Prufrock and the women?

When asked by my English tutor, on Monday night, to interpret the Michaelangelo couplet in Prufrock I dropped the ball. Some of the group felt the women are prostitutes. You can see how that reading is possible; the women appearing, as they do, after the grimy first fragment. Our tutor favours an inside / outside reading. Prufrock is in the "half-deserted streets". The women come and go in a room beyond a window.

The tutor turned to me then said ... you like this poem Dougie, what would you say? To which I answered both readings are possible, although nothing else in the poem supports the prostitute reading.

Poor response Douglas, is what I thought then and now.

Answering the question has been bugging me all week. This much I now know. The famous couplet,

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michaelangelo

is lifted, almost directly, from something written by the French 'symboliste' Jules Larforge. The original reads,

Dans la piece les femmes vont et viennent
En parlant des maitres de Sienne.

That, of course, shows us something of Eliot's brilliance. And (for reasons I can't quite pin down) argues further against the prostitute reading.

I am being driven nuts, however, in my attempts to source the original. I find reference to it in many Googled places but no citation of the source. That's very, very annoying.
.

First Monday back at work ...

... and one thinks of T S Eliot's Preludes which (according to this page on the web) "deals with spiritually exhausted people who exist in the impersonal, tawdry modern city. "Preludes" impressionistically captures the impoverished spiritual lives of those living in a lonely, sordid, decadent culture."

It's not really how I feel but it fits parts of my day somehow. Go figure.

PRELUDES

I

The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o'clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimneypots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.

II

The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.

With the other masquerades
That times resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.

III

You tossed a blanket from the bed
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed's edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.

IV

His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o'clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.