94 For it's no longer the night, the evening, from the lighting of the gas Testing lamps until eleven o'clock when the heta'ires operate. It is all day. the Limits It's not in the remote neighborhoods that they search out their booty, it's in the most lively center of Paris. Between noon and midnight, pass by the left sidewalk of the rue du faubourg Montmartre - you see that Pm precise — you will encounter twenty, thirty, forty girls, aged between fifteen and eighteen - there are some who are twelve! - hatless, decolletees, provoking, shameless, brushing up against you with an elbow or a shoulder, barring your way while telling you things in the loudest voice that would make a rifleman blush. Where do they come from? It is easy to tell from their demeanour; they walk dragging their feet, bothered by high-heeled shoes that they are not accustomed to, encumbered by corsets that they haven't worn for long. It's the riffraff from the bals de barriere who, enticed by impunity, have descended upon Paris. - Georges Grison, Paris horrible et Paris original Various commentators — including moralists, journalists, social ob- servers, policemen, and writers of specialized guides to sex in Paris — reported that bands of predatory lower-class women regularly invaded the grands boulevards, which were the pride of fashionable Right Bank Paris. Statements about this occurrence (the majority written between the late i86os and 1889) vary in tone and purpose but tend to fall into two general categories. One variety, like the first passage quoted above, lightheartedly celebrates a nocturnal move- ment of energetic and attractive young women who, when the gaslamps are lit, arrive on the 131 boulevards to establish their beachheads in the neighboring cafes. The other kind, exempli- fied by the second text, judgmentally describes a contamination of the neighborhood by a squalid street racolage, or solicitation, that lasts all day, practiced by grim, aggressive, and vul- 132 gar young girls. But certain "facts" appear in reports of both kinds: particular sections of the boulevards brimmed with opportunities for sexual commerce (especially but not only in the evening), the girls came from "elsewhere," and the boulevard Montmartre (between rue Drouot and rue du Faubourg Montmartre) was the most thoroughly contaminated section of the grands boulevards. (See the map of the quartier, fig. 50.) No doubt accounts of women aggressively putting themselves on sexual display in "the city 133 of open living" are partly fantastic and partly documentary. On the one hand, they describe the increasingly open forms of sexual commerce that characterized the urban erotic economy in the years following the Commune; on the other hand, they are also symptomatic of the chimerical neoregulationist disquiet about the takeover of the city by clandestine prostitutes. Not surprisingly, the always-courtly travel guides of the period avoid any mention of street prostitution in their descriptions of the grands boulevards precincts. Karl Baedeker's 1874 de- scription of this series of avenues is exemplary: "It constitutes a series of streets, of which the seven-part component, on the right bank of the Seine, today surpasses all the streets of the uni- verse, as much by the richness of its architecture as by the luxury of its stores and the splendid 134 decoration of its cafes." According to Baedeker, the only differences that the tourist might