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Among some groups, there's this stereotype of French citizens. You've heard that French waiters are snooty, for example,

or that they don't ever get work done because they're taking four-hour wine-infused gourmet

meal breaks multiple times a day. I will be the first to tell you that in my trips through France,

including a stint studying abroad, I never once was treated rudely by wait staff,

and I witnessed plenty of businessmen dropping

into a small cafe for a quick snack, as opposed to a long dinner break. Regardless, these thoughts

do persist, and one of those is that the French are way okay with extramarital affairs, and that

every man has a mistress. In fact, a great article on the website Salon a few years

back said, of course, that this is a vastly overblown image of relationships in modern France.

Even so, we are still enamored with these thoughts of France, especially Paris, that stem from our

turn-of-the-century romantic concepts of the Moulin Rouge,

can-can dancers, suave Frenchmen, and the City of Love and Lights. But it's often strange

to understand that in the mid-19th century, France was as staunchly Victorian in their morays

as, well, the Victorians in England. And so it was a huge, huge shock when one single painting by Edward Menei burst onto the scene

in 1865 and brought sex and a lot of other things, boiling up to the surface of a very

unprepared Paris.

Some people think that visual art is dry, boring, lifeless.

...