The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [66]
The struggle between dirty and clean proceeded somewhat differently in France. As in England, the scientific and medical establishment had a new interest in cleanliness, buoyed up in France by the establishment of a chair of hygiene at the University of Paris’s Faculty of Medicine in the early 1790s. And there was no question that Parisians, for example, were cleaner in the nineteenth century than they had been in the ancien régime. “Rancid pomade and dirty powder no longer hide handsome black or silver-blonde hair,” a doctor wrote in 1804. “The people change their underwear more often, frequent public baths more often, and prefer simple and comfortable clothes.”
Yet more ways to steam oneself: these elaborate contraptions were available from the 1830s.
But beyond the mode for natural, revealing coiffures and gowns, French practices did not dramatically change. Apartments and houses remained ill-equipped with water, more from lack of interest than from an inability to install running water. In the 1830s, when a third of London houses had hidden pipes that delivered and removed water, the chief water engineer for Paris was still insisting that such an endeavour would be too costly and dangerous—the damp introduced into houses by the pipes would stay forever.
Monuments were a greater priority than plumbing, as the sharp-eyed Englishwoman Frances Trollope noted when she visited Paris in 1835. After seeing the city’s newest pride, the Church of the Madeleine, she wrote, “I think it would have been more useful, for the town of Paris, to have saved the sums it cost to build for the construction and laying of pipes to distribute water to private houses.” For that to happen, attitudes would have to shift. Charles François Mallet admitted as much in his 1830 book about water distribution in Paris: “It is a question here of changing our habits, of exchanging the niggardly manner with which we now use water in favour of a generous use of this element essential to life and domestic health, and in favour of the habits of washing which are so beneficial to health, and which will eventually be introduced into France as has for long been the case with our neighbours across the sea.” The mention of Britain’s superiority in these matters was almost automatic. Although the French exaggerated the English devotion to hygiene, they were right in seeing that objections to cleanliness were less deeply rooted there than in France, and that reformers and sanitarians were more influential.
According to Dr. J. A. Goullin, the traditional washing schedule has much to recommend it: Saepe manus, raro pedes, nunquam caput: “Hands often, the feet rarely, the head never.”
—La mode sous le point de vue hygiénique, 1846
Washing thoroughly at home remained, at least until the 1870s, almost as difficult as it had been in the seventeenth century. When the water for a bath had been laboriously prepared, a Parisian apartment often had no better place for a filled tub than the hallway. One day, in the dim light of a friend’s hall, the poet Stéphane Mallarmé witnessed the drowning of the painter Edouard Manet’s overcoat. When Manet politely folded it and laid it down on what he thought was an opalescent marble-topped table, it turned out to be a full bathtub. Even when an apartment had a room dedicated to washing, it did not necessarily have a bathtub. When Hector Berlioz died in 1869, the inventory of his apartment included two washing rooms, but no tub. Washing without a tub proceeded bit by bit, as the writer Edmée Renaudin remembered:
Bébé learns to wash. In spite of the ringlets and nightdress, this is a little French boy mastering the elements of good hygiene, from braving cold water to cleaning his face to make it more kissable.
A small jug of water was brought. “What shall we wash today?”—“Well,” replied