The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [67]
Public baths were more convenient—at least in theory. A few, such as the Chinese Baths on the boulevard des Italiens in Paris, were opulent, supplying heated robes, rest rooms, reading rooms and abundant servants. Their fee was correspondingly high, from five to twenty francs at mid-century, when a worker’s daily wage was two and a half francs. Most bathhouses were significantly less costly, but did not attract more than a small percentage of the population. In 1819 the public baths in Paris provided 600,000 baths for a population of 700,000—a little under one bath a year for each Parisian. Thirty years later, the numbers indicated that the average Parisian patronized the baths twice a year. In fact, the bathhouses were largely located in wealthy and bourgeois neighbourhoods, so that prosperous people bathed more than the average, and poorer people less.
Beginning in the 1860s, piped—in water began to flow in the luxurious quarters of Paris’s Right Bank, and then on the Left Bank. By the 1880s, solidly middle—class apartments often had running water. But old hesitations remained, which some French reformers connected to their Catholicism. One of the English advantages when it came to hygiene, they theorized, was their religion: since Protestants (in their view) did not share their Catholic prudery about nudity, washing the body could be more straightforward and more thorough. In her treatise for French women, On Politeness and Good Taste, or the Duties of a Christian Woman in the World, published in 1860, the Countess Drohojowska advised: “Never take more than one bath a month. There is in the taste for sitting down in a bathtub a certain indolence and softness that ill suits a woman.” The Countess de Pange recalled, “No-one in my family took a bath!” They washed in a tub filled with two inches of water or sponged themselves, rather than sinking into water up to their necks, which seemed “pagan, even sinful.”
BATHS TO GO, OR THE CARRY-IN BATH
In 1819, a Monsieur Villette introduced Paris to a German innovation that allowed people to bathe at home in privacy and safety. A service, called a bain à domicile, delivered to the client’s house or apartment, even on the top floor, all the necessities of a bath—a tub, a robe and sheet, and hot, cold or tepid water as ordered. When the bath was over, everything was whisked away, including the water, which was usually removed by a hose that ran from the tub to the gutter on the street. The bain à domicile, a titillating combination of intimacy and commercialism, inspired comic songs, stories and a popular practical joke, in which mischief-makers ordered several baths to be delivered in the middle of a friend’s dinner party. But however much people enjoyed talking about the bains à domicile, only a thousand were ordered in 1838, in a city of more than a million inhabitants.
The owner of this French apparatus could have a steam bath in his own bed.
GODLY AND GRIMY
In Paris, “the devout do not wash their bottoms.”
—E. and J. de Goncourt, Journal, 1895
The women who were known to bathe more often and more magnificently than the average were the most exclusive courtesans as well as actresses and dancers, who were often the mistresses of rich men. Mademoiselle Moisset, of the Opéra Comique, decorated her bathroom with engraved mirrors and panels in the fashionable Oriental style, and had a bathtub in silvered copper set into a richly carved wooden surround. Mademoiselle Devise, who danced at the opera, had a copper tub encased in wickerwork. La Paiva, a celebrated late-century prostitute, covered the walls of her Moorish bathroom with onyx. Her tub, also set in onyx, was silver, ornamented with a copper frieze. The oils and unguents, the precious pots and bottles, and the long, languid hours these