Everywhere, however, in our most luxurious districts, splendid mansions, palaces indeed, are built for high-class and fastidious prostitution, where it is loaded with gems and perfumes, and receives the respectful attentions of tradespeople, ambitious people and hangers-on. Without speaking of the monuments erected to it by art; without pointing to the stairs of marble and porphyry which it walks on in the temples of its glory, it may be asserted that, in general, our women of doubtful position are lodged in rooms which the respectable woman could not pay for with the fruits of her industry nor of her talent, however exceptional that might be. My personal inquiries have shewn me in Paris a number of kept women, whose rent rises from 800 to 4,000, 5,000, and 10,000 francs yearly. The moral reaction which took place in 1848 caused the scale on which these women’s pay for what they do is based, to be lowered temporarily; but they very quickly regained their professional connection and their accustomed following when the pyramid was resettled on its base. There are houses where the porters even prefer the kept-woman to every other lodger, for her proverbial donations and prodigality, and whose virtues they vie in extolling.[11] The courtesan preserves in society the importance which attaches to her in her private apartments. Photographs of her decorate our streets; her memoirs enrich our literature; her showy personality sets off our public platforms (_trétaux_); she often displays it, moreover, at the theatres and the public baths; she cuts a figure on the fashionable promenades, in the most gorgeous equipages of the higher classes. When she finds herself at her own disposal, instead of beating the air and space, with the illustrious lover who glories in being as infatuated as herself, on returning from the races, the concubine remains in her chariot, where a long row of carriages with their contents are for hire in this novel market for prostitution. Amateurs of all classes pass in review this living corruption; they address these women in a loud tone, with their hats on, their riding whip in hand, and debate the conditions of purchase and sale which are made for them, as for horses, to the highest applicant and richest outbidder.