A few words concerning the places of rendezvous may be instructive. The girls in a certain position who have a profession of some sort, and have no locality adapted for meeting their lovers, have recourse to the public baths. In these baths each chamber has two bathing places: often the rooms communicate with one another by little doors, which facilitates the commerce of the sexes, about which the keeper of the baths is profoundly ignorant.
The legislature, as regards sanitary regulations, is mute. The only thing that can be done is to arrest the girls when it can be proved that they are infected, and they are then sent to prison.
We subjoin some extracts from the law of the 4th June, 1852, respecting drinking-houses and other analogous establishments:—
“Art. 37. The authorities of police and their servants can, in the exercise of their functions, open at any hour of the day or night the inns and other like establishments.
“Art. 39. In cases particularly urgent and important, the Executive Council is authorized to shut any inn or analogous establishment.
“Art. 55. The innkeeper must not permit in his house any infraction of the existing police regulations.”
Innkeepers are further forbidden to allow certain rooms in their houses to be used for immoral purposes.
The City of Paris.
From time immemorial the immorality of the city of Paris has been proverbial. Every historian, no matter what period of Parisian history he may have been describing, has dwelt more or less on the characteristic profligacy of the French nation. Yet all documents relating to the middle ages must be received with some diffidence, as they were chiefly drawn up by ecclesiastics, whose interest it has often proved to distort facts and falsify statistics. Nevertheless, the levity of the French people has always been a matter for comment amongst the inhabitants of other countries; and although we may not find much to instruct us in the papers relative to prostitution in former times among the Parisians, there is much to be relied upon which is not altogether uninteresting.
The first document which we possess upon the number of prostitutes in Paris was drawn up about the year 1762. “This document,” says M. Parent Duchatelet, “is not much known. We found the MS. in the archives of the Prefecture, with other papers relating to prostitution.” It contains a memoir presented anonymously to the lieutenant of police of that period. It is written very carefully, and with great sagacity, showing a profound knowledge of the subject of which it treats. The writer estimates the number of prostitutes exercising their profession in the city of Paris at 25,000. A few years later, another writer, alluding to the same subject, reckons the number of all classes upon the pavement of Paris at 20,000; but neither of these give the sources from whence they derived their calculation.