Incest in popular culture

[just1query]

If anyone could please help me reminding the French writer and his novel about a guy who travels around the world as a sailor and who eventually - stopping at a brothel and having sex with a prostitute - finds out she is his sister.
I know I came across this plot summary on wikipedia at some point, but I'm now having some hard times searching or recalling either the author's name or the book title.
Whereas the compilation of the most famous works on this topic on wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incest_in_popular_culture
would not provide me with the sought information.
Thank you very much in advance to those who have by any chance read and know the book I'm looking for.

[arrytus]

this seems familiar. I'm pretty sure I've read this or come across it and the penumbra of the occluded recollection is that it is French [the only other salacious continental books which I rule out are Boccaccio or Chaucer] and that it isn't a novel but a short story or novella at most, or that it is subsumed as a anecdote in a larger work. I would thus hazard it to be by Maupassant or de Sade.

[just1query]

My wrong, yes indeed it was about a short story rather than a novel, nonetheless I have passed erratically through most of Guy de Maupassant's short stories on this site - and I could almost bet it was written by him even before posting the question in the first place - and none of them seemed to be about the sailor-guy and his sister he had sex with at a brothel.

And I'm pretty sure it isn't Marquis de Sade neither: it's way too inconsistent for his hard-core porn-detailed-style to just deliver swiftly the issue of incest.

So, thank you for the hint, arrytus! Still waiting for other clues from anyone who can provide me with anything close to the title of the book and the author who wrote the book.

[Pecksie]

In 'Nights of Paris', an unreliable memoir written by Restif de la Bretonne (also French), there is a similar episode in which the prostitute, if I'm not mistaken, turns out to be a daughter. But there's no sailor in that story.