One of Cleopatra's Nights
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Featured visual  One of the iconic images of French erotica. Notice the peeping tom lying at her feet trying to glare upskirt
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Une Nuit de Cléopâtre (1838) is a novella by Théophile Gautier, which includes a fantastic—and an undisguisedly fetishistic—description of the Egyptian queen Cleopatra's body post-mortem:
Her sole vestment was the linen shroud that had covered her upon her state bed, and the folds of which she drew over her bosom as if she were ashamed of being so little clothed, but her small hand could not manage it. It was so white that the colour of the drapery was confounded with that of the flesh under the pale light of the lamp. Enveloped in the delicate tissue which revealed all the contours of her body, she resembled an antique marble statue of a bather...Dead or living, statue or woman, shadow or body, her beauty was still the same; only the green gleam of her eyes was some what dulled, and her mouth, so purple of yore, had now only a pale, tender rose-tint almost like that of her cheeks.
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