Maud Marin - Tristes plaisirs

Original title: "Tristes plaisirs" (Sad Pleasures). This is the first biography of Maud Marin. The book had many re-editions, including in 1991,

In the book, Maud Marin presents her years as a call girl, describing in detail her own life and the experiences of her female colleagues.'They are called daughters of joy. Changeable unknowns who mix "the foam of pleasure with the tears of torment". Some walk like cattle slow and serious, between a sidewalk and a squalid hotel.

Others, from a galley to galley, from the lights of the Champs to the glow of the rue Saint-Denis, from the clandestine houses to the Wood, find themselves at the restaurant of sex, the hospice of the taping.

Fragile women became easy women, all experiencing the same stage fright, and the same anxieties. Few make it, when they do not die on the cross or on their knees. In this dead end, Maud Marin tries to open an emergency door. Witnessing their bitter chills, she speaks of Elles...'

Maud Marin, born Jean Planchard on 28 June 1945, is a French lawyer and writer, known for being the first trans lawyer. Jean did not accept his male body. Having announced to her parents her intention to transition, she was rejected by her parents and in order to survive she had to become a call girl, first in the Bois de Boulogne and then in London.

She underwent gender reassignment surgery in Brussels, at the age of 29, on October 8, 1974. Thanks to the support from Simone Veil, she managed to give up selling her body on the streets and obtained a law degree, being registered at the Paris Bar as a trainee lawyer and becoming the world's first transgender lawyer. She joined the Paris Bar and practiced her new profession by helping French call girls.

She also published two autobiographical books, which earned her media notoriety in the 1980s: Le Saut de l'ange (1987), devoted to her transsexuality, and Tristes plaisirs (Sad Pleasures - 1989), about her experience of being a call girl.

In 1991, she published Le Quartier des maudites, a book devoted to women's prisons. In 1996, she published a new book, "Pitié pour les victimes" (Pity for Victims), in which she criticized the justice system for caring more about the fate of offenders than the suffering of victims.