The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [69]
—Colette, Claudine in Paris, 1901
The baroness is most eloquent when discussing, not how to bathe, but why to bathe. To those who find cleanliness irreligious, she writes that the real impiety is neglect of the body. And yet, girls leave convent schools and boarding schools with little understanding of hygiene—a subject their mothers “often acquired themselves, little by little, sometimes not without humiliations.” Too many of these mothers perpetuate the problem by remaining silent about their daughters’ cleanliness. Doctors, who should preach the purity of the body as the doctors of the soul preach the purity of the spirit, are also failing them. Cleanliness, the baroness insists, takes us close to the angels of light, while dirtiness drags us down into the primordial sludge.
Many French people, even the wealthiest, resisted the call of the angels. In the thirteen châteaux that the architect Edouard Dainville built or renovated in Anjou between 1856 and 1881, he designed a grand total of two bathrooms. In the other eleven châteaux, owners, guests and servants made do with a basin and ewer, or perhaps a sponge bath, which was called in France “the English wash.” (In England, such a bath is still occasionally called “the French bath.”) Things began to improve by the end of the nineteenth century, when water closets and baths in grand houses seemed less remarkable. In the 1880s, when the Rothschilds enlarged their Château d’Armainvilliers, the new wing had seven en suite bathrooms on the bedroom floor. But plenty of aristocratic holdouts still balked at modern plumbing. In the 1960s, when the English wife of the Vicomte de Baritault inspected his château, Roquetaillade—which had been elaborately rehabilitated in the nineteenth century by the restoration architect Eugène Viollet-Le-Duc—she counted sixty chamber pots, no toilets and one bathroom.
Before 1850, the Parisian poor could bathe in the Seine in the summer, either in the crowded, roughly enclosed bains à quatre sous (four—penny baths) or more surreptitiously, and without paying any fee, in a secluded stretch of the river. Hospitals and poor-houses provided indoor baths—though not many and never inviting—in all seasons. In France, as in England some years earlier, the coming of cholera in 1849 gave a new urgency to the question of hygiene for the poor. Public bathhouses were erected, although fewer than in England, and initially the French were predictably unenthusiastic. The poor found them unappealing, and the middle classes fretted about the morality of the poor. “Excessively prolonged baths produce in working class girls and women of the people a troublesome susceptibility,” warned Bourgeois d’Orvanne, and everyone knew what that susceptibility was.
French soldiers enduring showers and baths at Vichy.
“The women I paint are simple, decent persons, totally absorbed in the care of their bodies.”
—Edgar Degas, on his paintings of women washing themselves
Prudery was only part of the problem. Behind it lay a deeper French indifference to cleanliness, according to a report commissioned by the Ministry of Public Education in 1884. Charged with an investigation of school hygiene, the committee began with a sweeping statement:
It must be admitted first of all that, of all the civilized nations, ours is one of those which cares least about cleanliness… The most superficial enquiry is sufficient to prove that, even among the well-to-do classes, strict bodily cleanliness does not always extend beyond the visible parts of the body… Habits are even worse among rural populations. One has only to practise medicine in the country to know the terror that the recommendation of a bath inspires in most peasants.
The committee put its finger on at least one undeniable fact: France’s large peasant population feared washing and glorified dirt. Proverbs underscored the belief that dirt was protective: “People who