or waste water into the streets and squares. Orders were given to keep urine and stagnant water at home before emptying them into a stream and making sure they flowed away properly. Further bans were placed on burning straw, manure and other rubbish in the streets; rather, they were to be tipped outside the city and its faubourgs. Pigs and other livestock could no longer be slaughtered in public. Anyone owning housing without a latrine had to have one installed immediately or face having their home confiscated by the king or being banned from letting it for ten years, in the case of church property. Breeding pigs, goslings, pigeons and rabbits was now outlawed for all inhabitants, including butchers, cured and roast meat sellers, bakers and poultry sellers. Anyone who owned such animals had to send them out of town or face confiscation and corporal punishment. The latter directive, usually intended to avoid contagion, suggests that plague was either present or in the offing and therefore that the edict was reacting to specific circumstances. Whatever the case, its long-term impact was no greater than the numerous other urban regulations on the same theme laid down earlier or indeed subsequently. Way back in 1374, a royal decree had already required owners of housing in Paris to ‘have sufficient latrines and privies in their houses’, to little avail.
The lack of records of such facilities in estate inventories drawn up by notaries makes researching their development a challenge. However, one study of twenty-seven such documents from the Marais district of Paris from 1502 to 1552 has shown that commodes and/ or chamber-vessels were available in eighteen homes, while nine had neither, including five after the edict of 1539.9 It is unlikely that the poorer sections of the population all had access to collective latrines. Rather, the conditions of the time suggest that they simply relieved themselves outside, possibly on dung heaps, like those living in the countryside. Those fortunate enough to have home facilities were unlikely to trouble themselves with taking their waste to a stream to be washed away. Housing in Paris was typically built on several storeys: the higher the floor, the poorer the occupants, and most would simply have dumped their waste out of the nearest window. ‘Gare à l’eau!’ or ‘Watch out, water!’ was a cry to be heeded in the streets of Paris throughout the Ancien Régime to avoid an unpleasant dousing. Owners of sensitive noses and curmudgeons would sometimes complain, but the few traces of cases in the legal record by no means suggest a shift in collective sensibilities. In around 1570, the neighbours of a certain André Bruneau of Nantes complained that they had to avoid his windows in the town centre at around seven or eight every night, or else risk a sudden and very smelly shower. Some of his fellow residents of Nantes shared his bad habits even if they had a latrine at home. One such was Pierre Gaultier, who not only persistently threw ‘full pots and basins […] of foul, stinking matter’ out of the window, but also sent his children out to relieve themselves in the street.10 The stench emitted by latrines was hardly pleasant, as recorded by the poet Gilles Corrozet’s 1539 ode to the ‘secret room or privy’:
A retreat one dares not discover
Nor the top of the seat uncover
For fear (let me not lie)
That the powerful perfume rise high.11
The stench of Paris rivalled its vast size. A report by the faculty of medicine, drawn up after a dreadful outbreak of plague in the early summer of 1580, clearly identified the lack of adequate sewerage as the leading cause. It proposed widening the network by paving streets to slope down to a site a quarter of a league outside the city, like the one already in place outside Porte Barbette. A further suggestion was to dig deep, sloping canals to carry refuse down to the city’s great moats, where it would be swept away by the current. The city’s dumps also had to be moved further away, ‘due to the noxious vapours they emit, swept into the city by the wind, which grow thicker at night, creating a dangerous fog that causes a thousand ills at all times’.12 Montaigne complained about the filthy sludge in Paris, as did many other writers and travellers over the following century. The seventeenth-century historian Henri Sauval (1623–76) described it as ‘black, foul-smelling, its stench unbearable for those from elsewhere; it stings the nostrils from three or four leagues distant’. The mud clung to everything it touched, giving rise to the proverb tenir comme boue de Paris, ‘to stick like Paris mud’. The libertine poet Claude le Petit, publicly burned at the stake in 1662 for slandering the royal family and Mazarin, associated the sludge with the Devil in what was to become a common trope, as will be seen below:
Elixir of rotten excrement,
Cursed turds of Paris,
Shit of the abominable damned,
Faecal black of Hell,
Black dreg of the Devil,
May the Devil choke you.13
The smell of profit
A stroll through eighteenth-century Paris was an attack on all the senses. The city was a vast building site, under construction to meet the insatiable needs of a population that was growing at prodigious speed, generating hellish problems. Unlike in smaller towns and rural areas, private latrines were becoming common, but old habits died hard, as demonstrated by a 1777 police decree that repeated former regulations on ‘the most frequent offences’. One of the articles banned all private citizens, whatever their social status, from ‘throwing faecal matter and other rubbish of whatsoever kind out of the window into the streets, by day or by night’.14 The same habit was shared in Versailles, where the first lieu à l’anglaise, as Englishstyle toilets were euphemistically known, was installed rather late in the day, for Louis XV. The writer Louis-Sébastien Mercier shed some possible light on why such habits proved so long-lived in his denunciation of the ‘putrid miasma’ and ‘poisonous fumes’ emitted by latrines, the ‘dangerous seats’ that as a child he took for ‘the road to Hell’. He advised his readers against them, preferring the great outdoors.15 Such negative olfactory experiences in their formative years may have discouraged many eighteenth-century men and women from installing something that was not yet a convenience in any real sense. Not even those at the highest level of the state were keen on the idea, as indicated by a letter written on 9 October 1694 by the Princess Palatine, Louis XIV’s sister-in-law, to her godmother. Describing a court visit to Fontainebleau, where her house was not equipped with a latrine, she crudely wrote of being upset ‘at going and shitting outside, which annoys me because I enjoy shitting in comfort and I cannot shit in comfort if my arse is not resting on something. Item, everyone can see us shitting; women, men, girls, boys, abbots, and Swiss visitors pass by.’16
As money smells sweeter than shit, faecal matter became an increasing source of economic growth in the modern era. Like urine, which was vital for certain trades and medical treatments, excrement became a source of income. The doctor Jean de Renou wrote in 1624 that his colleagues were using rat droppings to treat kidney stones, dog dirt for throat infections, and peacock droppings for ‘falling sickness’ (epilepsy), while human excrement was ‘marvellously suppurative’.17 Human and animal excrement fill sixteen pages of remedies and beauty treatments in a 1689 book by Nicolas de Blégny.18 Another twenty-seven recipes involved urine, particularly distilled in cosmetics for women to hide wrinkles and lighten the skin, as tanning was considered vulgar and rustic. In 1666, Marie Meurdrac published a recipe to treat dry, scaly skin and improve the complexion that included ‘urine from a young person who drinks nothing but wine’.19 Madame de Sévigné used spirit of urine against rheumatism and the vapours. On 15 December 1684, she advised her daughter to rub her sides with ten or twelve hot droplets of it; some months later, on 13 June 1685, she wrote of having taken eight drops by mouth to cure the vapours. She could likewise have used a preparation by the deceptively poetic name of eau de millefleurs (‘water of a thousand flowers’: English distillers kept the French name). This was made using not only spring flowers, as the name suggests, but also fresh cow pat (four pounds, according to one author) gathered alongside them for distillation. There are numerous variants on the basic recipe,
