Please contact mpub-help umich. For more information, read Michigan Publishing's access and usage policy. The narrator of this pseudo-memoir never gives her first name, and all we have are the pseudonyms she uses for protection, including La Dumoncy. The narrator explains that she was born in a small village in Normandy, where she lived until at age thirteen she was seduced into becoming the kept woman of a young bourgeois playboy who rented her a room in le Havre. When he catches her being unfaithful to him, he arranges for her to be raped by a group of men and then has her arrested.
As part of her punishment, she is sent to a convent, where she develops the only truly selfless and satisfying relationship of the book, an intimate friendship with a nun, Sister Prudence.
After teaching La Dumoncy about masturbation, dildos, and anal sex, Sister Prudence, knowing her young lover's taste for high society, arranges for her to be released and sends her to Paris. La Dumoncy arrives in Paris knowing no one. She quickly meets a man who promises he can find high-paying clients for her sexual favors. After "restoring her virginity," he introduces her to a financier who provides her with a beautiful, lavish apartment.
This relationship proves to be financially, if not sexually, satisfying to La Dumoncy. Unfortunately, she makes a terrible gaffe at the theatre - insulting a princess - and her financier cuts all ties with her.
La Dumoncy then becomes serious about her profession, deciding to have sex with anyone and everyone who will pay. Among her many customers is a colonel in the infantry who takes her to his garrison in Rouen, where she contracts her first case of syphilis.
