Clean by Katherine Ashenburg

Author:Katherine Ashenburg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books
Published: 2009-04-06T04:00:00+00:00

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 our Alsatian maid hesitantly, “your face, your neck?—Ah, no, you washed your neck yesterday!—Well then, your arms, up to your elbows, and make sure you roll up your sleeves!” Personal hygiene was attended to while squatting over a bowl. We took it in turns on alternate days.

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

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