The frieze bore the stigmata of years of disrespect. Pipes had been bored into it, and there were holes, nicks and cracks everywhere. It was a mess. Finally, this summer, Ms. Senot hired a team of sisters, experts at restoring painted ceramics, who have toiled diligently to make the ladies and their companions whole again.

“I find it moving,” said Mathilde de Blas, one of the restorers, taking a break from her painstaking work on a sultry day last summer. “It’s a place where women worked and lived. This restores some of their dignity. These women look radiant. They are certainly not just objects.”

Her sister added: “They are free, they are beautiful, and they are among themselves. This was a world of women.”

The ladies on the street outside approve. “Beautiful, what they’re doing in there,” said one who would offer only her trade name, Nanou of the Rue Blondel. “It’s a great idea.”

“People have a bad image of us,” said Nanou, who was wearing knee-length black boots on a warm day. “But, we’re normal. We have a job. We’re not drug addicts. We try to raise our children. So, maybe it will give people another image.”

The tussle among the officials charged with historic preservation, in the late 1990s, and the protests that followed Aux Belles Poules’ official designation, speak to the uneasiness this buried past provokes, long after all the brothels were closed after World War II.

“Certainly, we’re not claiming this décor is an immortal masterpiece,” wrote Francois Macé de Lépinay, the conservator-general and inspector of historic monuments of Paris, in 1996.