid, soft, curly chestnut bush’; ‘The neat body and flowing locks of golden hue’ of Emilie Kessler ‘will be sure to excite desire in the male, especially when he makes the discovery that her tangled bush is as black as night, affording a rare and pleasing contrast.’ The brothel prints display a caricatural and gently satirical element that is virtually unique in Degas’ work. This is most apparent in Degas’ mockery of the bashful bowler- or top-hatted clients, dressed as always in the black uniform of the ‘undertaker’s mutes’.

 

In The Serious Customer, for example, a curvaceous prostitute (whose body is modelled almost entirely in Degas’ fingerprints) reaches out to encourage the timid bowler-hatted 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 (p. 34) 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 (p. 35) 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.