In a shop in the Rue Legendre, in Batignolles, a whole series of female busts, without heads or legs, with curtain hooks in place of arms and a percaline skin of arbitrary hue – bean brown, glaring pink, hard black – are lined up like a row of onions, impaled on rods or set out on tables...
The sight of this ebb-tide of bosoms, this Musee Curtius of breasts, puts one vaguely in mind of those vaults in the Louvre where classical sculptures are housed, where one and the same torso, eternally repeated, beguiles the time for those who look it over, with a yawn on rainy days...
How superior to the dreary statues of Venus they are, these dressmakers’ mannequins with their lifelike comportment; how much more provocative these padded busts, which, exposed there, bring on a train of reveries: libertine reveries, inspired by ephebic nibbles and slightly bruised bubs; charitable reveries, recalling old breasts, shrivelled with chlorosis or bloated with fat.
For one thinks of the sorrows of women who... experience the growing indifference of a husband, or the imminent desertion of a lover, or the final disarming of those charms which allowed them once to conquer, in the unavoidable battles they wage for the closed-up wallet of the man.
J.K. Huysmans Croquis Parisiens, 1886
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