The new law, enforced with as much rigour as the old one, proved every whit as impotent. Aspasia went her ways in secret, and devised many arts. She borrowed the manners and the costume of her more respectable sisters (Les prostituées singèrent les manières et le costume des femmes honnêtes), glided into the churches, and went with sidelong glances through the most frequented places of the town. This clandestine pursuit of the calling, and the hypocrisy which of necessity it bred on every side, were beyond measure distressing to Saint Louis. A good king, and a pious one, he considered the matter deeply, and then, in the interests, as he believed, of public and private morals, he resolved upon a novel and hazardous measure. It was, to allow the femmes publiques a degree of liberty, and the exercise of their calling, under certain strict conditions. Amongst other regulations, they were to live in houses specially appointed to them, and these houses were to be closed at six o'clock in the evening, no person being allowed to enter them after that hour.
Thus, strangely enough in one point of view, the King who won the name of "Saint," and whose memory has been justly cherished, was the first to give legality in France to the calling of Aspasia. Yet this was also the King who, above all others on that throne, had sought to keep in check the moral disorders of his kingdom. It was only when he had seen that measures of repression were of worse than no avail, inasmuch as the immorality of the town appeared always to increase in proportion to the stringency of laws, whilst the secrecy of the traffic confounded the femme du monde with the "respectable" woman, that he resolved upon giving to the former a domain and status of her own. In this manner, the unrecognised femme du monde was transformed into the femme publique, a woman with a standing of her own, and with the King's authority to prosecute her mournful industry.
She entered under the special jurisdiction of the Provosts of Paris, who from time to time made various enactments on her account. Thus, in 1360, the chief magistrate forbade the femmes publiques to wear certain specified apparel in the streets; and, in 1367, a police order confined them to particular streets in Paris, "a measure rendered necessary by their unseemly behaviour in all places, to the great scandal of everyone."[[24]] During the next two hundred years they were occasionally transferred from one quarter of Paris to another, and Parliament more than once took upon itself to "regulate their costume."
In 1560, an edict given at Orleans formulated afresh the stern prohibitions of Charlemagne. Once more, the calling of Aspasia was forbidden throughout the whole of France. The difficulties of enforcing this new-old ordonnance were great everywhere, but nowhere so great as in the capital; and the Provost, it is said, was five years in concerting his measures. The statement is easily credited. Paris herself was little in sympathy at that date with laws to restrict the liberty of Aspasia; and it cannot be said that the average citizen had received much encouragement to virtue from the examples of the Court, the nobility, the clergy, or the magistracy itself. Dulaure asserts in his Histoire de Paris that "La prostitution était considérée à l'égal des autres professions de la société." The femmes publiques, he adds, formed a corporation by themselves, received their patents, as it were, from the hands of Royalty, "et même étaient protégées par les rois. Charles VI. et Charles VII. ont laissé des témoignages authentiques de cette protection." The commerce to which was extended the august protection of the throne "était encore favorisé par le grand nombre de célibataires, prêtres et moines, par le libertinage des magistrats, des gens de guerre, etc. Les femmes publiques, richement vêtues, se répandaient dans tous les quartiers de cette ville, et se trouvaient confondues avec les bourgeoises, qui, elles-mêmes, menaient une vie fort dissolue." Provosts of Paris sometimes refused to put in force laws which themselves had framed against the "daughters of joy"; and in so refusing they seem usually to have had with them the sympathies of the town.
[24]. Les Prisons de l'Europe.
This being in general the attitude of society in Paris, it might be thought that the attempt to revive the code of Charlemagne would be received with small popular favour. It appears to have been received with no favour whatever. Seven years, from 1560 to 1567, did the Provost prepare his way, and then the edict was launched. It was read aloud at either end of every street in which Aspasia had her dwelling, and in several of these streets a violent resistance was offered, by the women as well as by their friends and protectors, to the not too-willing agents of the law. By main force at length the women were taken as by press-gang, their streets were closed, the temple of Venus was demolished, and there were once more no femmes publiques in Paris.
So, at least, did the Law assure itself; what then had become of them? As may be supposed, the great majority were still in Paris. Not a few were in prison (but for short periods only); the rest were scattered throughout the town, or in the villages surrounding Paris. As in the days of Charlemagne, and before the second decree of Saint Louis, Aspasia had merely disguised herself. No Magdalen repented on the order of the State. She sought a retreat until the passing of the storm, and in a little while the history of the affair repeated itself: la prostitution clandestine inonda Paris.
Matters continued apparently without the slightest improvement until 1619, when the authorities could devise no better plan than a renewal of the prohibitions of 1565. The femmes publiques were commanded by proclamation to betake themselves to some domestic or other occupation, or to quit the town and suburbs within four and twenty hours. The utter infeasibility of the injunction is not more striking than its stupendous absurdity. Imagine the whole corporation of Aspasias, richement vêtues, converting themselves at a day's notice into seamstresses, cooks, or chambermaids. It would have been so easy for them to find employers! Saint Louis had shewn himself more generous, more thoughtful, and more sensible in opening his private purse to lodge and maintain the would-be penitents of the order amongst the recluses of the Filles-Dieu. Needless to say, the foolish and impossible decree was quite barren of result. During the next sixty-five years, that is to say until 1684, no definite legal action was taken with respect to the position of the femme publique. Unlicenced and unacknowledged, she fared well or ill according to the laxity or the vigilance of the bench and police, who sometimes harried and sometimes tacitly or openly abetted her. The secret or semi-open practice of her calling was often as profitable as the pursuit of it by sanction of the Crown, but it was attended by the risks of an illegal industry, and in seasons when provosts or lieutenants of police shewed an unwonted activity, Aspasia went to prison. Thus she fared, now sparkling in the finest company, now pinched for a meal, and now doing penance on the prison flags, or perhaps sick (eight to a bed) in Bicêtre hospital, until 1684. At that date, another move was resolved upon, and for the second time Aspasia had the gracious permission of the State to style herself femme publique, and to sell her liberty to the police, to buy une licence de débauche,—for this was what it came to.
At the period arrived at, it was no longer merely a question of irregularities to be repressed, but of the public health to be preserved; and in the new regulations the hospital was named along with the prison. From this time forward, a brief interval under the Consulate excepted, it does not seem to have been questioned in France that women who chose to do so, or who might be driven to do so, were entitled under specified conditions to enter on the calling of femme publique. What steps must be taken to secure the dubious privileges of the order, and what dissuasions were employed by the magistrate who dispensed them, will presently be shewn.
Up to the reign of Louis XIV., the monarch responsible for the provisions of 1684, there was no special prison for the women of this class, who, when under lock and key, were herded with female offenders of all degrees. The first special prison for the femmes publiques was the Salpêtrière, built by Louis XIV., under the designation of "Hospital General." At this era, the women arrested were not put upon their trial, nor was any formal judgment pronounced against them. They were under the sole jurisdiction of the newly appointed lieutenant of police, who dispatched them to prison on the King's warrant, which took the form of a lettre de cachet. Curious, that the fille de joie should be placed in this respect on a footing of equality with the prince of the blood, the nobleman, and the prelate!