A by-product of this kind of highly aestheticized, deadpan modern-life painting is that the 147 viewer could never be sure that a serveuse like the one to which the painting may refer was (or Suspicious was expected to be) a prostitute. There were other contemporaneous depictions of brasserie Professions servers in which the women are not shown flirting or enticing men to drink, but their relative straightforwardness does not approach the inexpressiveness of Manet's picture. In The Waitress of circa 1875 — 80 (fig. 91), Henri Somm's brightly colored figure stands ready to perform wait- ressing duties, and she is exceptionally pretty, shapely, cheerful, and extroverted. The woman in Marcellin Desboutin's print Fille de brasserie, an 1886 book frontispiece (fig. 92), is shown in terms of her relationship to her admiring companion, who appears to be an interested cus- tomer. She is obviously found appealing by the man who encircles her waist with his arm. Manet's server is unlike these others because she is absorbed in her own refreshment and is not the object of any visible male attention. Nor would the centrally placed waitresses in the London and Paris versions (figs. 81 and 82) be conclusively identifiable as prostitutes solely on the basis of Manet's paintings of them. These two pictures are similar in many ways: they are about the same size, are similarly com- posed and populated, and focus on the figure of the waitress. Apart from the changed focus of the server's eyes, the Paris painting is actually a cropped and simplified version of the London picture. As in the Baltimore picture, Manet emphasized the social diversity of the customers: men from either end of the social spectrum sit side by side, and in each the worker is alone and the bourgeois men have equivalently dressed women with them. The waitresses deposit a glass stein of beer on the table, while holding two more for delivery, and are not shown looking at the customers included in the paintings. Perhaps the actions and facial expressions of the serveuses were intended to carry a meaning — a self-contained, slightly bored search for the next cus- tomer? — but are too deadpan and equivocal to be definite or clear. They are open to multiple readings. Of the three paintings, the London picture was exhibited most widely, and as we know, the most extensive reactions to it survive. In 1880 its subject was found Zolaesque because of being taken from the "dubious milieux of bohemia," and in 1883 the review from Lyons called Manet a naturalist of bad taste because of the painting's subjects: the sodden worker and dissolute waitress.80 The critics' terms do not seem to fit the London picture or the other two closely re- lated works. But because the critics assure us that the brasserie a femmes of the period was Manet's point of reference, we are free to face up to the artist's obvious neutralization of the subject and to discuss the meaning of that tactic. From what we have pieced together about the brasserie with female servers in the late 18708, it appears that the waitress of sexualized legend worked under conditions that forced her to assume various disguises. She would have been obliged to dissemble her possible sexual ve- nality in the presence of the police, and she would have been obliged to act emotionally in- volved in her flirtations with customers, all the while energetically serving drinks. It could be argued that her obligatory daily involvement in the commodification of self was even more ex- treme than that of the brothel or street-walking prostitute insofar as her flirtatious come-ons were to foster the sale of beer and, eventually, the merchandising of her own body. In her leg- end one could see sexuality transformed into a functioning and efficient part of the commodity economy, and to think about her job was to think about how far the commodity had entered the whole texture of modern social relations. The eroticized coding of the business of the brasserie