The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [43]
—Thomas Platter, Balaruc, near Montpellier, 1595
In the 1680s, about the same time that Madame de Sévigné was obeying orders in Vichy and Bourbon, the indefatigable Englishwoman Celia Fiennes was touring England, including its spas. Unlike the French and Italian spas, England’s watering holes, like those in the German-speaking countries and Belgium, were designed for pleasure as much as therapy. Some visitors to English spas—which included Tunbridge Wells, Scarborough and Epsom—looked for a cure, but others courted, promenaded, danced, played cards, bowled and gambled.
Montaigne sought relief for his kidney stones in Swiss, French and Italian spas.
The premier spot to take the waters in England was Bath, a health retreat since pre-Roman times that was known in the Middle Ages as Akemancastra (Sick Man Town). Like many visitors to Bath, Celia Fiennes was hoping for diversion, not a cure. Her immersion, as she recorded it in her diary, reads like an exquisitely measured baroque dance. Ladies descended into the various pools led by two male escorts who cleared the way and accompanied by a woman guide or two, “for the water is so strong it will quickly tumble you down.” Half a century earlier at Bath, bathers of both sexes would have been naked, but by the 1680s a gentlewoman wore a large gown of stiff yellow canvas. Gentlemen wore trousers and waistcoats made of the same material. After walking a bit while holding on to rings affixed to the walls, socializing with acquaintances and peering at the ill being showered with scalding water (those who were lame were showered on their legs, the palsied on their heads), the bather would make a slow-motion exit. Going through a door into a private stairway, still in the water, Fiennes allowed her canvas gown to drop off just as her maids, above her on the staircase, flung a flannel nightgown over her head. Modestly and warmly attired, she was deposited in a Bath chair and carried to her lodgings.
SUFFER WE MUST: MADAME TAKES A SHOWER
“I began the operation of the pump today,” Madame de Sévigné wrote her daughter on 2 May 1676.
It is no bad rehearsal of purgatory. The patient is naked in a little subterraneous apartment, where there is a tube of hot water, which a woman directs wherever you choose. This state of nature, in which you wear scarcely a fig-leaf of clothing, is very humiliating. I wished my two women to be with me, that I might see someone I knew. Behind a curtain a person is stationed to support your courage for half an hour; a physician of Gannet fell to my lot… Think of a spout of boiling water pouring upon one or other of your poor limbs! It is at first applied to every part of the body, in order to rouse the animal spirits, and then to the joints affected; but when it comes to the nape of the neck, the heat creates a surprise which it is impossible to describe. This, however, is the main point. It is necessary to suffer, and we do suffer; we are not quite scalded to death, and are then put into a warm bed, where we sweat profusely, and this is the cure.
Less drastic but also uncomfortable, the treatment included drinking the sulphurous, near-boiling water at six o’clock each morning. The patients (and no one went to Vichy without a malady, the regime was too unpleasant) then walked to and fro, to encourage the evacuation of the water, talking all the while of the success of their efforts. The doctor who kept Madame de Sévigné company behind a curtain while she endured the pump also came to read to her during the two difficult daily hours of sweating, and she chose a course of Descartes for their edification.
The baths at Vichy, 1569. Mineral baths were places to flirt, cavort and, sometimes, get well.
THE KING’S MISTRESS AND MADAME DE SÉVIGNÉ
COMPARE SPAS
“Mme de Montespan talked to me about her trip to Bourbon, and asked me to tell her about Vichy, and how I liked it. She had gone to Bourbon, she said, in hopes of a cure for a pain in the knee, but had come