On a cold, bright blue day in Paris, I stood by the fireplace of a beautiful apartment in the Palais Royal waiting for Madame Claude’s hand on the bell, the sound of her foot on the same long wooden staircase that Colette and Cocteau used to climb. There never was a madam as gifted or successful in the history of prostitution, certainly since the invention of the telephone, as the remarkable Madame Claude. Little had been heard of her for almost ten years, since she had fled to America: she had always been discreet to the point of mystery, and invisible to all but a few close friends.

“Prostitution,” I had been told, was not a word Madame Claude liked to hear attached to herself or to her business. She also forbade the use of the word “client.” These were the words of brothels and bawdy houses. The clients were her “friends,” even her “family,” and they included kings (the Shah of Iran, who had a weekly standing order for Claude girls on the royal flight to Teheran on Fridays; a Middle Eastern king, “between two marriages,” as she was to put it punctiliously), presidents, ministers, ambassadors, and many “leaders of industry,” particularly, apparently, of Italian industry.

Throughout the years of De Gaulle and Pompidou, and some of Giscard—whom she believes moved against her—she ran a call-girl service of such high quality and exclusivity that she became almost an extension of the French state and was considered to have its protection.

The specialty of the “Claude girls” was that they were indistinguishable from the most beautiful young women you might have seen from the late fifties to the late seventies at Maxim’s restaurant, at Jimmy’z in Montparnasse, or at Castel’s, the perennially fashionable nightclub in the Rue Princesse. They were elegant, trilingual, sortable—they were summoned at short notice to official dinners by the Quai d’Orsay (the foreign-affairs ministry) or the Élysée (presidential) Palace. Their style made the Mayflower Madam business look somewhat grubby, a mere visiting massage service by comparison. A New York investment banker who used Madame Claude’s service in the 1960s, and who left his Phi Beta Kappa key on a Claude girl’s bedpost, told me, “It reached the point where if you walked into a room in London or Rome, as much as Paris, because the girls were transportable, and saw a girl who was better-dressed, better-looking, and more distinguished than the others, you presumed it was a girl from Claude. It was, without doubt, the finest sex operation ever run in the history of mankind.”

Even for Paris, she had little competition. The brothels had been closed in 1946 and the only other glamorous figure was Madame Billy, twenty years Claude’s senior, who ran an old-fashioned clandestine brothel in the Rue Paul Valéry, once patronized by King Farouk, Maurice Chevalier, and the tumbling politicians of the Fourth Republic.

Madame Claude herself was a figure of myth and speculation, a phantom bourgeoise rather strictly dressed, I heard, in gray cashmere and pearls. I imagined her as a Stéphane Audran or a Coco Chanel. She knows a great many secrets—her own specialty was to match her clients knowledgeably with the girls of her creation—and this, with her proven discretion for twenty years, was where her power lay and probably lies even today. She ran her business tightly and for great profit until 1977, when she fled to Los Angeles in the face of a huge tax demand that she had ignored for many years and simultaneous threats that she would be jailed for proxénétisme (procuring) if she didn’t pay up. The protection of the Élysée Palace and the Quai d’Orsay seemed to have been ungratefully removed. She was mysteriously out of favor. She returned to France and, on the New Year’s Eve before last, was arrested in the house of Françoise Sagan’s brother, and, still refusing to pay her taxes, was finally incarcerated for four months. Under French law she cannot be jailed again for the same offense, although her property could be confiscated. But Madame Claude, according to her friends, was declaring herself ruined anyway.