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Ladies of the night have been selling their skin for years in Paris' verdant park, the Bois-de-Boulogne. Like wood nymphs, the prostitutes entice eager customers into sequestered leafy crannies for coital cavorting. This erotic arrangement has pleased prudish Parisians who want to keep hookers out of view, off the public boulevards.

Mon Dieu! Tempestuous weather destroyed this humping harmony on Dec. 26, when winds lashed the park, stripping branches and uprooting trees. Huge groves are presently cordoned off because of the danger of falling timber, forcing the naughty nooky merchants to flash their wares in an elegant adjacent neighborhood.

"All they have on is a fur coat and a pair of string panties," Christine Andre, Boulogne-Billancourt town hall spokeswoman, told Agence France-Presse on Monday. "There they are from late afternoon, just when our children start coming home from school. We have had it up to here."

The prostitutes are advertising their pudenda in front of the posh homes, horrifying the inhabitants. Clients and voyeurs flocking to the district are entangling the locals in traffic snarls. Drug dealers are also slithering in with pharmaceuticals that keep the nearly naked women warm.

Boulogne-Billancourt town hall has begged Paris administrators to reopen the park as quickly as possible, so that its titillating species can return to the shadows. "We don't want any trees to fall on them or anything," Andre explained. "We just don't want them here."

Paris prostitutes enjoy an exalted position in French culture as revered subject matter in the paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec and numerous other painters. Literary figures have also praised the French whore: When the National Assembly abolished brothels in 1946, poet Pierre Mac Orlan lamented, "The entire structure of our civilization has collapsed!"

Naked World is confident that the current femmes, buttressed by their proud heritage, will successfully surmount all meteorological and suburban obstacles and gloriously continue their ecstatic social duties.
salon.com | Jan. 25, 2000

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