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Formally prohibited in the late modern period, prostitution has long been studied as part of the field of female criminality. In the bustling town of the eighteenth century, where tensions and forms of solidarity took shape, prostitution also casts an impressive and revealing light on the relationship between urban dwellers and their daily environment. Grenoble was both a provincial capital and a garrison town, frequented on a daily basis by noblemen of the provincial Parlement, soldiers, craftsmen and day labourers. The spatial approach to prostitution highlights not only the town’s purpose as a space for encounters and sexual relations, but also as a ground for police action. Thus, this paper relies on police, court and hospital archives, as well as private writings, to investigate prostitution’s relation to space, along with the constant reshaping that it caused, between public and private, exterior and interior, formal and informal, normal and deviant.