In her heyday, Fernande Grudet, under the alias Madame Claude, boasted a network of more than 500 young women and a handful of young men, as well as an address book that, she claimed, included John F Kennedy, the Shah of Iran and Fiat boss Giovanni Agnelli.
The clientele of her maison close afforded her some protection, but she mostly kept out of police trouble by secretly passing on
The second daughter of a modest family from Angers, Grudet was born in 1923. She fell into the company of criminals when she arrived in Paris in the 1950s, when she began to work in the sex trade.
However, she had greater ambitions. By the end of the decade Grudet had reinvented herself as the child of a bourgeois family and member of the Resistance, and adopted the name Madame Claude to launch a maison close for the rich and famous.
Actress Francoise Fabian, who played Claude [in the film 1974 film Emmanuelle], told Le Point magazine: "I was struck by her