The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [54]
Even so, the hygienic horizons for educated and well-travelled people in western Europe widened. All this change came slowly and was probably often more theoretical than actual. Baths and bidets existed, rather as Jacuzzis and saunas do now in North America: they were options, more easily available to the comfortable middle classes on up. The important thing was that they existed, and a growing body of public opinion valued them.
Immersing oneself in water while naked still seemed strange to many women, if not men. One solution to the modesty problem was to cloud the bathwater. In 1772 the handbook Le médecin des dames, ou l’art de les conserver en santé advised dissolving powdered almond paste, bran, flour or resin in spirits of wine, then casting them into the bath. More often, female bathers would wear a bathing robe or, failing that, underwear. When Elizabeth Montagu finally succeeded in locating a bathing tub in the ducal house of Bulstrode, where she was staying in 1741, she wrote to her mother, “Pray look for my bathing dress, till then I must go in in chemise and jupon!”
Marie Antoinette had a bath most mornings, usually in a slipper bath rolled into her bedroom. Wearing a long-sleeved chemise made of English flannel while in the tub, the queen breakfasted there, her tray resting on the bath’s rigid cover. “Her modesty, in every particular of her private toilet, was extreme,” her lady—in—waiting Henriette Campan wrote. When her two bathing women assisted her out of the tub, “she required one of them to hold a cloth before her, raised so that her attendants might not see her.”
In the last years of the 1780s, a young Englishman named Arthur Young went travelling in France and Italy. Like other wanderers of the day, he paid close attention to local standards of hygiene and personal decorum. The Continental habit of spitting inside a house and the sorry state of the “necessary houses,” or toilets, scandalized him, as did the shamelessness with which men and women relieved themselves in public. In spite of these bad habits, Young decided, “the French are cleaner in their persons, and the English in their houses.” This was a minority view, since most eighteenth—century observers, English or not, judged both English people and houses to be cleaner than the French. Young based his judgment, at least in part, on a small piece of furniture he claimed was universal in every French dwelling, modest or grand: the bidet. He was quite wrong about that, for bidets remained unusual until the twentieth century and were seen only in the most luxurious establishments in the eighteenth century. But he was right to note the “chair of cleanliness,” as it was sometimes called, as a significant piece of furniture.
Although most people associate bidets with France, and the French word is used in English, Spanish and Italian, it was the Italians who invented an oblong vessel, set on a frame or cabinet, designed to wash the genital and anal area of men and women. Bidets first appeared in France in the sixteenth century but were rare until the middle years of the eighteenth century. At that point, they are increasingly noted in cabinetmakers’ account books and the inventories of great houses. Usually, although the bowl was still earthenware or tin, they were luxurious pieces of cabinetmaking used by the aristocracy and their mistresses.
NICKNAMES FOR THE BIDET
the hygienic little horse (Italy)
the hygienic guitar (Spain)
the violin case (France)
le petit indiscret (France)
As twenty-first-century movie stars are showered with shoes, purses and clothes by ambitious designers, the king’s mistresses received gifts of jewellery, bibelots and bidets. In 1751, Madame de Pompadour was given a bidet made of rosewood veneer, with fittings of gilded bronze, by the cabinetmaker Duvaux. Pierre de Migeon, another prestigious furniture