Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/504

 photographer P—, charged with habitual proxenetism and corruption of minors; a case involving a large number of persons of high station and of all nationalities, professions and social distinctions. This affair was not brought to trial until many months after the arrest of P— and the assistants in his studio; which arrest, by the by, was made when a noted German concert-singer was discovered in the photographer's premises, in compromising circumstances as to his relations with a youthful civus romanus. The unlucky photographer was shut up in durance all the long delay between his arrest and his trial; it was said, because the Italian authorities wished to give to as many, persons as possible their time to escape from Rome and appearances in court. A large and extremely compromising correspondence, between P—and clients all over the world, was seized. The photographer had long specialized nude male "studies", and did a large business in such portraits of tipi midi e ben membruti, as do several Italian photographers, including a near relative of P—, resident in Taormina. The painter was sentenced to some eight months of imprisonment and to a large fine. The affair was as much as possible kept out of the local journals, to which satisfaction, for all concerned, a general "strike" of the. printers of the daily newspapers in Rome most opportunely contributed. At last accounts, P— had been duly enlarged from prison, and had resumed in Rome all his specialities of business. Another noted Roman photographer of modelli nudi, G— was arrested and punished for "injury to public morality" at about the same date, on account of too-audacious "studies" in photography for general sale—even in Rome.

As blackmail in France—but not as to England, Germany, America, etc.—the law is so adjusted that the question of the relations of the blackmailed to the blackmailer are not of obligation to be defined clearly in the trial