21. Jules Draner [Jules Renard], "At the Salon," Le Monde Comique, 1879-80. Excuse me, madam, but all this nudity stirs up my brain. A very self-satisfied J.-K. Huysmans admired Forain's picture for the reasons we have outlined: What is prodigious in this work, is the strength of reality it emits; these whores are brothel whores and none other, and if their postures, their irritating odor, their spicy flesh, under the gaslight that lights up this watercolor heightened with gouache, with a precise truth which is really strange, are, unquestionably for the first time, so firmly, accurately rendered, their character, their bestial or puerile humanity is no less accurately recorded. All the philosophy of love for sale is in this scene in which, after having entered voluntarily, pushed by a stupid desire, the man reflects and, become cold, ends by remaining unmoved by their offers.24 For Huysmans, the essence of prostitution was a woman's ability to stage the sale of her body to a stranger with persuasive and uninhibited ardor even in the face of a cool and unenthusiastic customer. With his monotypes, Degas parts company with Huysmans and Forain. For Degas, it is the exteriority, cancellation, or extinction of self that is the essence of the seller's position in pros- titution. According to Huysmans and Forain, the knowing and repeated subversion or denial of self enacted over and over again in the ritual of seduction that somehow remains friendly is the essence of the matter. Huysmans is the complete cynic: it is the knowing and professionalized transformation of one's sexuality into a commodity that earmarks the true brothel prostitute. He sadistically gourmandizes over the woman's enlightened because masochistic awareness of 25 her irredeemably debased sexuality. He is delighted to assert the traditional prerogatives of male spectatorship. The prostitute is thus conceptualized as an immoral but tantalizing woman, a conscious human, though of a slightly different because lesser species, who practices a de- based and self-debasing skill. For Degas, the brute, material prostitute exemplifies unconscious human otherness, the loss of a person to the world of sexual exchange. Degas was not alone in his search for a particular and definitive syn- 42 tax for the brothel prostitute's body. The regulationists were eager to discover a distinctive set of