The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [41]
On a spring day in 1610, King Henri IV sent an emissary to the Paris house of the Duc de Sully, the superintendent of finances, requesting his presence at the Louvre. To everyone’s consternation, Sully was taking a bath. He prepared at once to obey the royal summons, but his attendants begged him not to risk his health by going outside. Even the messenger was against it, saying, “Monsieur, do not quit your bath, since I fear that the king cares so much for your health, and so depends on it, that if he had known that you were in such a situation, he would have come here himself.” “Such a situation”—a man taking a bath in his house—required the messenger to return to the Louvre to explain the complication to the king. Not inclined to treat this predicament lightly, the king, in his turn, consulted his own doctor, André Du Laurens. The doctor pronounced that the man would be vulnerable for several days after his bath. Sully was told, “Monsieur, the king commands you to complete your bath, and forbids you to go out today, since M. Du Laurens has advised him that this would endanger your health. He orders you to expect him tomorrow in your nightshirt, your leggings, your slippers and your nightcap, so that you come to no harm as a result of your recent bath.” Normally, His Majesty did not travel to his ministers’ houses, nor did he order them to receive him in their nightclothes—but a bath was no normal occurrence.
When Louis XIV suffered fits, starts and convulsive movements, followed by a rash on his chest, the royal doctors bled him eight times. During his convalescence, wishing to adjust the humours in his depleted body, the doctors decided to bathe him—but not before they ordered numerous safeguards, including a purge and enema the day before the bath, as well as extra rest. Even so, the king developed a headache, and “with th whole demeanor of his body quite changed from what it had been in the preceding days,” Guy-Crescent Fagon, the king’s personal doctor, aborted the treatment. In the following year, for the second and last time in the king’s life, Fagon prescribed a bath, again without success. Laconically, he summed up the experiment: “The king was never pleased to become accustomed to bathing in his chamber.”
CLEANING UP VERSAILLES
Shortly before Louis XIV died in 1715, a new ordinance decreed that feces left in the corridors of Versailles would be removed once a week.
Since bathing at home was so worrisome, an alternative was the spa. (Places with mineral springs had been called spas in honour of the famous hot springs of Spa, near Liège in Belgium, since the seventeenth century or before.) Belief in the curative powers of mineral springs dated at least from the Greeks. The Romans had positioned their baths whenever possible to take advantage of mineral springs, as advised by their medical writers, and medieval mineral baths at Bourbon-l’Archambault and Baden, among many others, were renowned as places of healing as well as recreation. But in the Renaissance, as the spontaneous, populist life of the old public bathhouses became troubling if not impossible, a new attitude arose in Italy about mineral baths. Rather than let amateurs do as they wished, doctors wanted to recover Greek and Roman teachings about therapeutic baths and to claim them as a professional responsibility. They insisted that bath lore, or balneology, as they called it, was a science with its own rationale and methodology.
As the Italian doctors noted, spas in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were far from places of order and discipline. A Swiss writer complained that visitors to Baden paid no attention to the rules, eating in the baths and remaining in the water day and night, “like unto ducks.