46. "Breda Street," La Vie Amusante, 1878-79, and Le Monde Comique, 1880. - It looks like the little viscount left me because his noble parents didn't want him to have a mistress. — You just need to get him to marry you. That would take care of everything. The elaborate corset series drawn by Henri de Montaut for La Vie Parisienne between 1874 and 1882 documents that fashionable, respectable women wore and were preoccupied by cor- 126 sets. Among young lower-class women, however, tight corsets were, to the male observer, a vivid sign of sexual willingness and therefore intemperance. A description of a group of under- age prostitutes (between the ages of twelve and eighteen), soliciting customers just off the grands boulevards, tells us that they were "bothered by high-heeled boots that they were not 127 accustomed to, hampered by corsets they had recently begun wearing." So Marion's adoption of just such a foundation garment declared her departure from adolescent sexual innocence and announced that she cultivated and drew attention to her illicit sexuality. Standing in front of Gervex's picture of a discarded, red corset men must have experienced a disorienting ambivalence that they would have been hard-pressed to put into words. In the spirit of Veblen's argument, the corset would have confirmed the viewer's power over women, because a corset concealed and transformed the female body into a pleasant, artifical shape and showed the woman's eagerness to bend her flesh in ways dictated by a male-dominated culture. But, as our analysis has already suggested, the removal of this token of obedience denoted the woman's flagrant rejection of the dominion of men, their fashion system, and their "morality." Without removing the armor of chastity, however, a woman could not respond to a man's sexual entreaties, nor, perhaps, to his fantasies of sexual mastery. And, as we have stressed elsewhere, those male fantasies underpinned the genre of the nude.128 From our familiarity with Marion's underclothing, we know quite a bit about her street clothing. Because her corset is not of the cuirasse type, it is doubtful that she could have been wearing one of the constricting and revealing tied-back dresses of tubular silhouette of the late 18705. The full, starched petticoat that jars into view alongside the bed — in Gervex's words, "this petticoat so stiffly starched" - assures us that Marion was wearing a dress with a full skirt.129 This interests us because, according to a variety of representations of women in street clothes, a woman in a tightly fitted dress could be respectable or an aristocrat of vice (that deter- 9i