44 in devising many of the heads in the series, he was less inventive and stuck quite closely to a In the fixed corpus of "low types.") Brothel Because Degas's brothel workers look and act the same regardless of who is around, one could argue that Degas's prostitutes have an essence. This reading is reinforced by the comport- ment of the women in the prints that contain neither actual nor implied customers. The 30 Madam's Name Day (fig. 22), for example, presents such a single-sex occasion. The prosti- tutes celebrate the name day of the madam, their overseer, and share a time of gaiete bete, or childish fun, bringing her flowers, patting her on the back and head, kissing her, all in the man- ner of partying children, but wearing the signs of their permanently debased condition: their immodesty about their nakedness and the ungainliness of their anatomies "covered" only by body ornaments specific to the slattern (neck ribbons or necklaces and brightly colored stock- ings). The uninhibitedness of the minimally inflected nakedness is familiar from other prints, but in this context there is enjoyment on the faces, and there is no customer-oriented obscenity of the body, nor a need for it. All the more reason to argue that the ideology of the brothel prostitute engendered by the prints proposes not that these inmates are unkind or rude or even misbehaved but that they are different from all other women. They do not resemble respectable women, and they are more rudimentarily."primitive" than other kinds of prostitutes (such as the clandestine varieties discussed in chapters 3 and 4). The Madam's Name Day may bring to mind the rustically simple and childlike prostitutes of Guy de Maupassant's short stories. This particular print, the proud possession of Pablo Pi- casso, has often been (mis)identified as a Degas-planned illustration for "La Maison Tellier," because Ambroise Vollard used it for that express purpose in 1934. And of all the women in Degas's monotypes, these filles are most like the good-hearted and fun-loving prostitutes of Maupassant's fiction. Maupassant's literary moves were almost always countercultural and ironic, and especially so when telling stories about filles inscrites (registered prostitutes). In those tales Maupassant regularly ironized regulationist cant. While his literary contemporaries' narratives of the pros- titute (for example, Huysmans's Marthe and the Goncourts' Elisd)^ appear to revere the "sci- entific" findings of the sociologists and medical men and use them to produce fact-laden stories about unstable, hedonistic, and immoral women, Maupassant demotes the pseudoscientific to the idee re$ue, the received idea or cliche, as part of his larger project of satirizing conventional moral hierarchies. In Maupassant's stories, the prostitute and her standard characteristics (she is fat, sentimental, religious, nostalgic, and emotionally volatile) function as the levers with which to prize loose the bourgeois agenda of morality from its hypocritical underpinnings. Maupassant's plots are clever reversals of the natural order. In his best-known stories on this subject, "Boule de suif" of 1879-80 and "La Maison Tellier" of 1880-81, he made the prostitutes the only moral citizens of France circa 1870. The key instances are the patriotic ac- tions of the story's heroine, the prostitute named Boule de Suif (ball of wax), which are greeted by the cold-blooded cruelty of "respectable" society; and the religiosity and kindness of the wardens of Madame Tellier's brothel on the occasion of her niece's First Communion in a small village. According to Maupassant's script, when the prostitute is virtuous, the contemporary world is truly turned upside-down. But even Maupassant's supposedly unmoralizing view really belongs to a standard kind of literary irony. Maupassant's sarcastic disruption of period cliches about the bordello prostitute disen- tangled the two strands of received wisdom about "her": that the fille was vicious and venal, on