26 When she rises from the bath, the [zealous ?] servant Painting pours on perfumes for her refreshment. the Traffic And, with breasts palpitating and head thrown back, in Women 53 free from care she takes in the intrusive glances. With this ensemble of picture and poem, Cezanne has restored a vexing theme to the safer world of literature, vouchsafed its generality and timelessness, and protected himself from ap- pearing to have enlisted his own libidinal feelings in its construction. With the last line of his rather pathetic poem, Cezanne struggled to demodernize the subject matter of desire in the fantasy brothel. Instead of the trademark "burning glances" of the professional, deluxe pros- titute, his literary courtesan appears nonplussed by the prospect of an admirer's importunate advances. But the strain to return to the fantasy bordello of a Delacroix is borne out by the patent mismatch between the text and the picture: the onlooker is stiff and inactive, the cour- tesan almost equally so. This examination of a small group of images by Cezanne introduces in microcosm a cen- tral theme of this book: the ways in which the painters of the Parisian avant-garde devised the means to attain an appearance of truthful representation of and detachment from the charged subject of contemporary prostitution, while simultaneously perfecting a strategy of ideological containment of the erotic force of the women portrayed. I shall be tracking what becomes a trademark of vanguard art of the 18705 and i88os: the devising of pictorial styles that appear to avoid (and evade) the explicit "expression" of sexual feelings, while at the same time achieving a measure of control over "their" elusively described women. This analysis will permit us to conclude that on the matter of sexual ideology - that is, when we focus upon artists' depictions of women — the painters of the Impressionist group had much more in common with their pompier and popular contemporaries than they perhaps would have been willing to admit. In any case, the similarities we shall uncover between appar- ently dissimilar artistic enterprises certainly outnumber those typically enumerated in the art historical literature.56