France’s most famous brothel keeper, whose clientele included ministers, diplomats and business leaders in the 1960s and 70s, has died aged 92.



In her heyday, Fernande Grudet, who was known by her alias Madame Claude, had a network of more than 500 young women and a handful of young men, as well as an address book that, she claimed, included John F Kennedy, the Shah of Iran and Fiat boss Giovanni Agnelli.

Her clientele afforded her some protection, but she mostly kept out of police trouble by secretly passing on clients’ pillow talk to the French authorities.

The second daughter of a modest family from Angers, Grudet was born in 1923. She fell into the company of criminals when she arrived in Paris in the 1950s and began to work in the sex trade.

However, she had ambitions. By the end of the decade Grudet had reinvented herself as the child of a bourgeois family and member of the Resistance, and adopted the name Madame Claude to launch a maison close for the rich and famous.

Fernande Grudet, then aged 68, leaves a Paris court in 1987. Photograph: Joel Robine/AFP

It was here that any similarity with the Streatham madam Cynthia Payne evaporated: Claude’s at 32 rue de Boulainvilliers in Paris’s chic 16th arrondissement – one of the most expensive areas of the French capital – aimed for high class, not homely.

But the arrival in the 1970s of centre-right president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing brought an official determination to stamp out prostitution and pimping and marked the beginning of the end for Madame Claude.



Pursued by the French taxman for 11m francs (about €6.6m, or £4.9m) in unpaid taxes, she fled to the US, returning in 1986 to spend four months in jail.

It was the first of Grudet’s many brushes with the law. On her release from prison she tried to set up a network of young women, leading to a conviction for pimping and another spell behind bars.



She was the subject of a number of French films, including Madame Claude by Just Jaeckin, the director of the 1974 film Emmanuelle.

Françoise Fabian, who played Claude in the film, told Le Point magazine: “I was struck by her cynical view of sex between men and women. To her, men were nothing more than wallets. I suspected there was a secret suffering behind her words. I remember she banned her girls from wearing black underwear. All of them had to wear white.”

In 1992 Claude produced a video entitled How to Seduce by Madame Claude in which she advised, with unexpected prudishness: “Never have sex on the first date.”



In recent years, she lived as a recluse on the French Riviera, where she died, aged 92, on Monday.