118 cliched language of sidewalk flirtation: "Miss! miss! listen to a heart who wants only to cherish Suspicious you!" Her wisecracking but practical response is to inquire about his wallet. His crestfallen re- Professions joinder: "Rats! There are charges." In the former image (fig. 70), which emphasizes the poverty of the milliner, no eroticization takes place, while in the latter, her receptivity to paid sexual adventure is made to appear venal rather than financially necessary. In such popular represen- tations of the milliner, then, the two identities — poor woman and prostitute — are separated. Milliners were not the only female workers in the garment trades who were shown garner- 19 ing sexual attention when lugging their work through the city. Pascal-Adolphe-Jean Dagnan- Bouveret's A Rest by the Seine of 1880 (fig. 71), for example, presents a laundress on a public thoroughfare in such terms: a pretty young woman rests briefly from carrying two large bundles of laundry, and this innocent pause "naturally" inspires the leering attention of the two swells strolling at the right. As in most pictures that sexualize a chance encounter between a working woman and men-about-town her attractiveness coupled with her profession appear to justify and naturalize the men's impertinence. Indeed, the social and economic gulf between the woman and the men enables this kind of modern-life painting of an apparent commonplace: the most powerful persons (the men) are the active (walking) subjects, while the least powerful person (the working woman) is the passive (seated) object of their gaze. Her appeal certainly depends here upon her being pretty, but it is fundamentally rooted in her gender and her eco- nomic inferiority indicated by her dress and bundles of laundry. An anonymous ink-wash drawing of an atelier des modistes, or millinery shop (fig. 72), datable to the late 18708 on the basis of the slim contour of the customer's two-piece day dress, would seem to reinforce C. J. Lecour's declaration, presented at the beginning of this chapter, that millinery shops were places of debauchery. The full range of millinery work is shown in this drawing. At left, three seated women build or ornament hats, while at right a fashionable customer tries on one of the hats, aided by the marchande a la toilette, or shopkeeper. A for- mally dressed, foppish gentleman (complete with monocle) stands silhouetted in the open door- way, peering in with a proprietary air to take in this all-female scene. That milliners were "fair game" for the libidinous flaneur — were perhaps in business to meet such a man's sexual re- quirements - was a widely shared conceit, kept in circulation by many social observers, ranging from naturalist writers to administrators of the service des moeurs. Of course the texts had dif- ferent functions and audiences, but most agreed that milliners were open to paid sex, and most commentators only begrudgingly acknowledged that this form of prostitution was necessitated by the inadequate wages of the profession. "Une Modiste," a story published in a journal of naturalist writings in 1880, was a particu- larly chatty version of the cliche of the alluring milliner. The narrator is the confidant of a young milliner, and, without any ado, the text presumes that the young woman will elicit offers from men on the street because she is carrying a hatbox and that the proprietress of the milli- nery shop is a procuress. Here are the relevant sections of the story: "All the men turned to look; the hat box gave them assurance. . . . Here is what the proprietress, a woman of forty, told her after having examined her for several seconds: 'My child, you please me physically very much and your look suits me. ... To avoid hiding anything from you, you will learn that the young women I have here are supported. To tell you the truth, I would like it if you were in the same situation. . . [ellipsis in original] Now, I have the custom of receiving several of my friends in the evening, gentlemen of the world.'"20