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eating. A certain amount of fashionable cleanliness awakened a desire for more. In the letters and diaries of the second half of the eighteenth century, the writers comment frequently on other people’s cleanliness or lack of it, especially on the bad smells that accompanied inadequate hygiene. It was as if noses, desensitized for centuries when no one washed, were being invigorated by the presence of the relatively few who smelled clean. In her memoirs, the Margravine of Bayreuth complained that Elisabeth von Braunschweig-Bevern, her sister-in-law and the consort of Frederick II, “smelt terribly strong.” The Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II wrote of his prospective brother-in-law, King Ferdinand IV of Naples, that, although ugly, he was not downright repulsive: “He is clean, except for his hands; and, at least, he does not stink.”

Murder in the bath, à la française. In 1793, the revolutionary leader Jean Paul Marat was sitting in his sabot, or slipper bath, to calm his persistent skin irritation when Charlotte Corday stabbed him to death.

When Princess Josephine of Savoy was about to marry Louis XVI’s brother, the Duc de Provence, the Savoyard ambassador to France insisted that she take better care of her hair and teeth. “It is embarrassing for me to discuss such things,” he wrote to the princess’s father, “but these mere details to us are vital matters in this country.” Similarly, when a German princess, Caroline of Brunswick, travelled to England to make what turned out to be a disastrous marriage to the Prince of Wales, her escort, Lord Malmesbury, reported that she neglected her toilette so much that she “offended the nostrils by this negligence.” He despaired of getting her to wash and change her underwear often enough to meet English court standards.

“Baths for reasons of health, or for voluptuousness, or cleanliness, are hardly ever taken in winter. Spring and summer are the most suitable seasons.”

—Le médecin des dames, 1771

At the same time, more people were washing more regularly and teaching the young to attend to their cleanliness. When Lord Chesterfield’s letters to his illegitimate son were published posthumously in 1774, Samuel Johnson belittled his advice as teaching “the morals of a whore, and the manners of a dancing master.” But the late eighteenth century considered the Letters such pearls of wisdom that, in addition to numerous editions, they alphabetized Chesterfield’s maxims and printed them as etiquette books. Lord Chesterfield hectored his son repetitively on the subject of cleanliness. His particular concern was the care of the mouth and teeth, since he himself was toothless at fifty—three. If he did not wash his mouth each morning and after every meal, he warned his teenaged son, “it will not only be apt to smell, which is very disgusting and indecent, but your teeth will decay and ache, which is both a great loss and a great pain.” The whole body had to be washed, too, for the same reasons. “A thorough cleanliness in your person is as necessary for your own health, as it is not to be offensive to other people,” he wrote in 1749. “Washing yourself, and rubbing your body and limbs frequently with a flesh—brush, will conduce as much to health as to cleanliness.”

“Wash your ears well every morning, and blow your nose in your handkerchief whenever you have occasion; but, by the way, without looking at it afterwards.”

—Lord Chesterfield, Letters

Authorities might canonize water—Le Tableau de Paris intoned, “What gives a woman real style: cleanliness ,cleanliness, cleanliness”—but their effect on most people’s lives is hard to measure. One marker is the number of public bathhouses in Paris. At the beginning of Louis XIV’s reign, in 1643, there were two, mostly used for erotic assignations, hair removal and curative steam baths. By 1773, there were nine public baths, and by 1830 their numbers had grown to seventy-eight. But opinion remained divided about when and even if one should bathe—and whether in hot or cold water. Compared with the English and Germans, the French were slow to welcome