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By Root 837 0

England did look like that to many Europeans. Its constitutional freedoms and the presence of a sizeable middle class struck them as uncommonly enlightened. The cleanliness and convenience seemed to go hand in hand with the liberty, for the English citizenry demanded running water, indoor toilets, washable cotton clothing and a degree of everyday comfort that was unheard of on the Continent. In the second half of the eighteenth century, all things British were à la mode on the Continent, especially in France—the self-confident ways of the English; their tailored but relatively easygoing clothing, especially for women; their informal country gardens. The English cachet that accompanied cold bathing undoubtedly helped its spread across the Channel.

The English word loo for toilet may come from 1) lieu à l’anglaise, the French term for toilet, or 2) Gardez l’eau! (Watch out for the water!), called to alert passersby that chamber pots were being emptied from upper-story windows into the street.

Although Louis XIV’S Versailles included an impressive appartement des bains with a massive marble tub, the Sun King, as we have seen, was not fond of bathing. But his heir, Louis XV (1715–74), was, and his private rooms always included a bathroom with two tubs, one for soaping, the other for rinsing. By his time, the bathing suite had changed its name and nature: unlike the appartement des bains, the new cabinet des bains was intimate, panelled in light—coloured, carved wood, with a portable copper tub, easily moved from window to fireplace as the bather wished. Gloomy grandeur, designed to imitate the ancients’ style but not their practice, had given way to informal charm. In 1751, when Louis XV’s mistress, Madame de Pompadour, designed a bijou house for herself called Bellevue, it included a boudoir, an intimate room next to her bedroom that contained a toilet and a bidet. A wing that bordered the courtyard held a sumptuous bathing apartment for the king and Pompadour, decorated with François Boucher’s nude paintings Toilet of Venus and Bath of Venus.

For the English, cold water and cleanliness were associated with vigour and northern virility. The French were nurturing a more hesitant interest in the same things, to which they added a Romantic attraction to the natural. Their guiding light in this was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau’s name runs through the period like a piece of homespun thread, often sturdy and thick, at other times thin to the point of invisibility, but always present in the fabric of the time. Championing simplicity over artifice, freedom over constraint, the country over the city, Rousseau became particularly influential after Emile, his treatise on education, was published in 1762. Although progressive voices had been speaking out for decades against restraining babies in swaddling clothes and sending them away from their mothers to be wet-nursed by strangers, it was Emile that caused a significant part of the educated middle classes and the aristocracy to re-think those practices. Even Marie Antoinette became a disciple of Rousseau, who inspired her desire to nurse her first child and her passion for her make-believe farm.

We know only a little about Rousseau’s own cleanliness, and what we know suggests that he was a child of his times, still relying at least partially on fresh linen rather than water. As a young man, he gave up gilt, white gloves and his sword, sold his watch and resolved to live simply. But his wardrobe of fine linen shirts outlasted his reformation, at least temporarily. He had acquired them in Venice and become very attached to them. As he put it, what had begun as an object of cleanliness had become a luxury. He was unable to renounce them, but on Christmas Eve, 1751, someone freed him from his “servitude,” as he called it, by stealing the lot. Because a large washing had just been done, no fewer than forty—five shirts were spread out in the attic to dry when the thief entered. “This adventure cured me of the passion for fine linen,” Rousseau wrote, “and since then I have had only