ith a "husband," who is only a superior kind of
protector. Officially, the prostitutes are free lodgers in the
brothel, but in reality they are often prisoners or slaves. They are
well fed and dressed in a way to attract the clients as much as
possible. Clothes, food, etc., are placed to their account and the
crafty brothel keeper generally manages to get them into debt so as to
always remain their creditor. In this way these miserable outcasts of
society, who are generally incapable of claiming their legal rights,
are more or less reduced to slavery. Apparently they are free, but in
reality they can hardly leave the house without paying their debts,
and the brothel keeper who wishes to keep them arranges so that they
cannot pay it.

It is not always easy to distinguish between the different classes of
prostitutes: the prostitute of the brothel, the street prostitute
under inscription or not, the private prostitute and lorette or
grisette. Sometimes a woman may rise from one class to another; but
more often she falls lower and lower.

We may mention here one of the dangers of brothels. Their good
organization, their medical supervision, etc., are extolled; but the
great danger of the arithmetical progression of mutations in sexual
intercourse is ignored. While a private prostitute rarely receives
more than one client in an evening, and is not absolutely obliged to
receive more, every prostitute in a brothel is forced to receive as
many as present themselves. A girl may thus have connection with men
twenty or thirty times in the same night.

Under certain circumstances, for instance at the time of conscription
for recruits at Brussels, the brothels are besieged to such a point
that one man has hardly time to finish coitus before another comes to
take his place. It is obvious that such "file firing" greatly
increases the danger of venereal infection, since a single infected
person is sufficient to contaminate innumerable clients (even without
the woman herself becoming infected).

It is often denied that the brothel is a prison, yet this fact has
been often demonstrated. When, as in France, the police can arrest a
prostitute at pleasure--often a virtuous young girl who is taken for
such--and put her on the inscription list, the thing is obvious. I
have treated a girl who became the mistress of a police agent in Paris
under the threat of being inscribed as a prostitute.

Again, besides the debts we have spoken of, th