The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [44]
—Madame de Sévigné, 1676
Living in a world that regarded water as the source of illness, Montaigne, Madame de Sévigné and Celia Fiennes seemed to enter a separate planet when they journeyed to La Villa, Vichy and Bath. None expressed any anxiety about plunging their bodies into warm water, even when it was sullied by dirt, blood and diseased people. In the case of Montaigne and Madame de Sévigné, the hope of physical relief and the blessing of medical authority (however much Montaigne disdained it in the details) were decisive. English spa-goers such as Fiennes had proceeded a step further, in that they could take to the waters for pleasure alone.
SO MANY FINE BODIES TOGETHER
In spite of the presence of “very fine ladies” at Bath, Samuel Pepys worried, “methinks it cannot be clean to go so many bodies together in the same water.”
—Diary, 13 June 1668
Montaigne, Madame de Sévigné and Celia Fiennes were not bathing for the sake of cleanliness. Even as water became less frightening, it appeared that, except for hands and more rarely the face, Europeans had forgotten the link between water and hygiene. But the spa, which enjoyed both medical approval and social cachet, played a part in legitimizing water. The sophisticated, prominent clientele who took the waters saw them as health-giving, not threatening. That shift, along with the end of the plague and changing intellectual currents that glorified nature and the simple life, ushered in a new era in the history of cleanliness.
THE RETURN OF WATER
1750–1815
One day early in the eighteenth century, a visitor arrived incognito at the women’s Turkish baths in Sophia. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the young wife of the English ambassador to Constantinople, must have been an outlandish sight to the two hundred or so women in the bathhouse. She wore the strictly tailored riding habit in which she travelled, while the Turkish women were all, as Lady Mary wrote, “in the state of nature, that is, in plain English, stark naked.” When they pressed their visitor to undress and bathe, she had difficulty refusing. Finally, one lifted the Englishwoman’s dress, exposing her corset with its bone stays. The Turkish woman “ran back quite frightened,” Lady Mary wrote, “and told her companion, ‘that the husbands in England were much worse than in the East, for that they tied up their wives in little boxes, of the shape of their bodies.’ … They all agreed that ’twas one of the greatest barbarities of the world, and pitied the poor women for being such slaves in Europe.”
“Among English women, the parts concealed are more neglected than among the regions of Italy.”
—John Shebbeare, English physician, 1755
Lady Mary enjoyed the irony of the Turkish women’s mistaken sympathy, but she was sincerely charmed by their hospitality and graciousness, as well as their beauty. She described the scene, with its marble benches, cushions, carpets and abundance of gleaming flesh, in such detail in her letters that the French painter Ingres copied several passages into a notebook. They inspired his 1863 painting Le bain turc. Lady Mary herself looked at the baths with an artist’s eye and wished that a fashionable London portrait painter, Charles Jervas, could have been smuggled in:
I fancy it would have very much improv’d his art to see so many fine Women naked in different postures, some in conversation, some working, others drinking Coffee or sherbet, and many negligently lying on their Cushions while their slaves (generally pritty Girls of 17 or 18) were employ’d in braiding their hair in several pritty manners. In short, tis the Women’s coffee house, where all the news of the Town is told, Scandal invented, etc. They generally take this Diversion once a week, and stay there at least 4 or 5 hours.
But, open-minded and admiring as Lady Mary was, the Turkish way was not the English way. Although she attributed the Turkish women’s smooth white skin to their cleanliness,