For the next step, you'll be taken to a website to complete the donation and enter your billing information. You'll then be redirected back to LARB. To take advantage of all LARB has to offer, please create an account or log in before joining There is less than a week left to support our matching grant fund drive! Your tax-deductible donation made to LARB by pm, December 31, will be doubled thanks to an anonymous donor.
Support our online flagship magazine and support our free trade of ideas. Support the writers who continue to push literary boundaries online and in print, emerging and established.
Some years ago I acquired a small, modest-looking French book published in that would become the source of my interest in women and prostitution in Paris, especially after the French Revolution. In a short preface, hoping to avoid complications lest he be discovered and considered a pimp, he disavows knowing any of the women described, claiming that he merely received the information from others.
Somewhat unexpectedly, he then rails against a society that preaches morals but permits vice, and urges fathers to protect their children against prostitution. By reading his book. The list of nymphs begins immediately after this peculiar suggestion. Intrigued, I began to piece together what I knew about post-Revolutionary France with the mystery of my little dictionary.
It took me thirty years to solve the riddle of the nymphs, which I will get to shortly. But before I was able to zero in on that, I began to look for clues in other books, and started to assemble a collection of material on Parisian prostitution β from the fall of the Bastille to the rise of the Eiffel Tower β and discovered an entire genre of books and prints devoted to it. In fact, I began to realize that prostitution was at the epicenter of the era. A frequent visitor to Paris, I was aware that the capital was and still is fueled by large quantities of caffeine, nicotine, alcohol and sugar, but I was unaware, until I began my quest, that prostitution had formerly been as fundamental to Parisians as those other stimulating staples.
