"Oh! It is as if we were there: the tall one opens her corset and the little one is looking for a flea!," plate 27 from Types Parisiens

Honoré Daumier’s comic voyeurs go to great lengths to spy on their female neighbors, even resorting to a telescope. While the viewer sees the observers rather than the unaware, disrobing women, the excited narration fills in details about the vermin-ridden objects of their desires. Women’s undergarments would become increasingly showy by the 1870s, with bold colors adopted by courtesans and prostitutes. As Eugène Chapus noted in his 1862 work Manuel de l’homme et de la femme comme il faut (Manual of the Elegant Man and Woman), “A woman in a corset is a lie, a falsehood, a fiction, but for us this fiction is better than the reality.”