82 If we compare the room and its furnishings in Gervex's painting to the squalid interior Testing described in Musset's poem, the discrepancies are apparent. Whether a hotel room or private the Limits bedroom, the space is well appointed with a Louis XVI bed and night table and a wall-mounted brass candelabrum with convex mirror. The pink and blue pastel scheme of the bed and its furnishings, the small glowing bedside gas lamp, and the discarded clothing contrast markedly with the brown, green, and yellow of the armchair and the rose-colored rug. The red of the corset and the discarded shoe are added spots of discordant color. The conflicting color sys- tems — pale and cool, dark and warm — give an improvised if not sloppy look to the condition of the room in spite of the elegance of the prominent bed. In Musset's poem, Rolla sees the sun rise over the rooftops while "the heavy carts were beginning to roll" and "a forlorn band of wandering singers murmured an ancient romance in the square."99 Musset's phrases are images of Paris in the 18305, and they do not tally with the city seen through the window in Gervex's painting. In it the morning light flows into the room from Haussmannized Paris. The stylized floral motifs of the iron balustrade and the mansarded buildings on the facing street are characteristic of those that had recently been built in the northwest part of the city. A critic for UEvenement proposed that the setting of the painting might have been the boulevard des Italiens,100 the most chic section of the newly prosperous and fashionable grands boulevards of the Right Bank, a beau quartier of Paris in the 18708. In his careful editing of Musset's story — his inclusion of the current, his exclusion of the 101 old-fashioned - Gervex obviously updated it, but in so doing he also changed its significance for Parisians of the late 18705, perhaps unwittingly. Like its source, Gervex's Rolla tells a story about a debauched bourgeois and a prostitute. But the careful building of a recognizably mod- ern Parisian context, inhabited by modern people and props, resulted in a picture that situated the overtly sexual content of its narrative as a contemporary issue. The explicit eroticism of the details of Gervex's picture comes into focus upon close inspection of the painting. The repose of the nude young woman in the painting is languid, but studiously controlled and decorous in every detail. There is nothing to be discovered in the treatment of her skin, anatomy, or pose that differentiates her from the canonical nude of the period. Gervex's nude is little changed, in fact, from that classic of the genre, painted by one of his teachers in 1863, Alexandre Cabanel's The Birth of Venus. The smooth surfaces of her pale flesh accord with Musset's description of the girl's skin: Is it on snow, or on a statue That this golden lamp, hanging in the shadow, Casts the blue shimmer of the swaying curtain? No, the snow is more pale, the marble less white. It is a child, sleeping.102 But Gervex's Marion is a young woman, not a child. She lies sleeping on her back with her arms in customized odalisque position: the turn of her head toward the viewer and the exten- sion of her left arm back alongside her head set a viewer-oriented seductiveness even though her eyes are closed in sleep. The left leg falling over the edge of the bed is Gervex's only conces- sion to nakedness, to the operations of a real body. It is the one element of the body that sug- gests unposed fatigue, although the leg is made weightless through its bent knee and floating foot. The right knee, primly raised and tilted, corrects any impression that this body departs