Madame Claude (real name Fernande Grudet), who has died aged 92, was known to the international jet set as perhaps the most famous purveyor of high-class call girls in the world.
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There are two things that people will always pay money for,” she wrote in her autobiography Madam (1994): “Food and sex, and I wasn’t any good at cooking”.
….
When police burst into Madame Claude’s third-floor flat they found her inspecting a naked job applicant called Sabrina. “My dear,” she was heard saying on a tape later played in court, “those thighs are a little heavy.”
So, one day the French President is in a limo driving down the Champs Elysee with one of the black Francophone Presidents (think Bokassa, or perhaps someone less terrifyingly evil), state visit sort of thing, and he says:
“Over there, on the left, we are just passing Madame Claude’s, the finest brothel in all the world.”
“Why?”
And the reason police “burst in” was due to the unfortunate fact that in the aftermath of WWII, the SJWs managed to get brothels prohibited in France.
She wasn’t done for running a brothel though. She was done for that good old stand-by, tax evasion:
In 1976, the judge Jean-Louis Bruguière began dismantling Grudet’s organization. She was being pursued for unpaid taxes, amounting to 11m francs, (around £4.9m), and fled to Los Angeles, but returned to France in 1986, serving a four month jail sentence.[2][3] After her release, she attempted to set up a new prostitution organization, but in 1992 she was sentenced to a term in Fleury-Mérogis Prison for procuring.
Procuring is something else again. An old fashioned but perfectly reasonable criminal offense I think.
(Ahh, for the days when the franc 1. existed and 2. was worth something)
You think?
I know a business just down the road from here that procures drivers, pickers and packers and other manual workers. There are others who procure nurses and pimp them to the NHS, and I was myself procured and pimped as an engineer for a number of years.
It’s almost like people offering labour services in the free market can be put in touch by customers by some kind of “agent” or something. Which is obviously a disgrace.
*in touch with customers…
touched by customers seems more appropriate to this sector.
‘Food and Sex.’ Sex is available on most any street corner. A good cook, however…
If they were driving down the Champs Elysees. they were miles away. Her business was in Passy (16th arr,) near the ORTF building.
Um, cough .. or so a good friend tells me,
Seem to recall reading many years ago something along the lines of
Theres nothing as overrated as a bad shag and as underrated as a good meal
I was gonna say, but Alex beat me to it: a brothel on the champs elysee?