The Smile Revolution by Jones CBE Colin;

Author:Jones CBE, Colin;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2014-08-08T00:00:00+00:00

D’Argenson, who was a noble and had served as royal minister, was also a stern critic of court politics, and he was evidently almost as shocked as the tooth-puller at d’Aiguillon’s conduct. But that was precisely the point. Courtly, aristocratic insouciance was still expressed within an unsmiling fatalism which (despite the sado-masochistic element in this tale) was solidly encrusted within the Old Regime of Teeth. Where Paris was finding fatalism about tooth loss shocking, Versailles shrugged and accepted.

Louis XV seemed supremely unconcerned about the state of his mouth (another example of his fidelity to the manners of Louis XIV). In 1742, he had a tooth extracted which was causing him some trouble. This tooth loss, the marquis d’Argenson noted, ‘is going to disfigure his face when he talks and when he laughs’. Yet what irritated the monarch about the whole affair was that it forced him to stay at home and miss hunting for two whole days. The king’s insouciance extended even to his lovers: one of his mistresses in the 1740s, the duchesse de Vintimille, had a strong reputation at court for stinking like a goat. The story differed little with Louis XV’s successor. According to one of Louis XVI’s pages, the new king had ‘a very strong and fine leg’ (a Louis-Quatorzian leg, no less) and ‘his face was agreeable’. In contrast, ‘his teeth were badly aligned and this made his laugh very graceless’. As for the comte d’Artois, the future Charles X, ‘he continually had his mouth open, which made his physiognomy look less than intellectual’.

Some change was, however, detectable. The royal family started to avail themselves of the services of their dentists particularly for their children. Highlighting how serious a threat to health teething problems in small children could still be, in 1748, the little Marie Thérèse, daughter of the duc d’Orléans, died at Versailles during weaning, after much suffering caused by a fluxion in the cheek. The autopsy report stated unequivocally that ‘teeth were the sole cause of death’. Luynes reported a related, if less deadly, incident in the same year. It followed the decision of Claude Mouton, dentist to Mesdames (the king’s daughters) to extract one of the teeth of the fifteen-year-old Madame Victoire. The young princess tried everything to postpone the operation, and managed to defer it a day at least. However, Luynes recounted,

Finally the king determined to go and see her after vespers and remained with her for two hours and a half. M. the Dauphin kneeled down in front of Madame Victoire and to all the exhortations that religion and friendship inspired him he added some touching reflections about the goodness of the king, who could have ordered her to be seized and the tooth extracted by force and who however wished rather to accommodate her weakness and silliness; but that all the same she should not abuse the royal goodness. Indeed, the king could not resolve to give the order to have the tooth pulled out. He kept putting it off and Madame Victoire was endlessly thankful.

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