responding with her entire body to the man's proximity; her profile may suggest words spoken 18. in his direction. Her immediate colleague is somewhat cooler in her response to business at Edgar hand: also on the near couch but with her lower body concealed, she leans against the furniture Degas, The with shoulders hunched while looking toward the client with eyes slightly veiled. On the far side Customer, of the room, the woman in royal blue stockings leans back into the sofa cushions, her feet on the ca. 1879-80 edge; she spreads her thighs in view of the man and wears a smile, a spare but clear upturned or 1876-77, line. Her attitude is a far cry from the facetious propriety devised for the coy woman in monotype, Lefebvre's painting (fig. 16). Musee The composition of Waiting for the Client is certainly intricately structured. Degas has var- Picasso, ied the scene by flanking the relatively restrained and partially hidden central woman with two Paris. women who are physically forthright in their address of the customer. Neither decorous nor inhibited - one assumes a boyish sitting position at the front, the other brandishes genitalia at the back — the women get on with the preliminaries, encouraging the man to make a choice between the two of them without waiting passively to be noticed, without too much profes- sionalized enticement, and without the appurtenances of a falsely heart-felt seduction. In The Customer (fig. 18), another moment of selection is played out. The customer is again fragmentary but moved on stage. He wears a hat and he smokes, underscoring his al- ready considerable physical distance from and social disregard for the pair of naked prostitutes. The thickset woman at the center, shoulders stiff and arms pulled into her side, looks done up like a package of flesh, ready to be taken. As usual, Degas varies the scene by contrasting the positions and actions of adjacent figures. The near woman rests a bent arm jauntily on her upper thigh and ilexes her legs; the tilt of her head and the set of her mouth appear conversa- tional, yet there is not a trace of coquetry. The two women carry out this stage of their unrelen- tingly physical work without recourse to elegant maneuvers or to any of the bodily conventions of romantic intimacy. In the Salon (fig. 19), the last print we shall examine in some detail, is an exceptionally complex composition that brings together nine prostitutes with the mistress of the house and a customer in top hat. The madame and the man — the two representatives of the world of at least semirespectability — close off the two horizontal rows of filles like parentheses at either side of the page. Their uprightness - both physical (they are vertical) and moral (they are dressed) - emphasizes the difference between them and the sprawling filles. Among the prostitutes, the diversity of sitting and reclining positions has been maximized, but it is a variation within the limits imposed by the series' established code for the specialized language of the prostitute's body. Contrary to the client and the madame, the women are in various states of undress and assume varied positions of abandon (from enthusiasm to inattention to collapse) — the physical evidence of their existence outside the society whose rules they trespass or do not know. In spite of the transgressiveness of the way their bodies are figured, the women of the monotypes do not appear rude in their disregard of the etiquette of intimacy — both prostitu- tional and bourgeois, venal and romantic — or particularly bad-mannered in their occasional self-absorption. The point is that their childlike, bete, good-natured otherness does not conflict with the obligations and circumstances of their work as Degas has defined it in the monotypes. Their particular, tenacious physicality seems intended to embed them in a world of the sheerly material, where the subjective self has been suspended, cancelled, or long since overridden. Degas's prostitutes lead an existence in which the self and the body have become the same and the women's sexuality has been lost to the world of exchange. 39