There's a short epilogue at the end with a view of modern Paris streets, traffic and some streetwalkers, one of whom is a 'twin' to a brothel prostitute. Bertrand Bonello said that Thierry Frémaux, the artistic director of the Cannes Film Festival, asked him to cut it, though the film still made it into the main competition after Bonello refused. "A lot of people thought I was glorifying the brothels of the time, holding them up as an ideal against today's prostitution, but it was actually much simpler than that. I felt I couldn't end inside the brothel but needed a contrast. I wanted to burst this bubble I had created for two hours, to wake the viewer up, and that wake-up is the return to the present", Bonello said.
Iliana Zabeth said she was aware about director Bertrand Bonello's project when she was 18, in art college. "The subject interested me, I was able to pass the casting and I was selected. The apprehension was strong since I had to shoot some scenes totally naked, it was my first feature film, with actors I knew as a spectator," Zabeth recalled.
The casting says "Clotilde" but her name is misspelled (as "Clothilde", rather a common error in France) in the movie when we see the lines of name/debt written by the matron.