The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [42]
“Monsieur Leibnitz must have a very high degree of intelligence to make him such an agreeable companion. It is seldom that scholars are clean and do not smell bad, and that they have a sense of humour.”
—Elisabeth Charlotte, Princess Palatine, 1705
It was not that Renaissance baths lacked rules and regimes, but that bath-goers felt free to ignore them. Michel de Montaigne was skeptical about doctors but hopeful that mineral waters would lessen or cure his kidney stones. Searching for relief in French, Italian and Swiss spas in the 1580s, he enjoyed defying medical orders. In Plombières-1 es-Bains, he ignored the prescribed purgative, drank nine glasses of the water each morning instead of the recommended one or two, and bathed every other day, rather than two or three times a day, as advised. In La Villa, near Florence, he insisted on bathing and drinking the water on the same day, rather than on alternate days, and on bathing his head while in the waters, contrary to approved practice.
In spite of balky spa-goers like Montaigne, the Italian doctors’ campaign was successful, in that Italian and French spas became increasingly medicalized. Deliberately ascetic when it came to diet and social life, they became lucrative sources of income for attendant doctors. Merchants, lawyers, priests and nuns flocked to the spas, and the ailing poor occasionally made their way through alms and individual acts of charity, but spas most suited a wealthy, leisured class. A cure could require three to six weeks and often involved annual visits. In France, where the spa came into its own in the seventeenth century, royal patronage assured its success. It was popularly believed that the waters of Forges were responsible for the birth of Louis XIV (although his parents, Louis XIII and Anne of Austria, visited the spa in 1633 for infertility, and their son was not born until 1638). Louis XIV’S mistress Madame de Montespan made regular pilgrimages to Bourbon-l’Archambault, and almost every member of his court (except the king himself) visited one of France’s main spas—Bourbon, Vichy or Forges.
THE SPA TREATMENT FOR INFERTILITY
“If you want your wife to conceive, send her to the baths, and stay at home yourself.”
—Italian proverb
Madame de Sévigné, the aristocrat whose vivid letters to her daughter bring seventeenth-century France to life, was a typical spa-goer, hoping for a remedy for a specific malady and thoroughly obedient to medical authorities. In 1676, troubled by rheumatism, she travelled eight arduous days in her personal coach to Vichy. The regime, standard throughout France and inspired by Italian practice, involved drinking Vichy’s sulphurous water, bathing in it and subjecting oneself to the shower, or pump. Madame de Sévigné reported her rheumatism much improved, and returned to Vichy in the next year for a follow-up. Ten years later, when she was over sixty, she travelled to Bourbon-l’Archambault. This time, her doctor forbade the showers (too hard on her nerves) and limited her to baths, drinking the water and a strict diet that, sadly, allowed no sauces or ragouts. One look at the “lame and the halt, the half-dead who seek relief in the boiling heat of these springs,” convinced her that she was one of the healthiest people there.
QUICK-ACTING SPA WATER
“After drinking, you go for a walk in the countryside. Ladies of elegance walk leaning on the arms of their servants or of their gallants; and as the water acts promptly, and causes abundant stools, it is a curious spectacle to see everyone firing off in full