Fernande Grudet, who under the name Madame Claude operated a deluxe call-girl ring in Paris in the 1960s and ’70s that attracted the patronage of world leaders, business executives and playboys and made her a byword for sophisticated sex, died on Saturday in Nice, France. She was 92.

The news agency Agence France-Presse reported the death on Tuesday.

Ms. Grudet, a woman of modest background from the Anjou region, arrived in Paris in the 1950s. After working a series of menial jobs, one of which may have been selling sex on the streets, she decided that the managerial side of the business suited her talents.

“Two things in life sell,” she once said. “Food and sex. And I was not meant to be a chef.”

Precisely how she built her business remains a mystery, despite two memoirs, larded with colorful and eminently uncheckable stories. But build it she did, grooming a finishing school’s worth of beautiful young women, many of them foreign, from the fringes of the film and fashion worlds, with a sprinkling of students looking for extra cash and housewives looking for adventure in the manner of Catherine Deneuve in “Belle de Jour.”

Ms. Grudet zeroed in on “failed models and actresses, the ones who just missed the cut,” the high-society columnist Taki Theodoracopulos told William Stadiem, who spent many years interviewing Ms. Grudet for a book that never materialized, but that did yield an article for Vanity Fair last year. “But just because they failed in these impossible professions didn’t mean they weren’t beautiful, fabulous.”