ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the way in which the writing of promiscuity changes with the emergence of the modern city. In Paris, in 1798, a secret agent reported to his superiors that it was “almost impossible to maintain good behaviour in a thickly populated area where the individual is unknown to all the others and does not have to blush in front of anyone.” In writers from Baudelaire and Zola to Henry Miller to Renaud Camus, Paris becomes the exemplary modern city and, as such, a place in which promiscuity is inherent and pervasive. Paris is a sophisticated logistical network – Paul Valéry’s “smooth social mechanism” – but it is also Baudelaire’s “swarming scene,” a place of random conjunctions and passing opportunities. In the modern city, Baudelaire argues, “Ecstasy” is “Number.” This chapter takes Paris as a powerful example of how modern writers assert, bemoan, and celebrate the promiscuity of the city; it also considers how the same writers explore an ever-tightening relationship between sex and commercial exchange.
