The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [34]
A PASSION FOR CLEAN LINEN
1550–1750
Most middle-class North Americans wash their face at least once or twice a day, and it wouldn’t occur to us to mention such a banal detail in a letter. But at the beginning of the eighteenth century, washing your face was no run-of-the-mill event. That is why we know that, on a hot August day in France in 1705, Elisabeth Charlotte, the Princess Palatine, was compelled to do something out of the ordinary.
The German-born princess was the widow of the Duc d’Orléans (the younger brother of Louis XIV) and the mother of three grown children. She had had a long journey on dusty roads to the royal château at Marly, and arrived covered in perspiration, her makeup a disaster. She dealt with her sweaty body not by washing it but by changing her chemise, or undergarment, and her dress. Her face, by contrast, had no article of clothing to cover it and was too far gone to ignore. She looked, she said, as if she were “wearing a grey mask.” She was forced to do something so singular that she reported it: “I had to wash my face, it was so dusty,” she wrote to a correspondent, announcing a newsworthy event. Marly’s gardens were famous for their abundant fountains, but water was first and foremost a spectacle. “Water flowed in profusion in the gardens of Château de Marly,” Georges Vigarello, the historian of French cleanliness, writes, “but liquid hardly touched the skin of those who lived there.”
In 1576, the Italian musician Hieronymus Cardanus complained that men and women “swarmed with fleas and lice, some stank at the armpits, others had stinking feet and the majority were foul of breath.”
While they avoided wetting the skin, except in an emergency such as the Princess Palatine’s, the French court was devoted to a stylish facade. From the padded and covered-up styles of the sixteenth century to the nonchalance of eighteenth-century décolletage, it was a time of careful attention to appearances throughout Europe, of self-presentation as elegant as could possibly be afforded. Even so, the realities of the dirty body underneath threatened constantly to disrupt the graceful surface. Some were so common that they embarrassed no one.
The seventeenth-century Dutch painter Caspar Netscher painted a picture of a prosperous woman at home with her children. A maid waits in the background of the richly appointed room and the young woman at the centre of the picture, which is called Mother’s Care, wears a brocade jacket and a satin skirt trimmed with brilliants. But she wields a comb in her dimpled hand: she is inspecting her small son’s head for lice. It was a familiar theme in seventeenth-century painting, and no wonder, for children and adults, from the most privileged to the poorest, teemed with lice, nits and fleas.
Woman Catching a Flea, by Georges de la Tour, ca. 1638. The realities of the dirty body threatened constantly to disrupt the graceful surface.
Underneath the rich chiaroscuro of velvets and silks were bodies that went unwashed from one year to the next. At the French court, where the daily dressing of the monarch was a minutely choreographed ceremony, aristocrats perfumed themselves so as not to smell their neighbours. The sixteenth century had not been notably fastidious, even at the highest level: Elizabeth I of England bathed once a month, as she said, “whether I need it or not.” But the seventeenth