27. A Habit that Proved Deadly
As much as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec liked paying these women to be intimate, they liked him back. They befriended him, modeled for him, and even supported him when he was broke. Working women and madams accepted the crippled artist as a fellow outcast. He liked their company so much, that he would sometimes pack up and move into brothels, to live there for months on end. He liked to shock people by giving the address of a famous brothel as his place of residence. He was allowed to freely wander around the establishments, to sketch and paint what he saw as the muse took him, and he became known for his paintings of ladies of the night.
Toulouse-Lautrec lived in an era when working women were common and easy to access, and most men routinely made use of their services. Still, even in the socially liberal France of the late nineteenth century, women of the night were a taboo subject. Toulouse-Lautrec broke the taboo by painting working women as they were. He neither glamorized nor vilified them, but simply depicted the everyday life he shared with them in a near-documentary fashion. He died at age thirty-six from advanced syphilis, which he got from one of his lady friends.
