The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [49]
“Is it for the sake of your health, or is it by choice that you take baths, and were you born under the sign of the fishes?”
—writer Julie de Lespinasse, 1769, when the Marquis de Condorcet told her that he bathed occasionally
Smollett was made of sterner stuff. At Boulogne, in northern France, he swam in the sea daily for fifty days. It produced a head cold, but the fever and stitches in the chest from which he suffered disappeared and his strength and spirits increased. In Nice, where he stayed for ten months, Smollett swam regularly in the Mediterranean, beginning in early May. The local people stared astonished at the tall, thin Briton: “They thought it very strange, that a man seemingly consumptive should plunge into the sea, especially when the weather was so cold; and some of the doctors prognosticated immediate death.” Although he continued to lose weight, Smollett was sure that his bathing regime justified the risks. “I have breathed more freely than for some years,” he wrote from Nice, “and my spirits have been more alert.”
Watching Smollett bathe, some Swiss officers stationed at Nice followed his example, then a few other inhabitants. Smollett’s 1766 account of his odyssey, Travels through France and Italy, in which he described Nice’s climate and sea bathing in glowing terms, did much to popularize the town among English people. The Hôtel d’Angleterre became the centre of a lively expatriate scene, and a visitor to Nice in 1786 complained, “The whole neighbourhood has the air of an English watering-place.” The French regarded this misguided sea bathing as yet another instance of English eccentricity, and only began venturing into the water around the 1830s, some sixty years after the English invasion.
Although Smollett praised cold water for its curative qualities, he also took a fascinated interest in cleanliness. Italian and French standards of hygiene struck him as laughably inadequate. He remarked, as did many travellers, that the apartments at Versailles were “dark, ill—furnished, dirty, and unprincely,” and that the French “have not even the implements of cleanliness.” Some enlightened French, Smollett admitted, were beginning to imitate the English—but only in those points where English superiority was undeniable. His list of “superiorities” is interesting, including the penny post and a new informality in dressing. In addition, there was talk in Paris of supplying houses with water piped in from the Seine, as English towns were increasingly doing with their rivers. “They have even adopted our practice of the cold bath,” Smollett wrote, “which is taken very conveniently, in wooden houses, erected on the side of the river.” These new-style bathhouses had low entrance fees and separate, comfortable rooms for men and women.
A SWISS VIEW OF LONDON
“One of the conveniences of London is that everyone can have an abundance of water… In every street there is a large principal pipe made of oak wood, and little leaden pipes are adapted to this principal pipe, and carry water into all the houses. Every private individual may have one or two fountains in his house.”
—César de Saussure, 1726
(Another English innovation was the indoor toilet, as opposed to an outdoor privy. Beginning about 1770, such an accommodation was known in France as the “lieu à l’anglaise,” or “the English place.” French attempts to duplicate English toilets were not always successful, judging by one Smollett saw at Nîmes. The mistress of the inn had installed it for the convenience of English travellers, but the French, “instead of using the seat, left their offerings on the floor,” which had to be cleaned three or four times a day. This was a “degree of beastliness,” Smollett wrote, even worse than that seen at Edinburgh, a city renowned for its uncleanliness.)
In spite of Nice’s glorious climate, two years abroad was enough for Smollett. “I am attached to my country,” he wrote as he prepared to return to England, “because it is the land of liberty, cleanliness, and convenience.” Smollett’s loyalty to his adopted country aside,