The Acclaimed Erotic Classic! Memoirs of Madeleine is the fictionalized story of the most successful prostitute and madam in Edwardian era Paris. Her uninhibited confessions leave no details to the reader's imagination. Based in part on the life of a real Parisian madam of the period, here is a novel that shocked even the unflappable French, who were dismayed not by its explicit erotic encounters, but its philosophy. As Madeleine says, "I chose the life of a prostitute. Worse than that, according to some moralists, I have become a 'whorehouse mistress.' There are many other ugly words that could be used--but so, too, there are more just and beautiful terms that have been applied to us in periods like the ancient Roman and Greek, when our profession was regarded on a vastly higher plane than many another--that of wife, say. Prostitution! Pray ask your moralist whether all men and women who work with their bodies do not prostitute themselves far more meanly than we, whose toil, if such it be, is, of all forms, the most lovable, seeing that it receives, even as it gives, pleasure? More pertinently still, take your smug married woman--she has the questionable comfort of knowing that she used her sex, an intrinsically temporary appeal, to lure him into the marital trap."