The sign hung at 12, rue Chabanais, in the days when the building housed the most prestigious of Paris' infamous bordellos, read "Welcome to the Chabanais: The House of All Nations".

With the brothels closed down 60 years ago, nowadays the skinny eight-storey building on a tiny street near the Louvre houses an employment agency and a bunch of flats. But right across the road, at number 11, a gallery is keeping its memories alive.

Nicole Canet, who runs a gallery-cum-boutique of erotic pictures and historic sex toys, is holding an exhibition there on the heyday of France's legendary "maisons closes", or authorised brothels.

"I love going back in time, playing detective," Canet, a 50-something former dancer, told AFP.

Along with a selection of whips in rhino-horn and other suggestive bits and pieces, the show revisits the life of the brothels from 1860 to their forced closure in 1946 in some 400 old photographs, etchings and books.

The Chabanais, for one, was a routine stopover for foreign dignitaries, who would be sneaked in secretly by French government officials. One of its most distinguished visitors was Britain's "Bertie", then Prince of Wales and soon to become King Edward VII.

"Bertie" had his own room there, as well as a giant copper bath -- with a half-woman half-swan figurehead -- that he liked to fill with champagne before jumping in, and a so-called "love-seat", a weird contraption said to be for threesomes.