On the occasion of the exhibition "Splendors and Miseries. Images of prostitution, 1850-1910" at the Orsay Museum, the Feu Follet offers a selection on the "venal love" seen through the literary prisms, medical , social or even comical.

In parallel pictorial works presented in Orsay, find here a selection of writings from The life of a prostitute Maria Theresa to considerations Roman decadence of St. Paul Olive.

A trip without vulgarity nor voyeurism in the universe of "prostitutes" in the image of the work of Griselda Real, The Black is a color   : Réal, writer, painter and prostitute, is a great figure of the romantic end of the twentieth century. Lover, activist, fighter and poet, she shoved the morals of Geneva society. She is now buried at the Cemetery of the Kings in Geneva between John Calvin and Jorge Luis Borges.

Black is a color evokes his youth, his elopement with an American military to years of forced prostitution.
If literature saves of his condition, yet she péripapétitienne resume its business by turning it into a philosophy of life, fighting all his life for the social recognition and for the rights of prostitutes.
 

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Link to details exhibition at Musée d'Orsay: Splendours and Miseries. Images of prostitution, 1850-1910