The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [52]
Sophy sounds uncannily like the germ-and dirt-phobic modern people shaped and preyed upon by advertisers, but Rousseau denies that there is anything either affected or exaggerated in her attitude. “Nothing but clean water enters her room; she knows no perfumes but the scent of flowers, and her husband will never find anything sweeter than her breath… Sophy is more than clean, she is pure.” Sophy is, in short, like nature itself—or at least like the idealized, sweetly smelling nature glorified by Rousseau.
For much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the court at Versailles had tried to distance itself as much as possible from nature. They devised a parody of freshness, using wigs, rouge, powder and oils. They tried to mask the pervasive smell of sweat with heavy perfumes based on civet, ambergris and musk. Unwashable brocades, velvets and satins were cut and padded to conceal and distort the body’s natural shape.
But by the last third of the eighteenth century, even those closest to the king had been inching toward something different. In 1775, Jean-Baptiste Gautier d’Agoty painted Marie Antoinette. Her powdered hair was built up to a giddy height and threaded with pearls, ribbons, diamonds and feathers; her real arms, waist and hips were impossible to discern under the scaffolding of court dress. Only eight years later, she sat for another portrait. This one, by Louise Vigée Le Brun, was startling in its informality: her loose hair only lightly powdered, the queen wears a simple white muslin dress and a straw hat à l’anglaise. It was an outfit that suited her hamlet at Le Petit Trianon, a cluster of rustic buildings complete with a herd of Swiss cows, where Marie Antoinette played at living the simple life. One of her last improvements was a water mill she had installed there in 1789. She was said to be sitting beside it when a messenger came to tell her that the mob was closing in on Versailles.
A detail from Marie Antoinette Wearing Court Dress, 1775. The court at Versailles hid the real body behind rouge, wigs and a carapace of brocade and satin robes.
The queen’s attraction to Rousseau’s ideals could not save her, but his spirit proved impressively resilient. He died in 1778, before the French Revolution, but with the downfall of the monarchy, his beliefs became even more attractive. Now the artifice of the ancien régime was worse than outmoded: it was associated with oblivious, arrogant tyranny. There was a brief period, particularly intense during the Terror, when it seemed revolutionary, and hence virtuous, to be dirty. Helen Maria Williams, an Englishwoman living in France, wrote in 1793 that the old term muscadin, meaning “a scented fop,” had been revived, “and every man who had the boldness to appear in a clean shirt was branded with that appellation.” But it did not last. In the new world that was dawning, clean hair and shining faces looked more spontaneous and progressive than the old style of grimy splendour.
Even perfumes became lighter and floral, more suggestive of springtime meadows than the animal-based scents that had epitomized seventeenth-century taste. The late—century vogue for cotton—chintzes, calicos and muslins—and simpler silhouettes made clean clothes more possible and unwashed bodies more noticeable. Later, when the clinging, short-sleeved Empire dress swept into fashion at the beginning of the nineteenth century, even more was revealed, and the Duchesse d’Abrantes claimed, “An elegant woman does not pass I two days without bathing.”
As the French say, “L’appétit vient en mangeant,” appetite comes from