The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [55]
“A knight of the bidet”—slang term for a French pimp, from about 1880.
An eighteenth-century woman astride her bidet, in Louis-Léopold Boilly’s engraving.
When fifteen—year—old Marie Antoinette travelled from Vienna to France to marry the dauphin in 1760, the modern conveniences in her coach included a bidet trimmed with red velvet, embroidered in gold. Men used them as well as women, and cabinetmakers designed ever more ingenious examples, such as a back—to—back double bidet, a double bidet arranged like a loveseat, and one that converted into a chair.
The bidet remained recherché, and mainly French. An English writer in 1752 referred it as the “machine which the French ladies use when they perform their ablutions,” and a persistent Anglo-Saxon suspicion that clean genitals might lead to lascivious behaviour (even oral sex) kept the chair of cleanliness mostly on the other side of the Channel. But its popularity, however limited, indicated a new understanding that particular parts of the body, not just hands and face, needed cleaning, and that water was an ideal medium for that purpose. Le médecin des dames advised daily washing of a woman’s “natural parts,” with aromatic plants or spirits added to the water. Le conservateur de la santé, in 1763, was even more explicit about areas that needed vigilant washing:
In August 1785, Samuel Kempton, tinsmith, coppersmith and ironsmith, offered to supply New Yorkers with “those truly useful Machines, called Bidets, so much used in England and France,” especially effective for barrenness, imbecility and the “renovating of constitutions injured by luxurious excesses.”
If perspiration or sweat remain on these parts (the armpits, the groin, the pubic area, the genitals, the perineum, between the buttocks or “the furrow”) the warmth inflames them, and, apart from the unpleasant smell which results and is spread about, part of these exhalations, and of the substance of which they are formed, is taken up by the absorbent vessels and carried into the circulation where it can only do harm by disposing the humours to putrefaction.
Here the old beliefs in the permeability of the body and the importance of the humours remain—the danger is that sweat will re-enter the body and upset or putrefy the humours—but now they are combined with a new faith in the ability of water to prevent harm.
Nothing illustrates the new importance of water and washing better than its role in the lives of Napoleon and Josephine. Both commoners from the outskirts of the French world—he from Corsica, she from Martinique—they adored hot, fragrant baths. Their establishments always had a bathroom, which was a relative rarity in 1795, when they first set up housekeeping in a small, neo—Greek pavilion at 6 rue Chantereine, near the Tuileries. Josephine decorated their bathrooms like salons, with mounting ostentation, until the end of their marriage. She began the day with a long soak, accompanied with oils and carefully chosen perfumes.
Napoleon owned several bidets, one in silver gilt, equipped with crystal bottles and a silver—gilt box for sponges. But his real love was a steaming bath, where he generally spent two hours each morning while an aide read him newspapers and telegrams. During tense times, his bath lengthened: while the Peace of Amiens was collapsing in 1803, it stretched to six hours. A century earlier, Louis XIV had avoided water. Now the monarch of France could not begin the day without a prolonged immersion.
Lord Byron said that his times were distinguished by three great men: himself, Napoleon and the finest of all—Beau Brummell. It is a provocative list, in which two are men of achievement, and the third a dandy whose gambling debts led to exile and ruin. Typical of their age, all three men loved water. Byron was a swimmer, Napoleon a devotee of bathing and Brummell, in the words of