Naked ladies of Paris

Ha ha, I bet I get a lot of extra pageviews from that title!

I've been thinking about the sheer number of naked ladies of Paris. Naked STONE ladies, that is. Most of them, oddly enough, were set in place at a time when good girls were covered from head to toe.  I wonder how those girls felt as they walked around the stone nudities of Paris! I remember reading a funny book about two young American women arriving in Paris in 1920 on their college graduation trip [Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, by Cornelia Otis Skinner and Emily Kimbrough. A great read, with funny illustrations]. They were totally innocent about men, had been to  an all-girls high school and then Bryn Mawr, and went around the Louvre gasping. Not all the statues had fig leaves.

Here's a random selection of voluptuous photos from around the city. You get the feeling the sculptors had fun.

Hôtel de Sully, just off Place des Vosges

Two naked women around a coq, symbol of France. Hmm

Main floor, Musée d'Orsay

At the National Archives

Comments

[frances aka materfamilias]

We still laugh, in our family, about our first trip to France, with our four ranging from 14 to 5. Our then-seven-year old was agoggle at the "naked ladies" at Versaille. Absolutely agoggle! and we weren't/aren't a prudish family, but she obviously picked up on a cultural difference immediately.

[Sedulia]

My mother walked around the Louvre going, "Hmph! You could certainly see which sex *he* was interested in!"