8o. "Paris during the Exposition," Le Monde Comique, 1878-79. The garcon of a brasserie in the Latin Quarter. 3 years of the Third Republic in Paris. 8 Alain Corbin considers the advance of the brasserie a femmes to have exemplified the most fundamental change in French prostitution during the last third of the nineteenth century — to wit, "the development of venal outlets that cannot be called clandestine on the part of girls and women who are not courtesans of the highest rank, 39 but escape the regulationist system almost entirely." Another token of the new sexual order was the combination of true commerce — these new outlets were full-blown business enterprises — with a new prostitutional style based upon the simulation of "real feelings." According to Corbin, "Finally, and perhaps especially for this is what defines them, all these new outlets of prostitution imply that the prostitute gives her cus- tomer the impression that she is letting him seduce her, and that she is no longer a simple animal deprived of the liberty to refuse him."40 Several later nineteenth-century commentators adum- brated Corbin's observations about the imitation of sexual feelings in the new beer halls. In his discussion of the simulated flirtations of the serveuse, Dr. L. Martineau wrote in 1885: "Some- times she acts in ways to appear particularly young and overtaken by the madness of being in love which really puts the naive guy on the wrong scent and makes him think he's being se- 41 duced, when in fact everything's been calculated." An anonymous source of the same date cor- roborated this view: "There is the appearance of a conquest and consequently of love in this ephemeral union. They smile, they talk, they like each other. This illusion of independent choice has ruined the prestige of the lowest pleasure-spots."42 Starting in 1878, countless visual images of brasseries a femmes were produced. Between 1878 and 1879 Manet did three paintings of waitresses and customers in just such a place (figs. 81, 82, and 85). Further to my observations on these establishments, I 134 shall argue that the atmosphere of contrived mutual desire was central to the historical moder-