from the Salon norm — especially since the bed sheets are gathered up strategically between 83 her legs to the groin at the center of the canvas, a traditional compositional strategy that simul- Testing taneously announces and conceals the woman's genital area. The bed is rumpled, but the sheets the Limits and pillowcases are well made and impeccably clean, and the bedstead and curtains are in per- fect repair. Disarray, yes, but nothing dirty. Gervex attempted to give the face some specific features. It is not an abstracted mask: the nose and mouth are thick, the eyes, brows, and mouth bear appropriate traces of makeup, and the parted lips resemble a breathing mouth in slumber. Her long thick chestnut hair, with its gathering of curls about the forehead, also betrays the artist's concern to individualize and modernize the usual, unstyled, loosely flowing hair of the Salon nude. The mustachioed Jacques Rolla is anchored to the far side of the room: he stands upright at the open window, with his right arm resting on the wrought iron balustrade and left hand grasping the frame of the open casement window. His wrinkled shirt is open at the neck and cuffs. (Perhaps we are to think that he engaged in the hurried coupling of the prior evening with his shirt on, but surely not with his trousers on. In either case, Gervex has given him a shirt to strike his pose. A naked male torso would, after all, have been out of the question in the context of Salon propriety.) He looks thoughtfully but without specific focus across the room, past the 10 woman lying before him. 3 His detumescent condition is narrated by bed clothes: the serpen- tine mass of blue comforter with pointed tip hanging over the end of the bed overlaps Rolla's pelvic area, suggesting a colossal, flaccid phallus emanating from his trousers. In the jumbled pile of clothing in the right foreground (fig. 44), we can distinguish an inside-out red corset lined in white, two garments — one white, one pink — beneath the corset, a rose garter, and a stiffened white petticoat on the floor. Again, still life works as sexual meta- phor in the painting: an upside-down top hat lies atop the prostitute's underwear, and the sharp tip of a cane pokes out between the white garment and the corset. The scale and angle of the exposed cane even give the chair on which it rests a bodily presence, to the degree that the clothing enacts a surrogate intercourse in the foreground of the postcoital human scene. Mar- ion's body is thus hemmed in by the phallus — limp at her right, erect at her left — and her body inclines toward the stiffened male sex in the chair, as do her stiffened petticoats from the floor. Furthermore, the layering of the pieces of clothing provides a startling sartorial chronology for their lovemaking: she was apparently out of her corset before he put down his hat. Of the many critics assessing the Rolla scandal in the Parisian press in 1878, only two thought that technical incompetence or stylistic unorthodoxy was responsible 104 for the decision to remove the painting from the Salon. But even judgments ostensibly con- fined to matters of form also touched on the issue of morality. Jacques Liber, writing for the short-lived Paris-Plaisir, was an avid supporter of the picture; he believed that the artist had been censored for his stylistic independence and originality, for trying "to get off the beaten track and get away from academic convention."105 If Liber meant to refer to specific portions of the painting, it is hard to know which they might be - perhaps the arguably Manet-esque handling of the clothing in the lower right corner, the roughness and thickness of which differ somewhat from the otherwise thin glazes and smooth surfaces of the