23' Edgar Degas, On the Bed, ca. 1879-80 or 1876-77, monotype, Musee Picasso, Paris. plication, emotional) alienation of the buyer from the goods for sale is the opposite of the cli- mate of selection in Forain's The Customer (fig. 20) in which the social and psychological supe- riority of the client remains intact. It differs as well from the easy sociability of interaction that Degas incorporated into his Fille Elisa drawings (figs. 11 and 12). In the monotypes, Degas pictures the diminutive and reticent customers of the brothel as buyers in a sexual market where the goods lack the cachet of refinement, where the codes in operation seem to conflict with their own, or with what they anticipated finding there. It ap- pears, in other words, that Degas imagines that the customer of the middle- to high-class brothel — a member of his class? — would be somewhat humiliated and perhaps socially and psychologically compromised by the experience. Yet the social signs given to Degas's brothel customers are elliptical in the end. The man in The Serious Customer (fig. 15), for example, wears a soft rather than a top hat, suggesting a lower-middle-class rather than an upper-middle-class clientele. This was perhaps another means of distancing himself from the men of the prints, of discouraging any reading of the series as self-representation, and perhaps another ideological way of suggesting the otherness of the place and its people. Degas further suggested the foreignness and distinctiveness of these cloistered women by providing them in many cases with conventionalized simian faces. Over twenty years ago, Eu- 55 genia Janis called attention to what she called "vulgar facial characteristics" in the prints, while John Richardson observed that Degas regularly frizzed the women's hair into bangs "over 56 criminally low foreheads." The solitary figure in On the Bed (fig. 23) has such a face. So do the inveigling women in The Serious Customer (fig. 15) and the thickset, seated figure in The Customer (fig. 18). These 47