Auctioneers dressed as old-style pimps are to preside today at the main Paris art house over the sale of a police officer’s trove of items from the era of legal prostitution in France.

The Drouot salerooms have decked out a hall in red velvet to evoke a maison close, the brothels that were legal until 1946, for the sale – to adults only – of 355 lots. These range from erotic walking sticks and sculptures to the metal tokens that clients used to pay les filles de joie.

Most of the collection was gathered by Jean Feixas, a retired chief superintendent, who became fascinated by the netherworld of prostitution as a young Paris detective. “The tokens were like the beads they use in the Club Med resorts,” he told The Times yesterday. “It was to avoid cash having to change hands.”

He added: “I was drawn to collecting by la femme – woman in all her moral and social sense.”

The former officer, who left the force in the late 1980s and is in his seventies, appears nostalgic for the days when les flics (coppers) and les voyous (villains) frequented the same bars and cafés. “Prostitution is in reality a sordid business, but it was made poetic by the way that it was treated by artists and writers and the cinema,” Mr Feixas said as he showed visitors around the exhibition.

He regrets not having anything by Toulouse-Lautrec, who celebrated the good-time girls of Victorian Paris. He has plenty from what he calls the golden age of the inter-war period, when films and singers such as Edith Piaf celebrated the street girls of Pigalle. “Of course all that stuff about tarts with hearts and pimps with a sense of honour was make-believe, nonsense,” Mr Feixas said.

The sordid modern side is more visible in photographs of streetwalkers and garish paintings of transvestites in the Bois de Boulogne. The biggest example of make-believe is a poster of Irma La Douce, the 1963 Billy Wilder film starring Shirley MacLaine as a Paris prostitute and Jack Lemon as a former police detective who falls in love with her.

There is a parallel in Mr Feixas’s life: his friendship with Faty La Fouetteuse (Faty the Whip Lady), a ferocious dominatrix of the 1970s whose dungeon in the Halles district was frequented by well-off clients.

“Faty was a professional whipper. She did not have sex with her clients,” Mr Feixas said.

On sale are eight paintings and drawings by Bernard, a client, showing Faty performing sadomasochistic acts upon him. “Bernard used to slide the art under her door in an envelope with a banknote and leave quickly. She never really did these things to him. It was the idea that excited him,” the former police officer said. “I sometimes watched him leaving his picture and running off. He was terrified that she would open the door.”

Mr Feixas, who published The Memoirs of a Whip Lady with his friend in 1991, said that there had never been a conflict in his role as police officer and his friend’s occupation. He was no longer a detective at the time.

After a decade in the Paris CID he moved to the gambling and gaming police, then the DST, the equivalent to MI5, ending his career in the Interior Ministry.

“I never acquired any object from my professional life that I used for this collection,” he said.

“It has come through acquaintance and friendship.”

The oldest profession

— As early as 1810 there were 180 approved brothels in Paris. Some of the more upmarket establishments – such as le Sphinx and One-Two-Two – also held cabaret acts and were considered sufficiently respectable to attract famous guests

— King Edward VII was a regular guest at Parisian brothels, reputedly favouring an establishment called Le Chabanais – founded in 1878 and still going strong as a “six-star private gentlemen’s club” – where he would bathe in a copper bathtub filled with champagne

— The 1946 law banning brothels in France is known as the Marthe Richard Law, after the woman MP and former spy who railed in parliament against the “houses of tolerance”

— A Ministry of Health official claimed that cases of venereal disease had dropped from 40 per 100,000 in 1946, when the brothels were closed, to 4 per 100,000 eight years later

— This week the Women’s Institute in Hampshire called for brothels in Britain to be legalised, arguing that it was “the best way we can protect the women who work on the streets in big cities”

Sources: SOS Femmes; Prostitution, Women and the Misuse of the Law; le Chabanais; Metropole Paris; agencies

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