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So the stingy ones find the sex dull.
You have to be ogre in the gift.

 Isabelle Sorente  / Le cœur de l’ogre

Between 2010 and 2019, several thousand digital photographs were saved on a hard disk accidentally discovered. More than a dozen anonymous women present their fantasies out of all censorship in front of an unknown photographer. This unique collection is completed by a hundred or so miscellaneous objects related to this amazing intimate epic.

This raises the question of ordinary madness:
is it crazy to be wise or is it wise to be crazy and how wise?
 
There remains the trouble of undeniable beauty,
omnipresent that points beyond what is at stake between the protagonists.

ANONYMUS pictures /

SEX LIFE AS art, who ignores iTself /

Charles Baudelaire

Has it happened to you, as it has to me, to fall into great melancholy,

after spend long hours leafing through erotics prints? ...

Have you ever wondered why we sometimes find charm in these annals of lust?
buried in libraries or lost in merchant boxes,
and sometimes also the bad mood they give you?

Pleasure and pain mixed, bitterness whose lip is always thirsty!
The pleasure is to see represented in all its forms the
the most important feeling of nature,
and anger, to often find it so poorly imitated or so foolishly slandered.

...

Many times I have found myself wanting,
in front of these countless samples of everyone's feelings,
that the poet, the curious, the philosopher,
could give themselves the pleasure of a love museum, where everything would have its place,
since the inapplicable tenderness of St. Theresa
to the serious debaucheries of the bored centuries.
Undoubtedly the distance is immense which separates the Departure for the island of Cythera
miserable colorings hanging in the girls' rooms,
above a cracked pot and a wobbly console;
but in such an important subject, nothing is to be neglected.

...

Thus to completely reassure the reader's frightened chastity,
I'll say I'd classify myself as a love subject,
not only all the paintings that deal specifically with love,
but also any painting that exudes love, even a portrait.

In this huge exhibition,
I imagine the beauty and love of all the climates expressed by the first artists,
since the crazy, evaporated and wonderful creatures that Watteau Jr. left us
in his fashion engravings, down to Rembrandt's Venus
who get their nails done, like simple mortals,
and comb with a big boxwood comb.
Subjects of this nature are so important that he is not an artist,
small or large, who has not applied himself to it, secretly or publicly...
Their great fault, in general, is that they lack naivety and sincerity.

I remember a lithograph that expresses,
without too much delicacy unfortunately,
one of the great truths of libertine love.
A young man dressed as a woman and his mistress dressed as a man
are sitting next to each other on a sofa, the sofa you know,
the sofa of the furnished hotel and the private office.
The young woman wants to lift her lover's skirts.

Cette page luxurieuse serait,

dans le musée idéal dont je parlais, compensée par bien d’autres

où l’amour n’apparaîtrait que sous sa forme la plus délicate.

In the 19th century, the ball of the madwomen was a famous ball of the Paris Carnival.
It took place every year in Paris at the Hospice de la Salpêtrière at the time of Mi-Carême.
The Parisian press was talking about it.

Many personalities, especially from the medical world, attended.

THe baLl OF 1887 /

Le Petit Parisien / 19 marCH /

Every year, at the Hospice de la Salpêtrière, a ball is held on Mi-Carême Day to the delight of the poor, crazy women who live there.
It is in the main hall of the Hospice that this ball takes place.

On both sides of the room, along the windows are benches where guests gather, all in city costume.

At the end, there is a buffet, where, very welcoming under their little white tulle cap,

the busy nurses distribute the syrup glasses and cupcakes to the dancers.

In the middle, we see a multicoloured tingling of quadrilles and waltzes:
a whole dancing people of Colombines, magicians, Spaniards, princesses and milkmen.
And all this happy world, pink on the cheeks and a flash of pleasure in the eyes,
it's crazy, though!

Who would believe that?
Actually, it's not just crazy women there.
The service of nervous diseases, hysterics, epileptics and hypnotics,
also provide their contingent to the party.

You'd think so, wouldn't you?
that a ball organized like this must be the unleashing of insanity.

Well, that's not the way it is.
Nothing more peaceful, calmer, softer,
nothing more debonair and reassuring than this crazy ball:
it's like one of those family and bourgeois celebrations,
as it is often organized by subscription between neighbours and friends,
on the occasion of the Jours-Gras, in certain Parisian circles.

All these poor insane women seem full of gratitude

and affection for those who had the idea of preparing this annual ball for them.

They dream of this ball all year round!
Also, their joy breaks out when it happens.

When we remember that in the same Hospice de la Salpêtrière
where we danced so joyfully yesterday, the poor crazy women were still there,
not eighty years ago, locked up half-naked, the body loaded with chains and shackles,
in underground boxes where "they often had their feet eaten away by rats"
or frozen "by the cold winters", one thinks with pride of the road travelled,
and we think that neither science nor philanthropy,
nor progress are empty words.