108 rudely into her vernacular gesture. The woman at far right does not sit up to the table: she Testing appears to have rapidly taken her position without having bothered to rearrange herself accord- the Limits ing to conventional standards of etiquette. Her ample bosom, squeezed by a corset and covered by transparent material, is the most prominent sculptural form in the drawing. Even this ripe anatomical feature is absorbed into the formal scheme of the lower half of the sheet by rhyming the shape of the black tuile trim with the chair back. Degas also used different colors, patterns, and materials for each of the costumes. The women wear the obligatory hats (required by the 152 regulationists), which in this case are gaudily ornamented. Degas establishes the appearance of an animated conversation kept up in spite of the women's coming and going. Critics easily identified the occupation of these women, even though Degas's image of boulevard prostitutes obviously differs from other images of the sub- ject. One difference is that these figures appear to relax, to bustle off to work, and to be at work — all at the same time. By mixing these pursuits and by joining together the genres used to depict them, Degas suggests that, for the prostitute, work and leisure are not mutually ex- clusive, especially not on the terrace of a boulevard cafe, locus of work and play for a street prostitute. Blurring the borders between established formats allows Degas to propose that the commodified woman remains just that, at work and at play. Stopping work does not alter her prostitutional status. Prostitution is not what she does but, according, to the terms of this picture, what she is. This outlook toward contemporary lower-class prostitutes is reminiscent of that found in Degas's brothel monotypes, discussed in chapter 2. Another link between this pastel and the brothel prints (and another characteristic of the 1877 cafe picture that differentiates it from the others we have examined) is the use of a thumb-in-mouth gesture by one of the conversing prostitutes. Degas uses the same action in Waiting (fig. 65), one of the brothel monotypes owned by Picasso. To this second version of the print, Degas added bits of clothing (stockings), altered 153 body details (darkened and enlarged pubic areas), and included additional gestures. The woman second from the right employs the decisive action of the 1877 pastel-enhanced mono- type. In view of Degas's use of the same hand movement in these two particular contexts, Riviere's reading of the motion — a girl's complaint about a niggardly payment from a client or regret that she did not have enough customers that evening — does not exhaust its possible meanings. In Waiting, four varieties of simultaneously relaxed and enticing bodies (a portmanteau configuration often found in the brothel monotypes, as we discussed in chapter 2) are lined up. As usual, it is hard to separate the "natural or inner-directed" from the "staged or outer- directed" in this syntax of the body. What concerns us here is that in the framework of brothel display and inveiglement, the woman may be shown mimicking (and thereby promising?) fel- latio. Although Degas did not set out to refer to this act directly in the pastel he exhibited in 1877, he certainly relied on the thumb-in-mouth gesture (fig. 66) to enforce the scurrilousness of the street prostitute and to collapse further the distinction between work and play for the prostitute's mouth. In the artist's otherwise very similar monotype, Cafe Scene of 1876 — 77 (fig. 67), the absence of just such a gesture (and the presence of the prim, bespectacled standing woman) allows the seated women to appear comparatively less coarse than their analogues in the 1877 pastel. The gesture in Women on the Terrace says: only a vulgar woman would place a