I have never quite understood what it is that’s so wrong with prostitution. It seems a perfectly reasonable career choice to me, faute de mieux.

I don’t expect those poor eastern European women, pimped by Albanians and forced to work in some grotty “sauna” have much of a time of it. But I can think of worse things than working at the other end of the scale — being one of the “girls” of the alleged Parisian madam Margaret MacDonald, for instance, and earning somewhere in the region of £600 an hour.

Madame Claude — the über-madam of the 1960s and 1970s, whom I know about in some detail thanks to my late father, God rest his soul — always used to cackle knowingly about the number of her former employees who had married into the aristocracy or made it big in Hollywood.

For somebody starting off with feeble career prospects, with no obvious assets other than, well, the obvious, this doesn’t seem such a bad trajectory to me.

MacDonald is 43 and the convent-educated daughter of a Windsor businessman. She is in court in Paris on charges of supplying high-class prostitutes and, if found guilty, faces a possible five-year sentence.

One detective said of MacDonald, a business graduate and a talented linguist (she speaks eight languages and spends her time in jail learning Croatian): “Anything further from the traditional idea of a pimp you really couldn’t imagine. She is brilliant, cultivated, multilingual and kept some very distinguished company.”

The vice squad says her alleged network is one of the biggest it has encountered; her defence says she ran a legitimate service and never made it compulsory for her employees to have sex with clients. Emmanuel Marsigny, her lawyer, said, Frenchly: “My client gave complete freedom. Sexual relations were not imposed.”

MacDonald is in court, it would appear, as the result of one Laura Schleich, a 23-year-old German who had worked for her. “Laura’s aim was to steal all my girls and my clients and take my place,” MacDonald told Jacqueline Ribeyrotte, the judge. The police acknowledge that Schleich led them to MacDonald’s escort operation and to her arrest in May last year. Schleich was also charged but fled to Germany when given bail.

So it’s all tremendously exciting — it always is, whether the alleged madam is Heidi Fleiss or Sidney Biddle Barrows, New York’s blue chip “Mayflower Madam”, or Mrs Bloggs from the £10-a-go dodgy sauna.

Prurience aside, what seems to astound us every time is the idea that rich men — even, occasionally, good-looking rich men, not to mention the likes of Hugh Grant — might avail themselves of such services. But to be shocked by this is surely to lead an unusually sheltered life: what’s not to understand? If you’re struck by hunger pangs and there’s no kitchen, you get a takeaway.

Ergo, if you’re struck by overwhelming friskiness and find yourself temporarily partnerless, you dial out too. I’m not saying that this is fabulously continent, or a really heartening and lovely thing to do, but we should try to be less coy about it because it is entirely understandable, entirely human and hardly new.

And yet the subject is tiptoed around in an almost biblical manner (except that our Lord was kind to prostitutes and we tend not to be).

Watching the court proceedings in Paris last week, Axelle Guerin, one of MacDonald’s former employees, commented laconically: “People have always done this business in France and they always will.” You can almost hear the so-whatish boredom in her voice.