Fernande Grudet, known as Madame Claude, was a brothel keeper whose clientele included statesmen and leaders in her heyday in the Sixties and Seventies. She had a network of more than 500 brothel workers and a handful of young men in a little black book that included names like John F. Kennedy and Shah of Iran amongst others.

The second daughter of a modest family, she began to work in the sex trade when she fell in with the wrong crowd in Paris in the Fifties. later she reinvented herself as the child of a bourgeois family and Resistance member, adopted the name Madame Claude and worked her way through the sexual appetites of the rich and famous.

It all went well until center-right president Valery Giscard d’Estaing decided to clamp down on prostitution and pimping with zeal. Pursued by taxmen and police she fled to the US only to return and spend four months in jail in 1986.

She was the subject of a number of French films and left a legacy in French prostitution.