shamelessly urinated in the fireplace in front of her. Such behaviour was commonplace. On 25 June 1638, a man and two women, spotting a man urinating on a tree, began to laugh and called out to him waggishly, ‘there goes a devilishly odd fellow!’31
Bodily waste was also used in dares, particularly by young men, who ‘jokingly’ sprayed urine over their victims or slipped some into their beer at the tavern. This often provoked angry confrontations that ended badly, not so much due to the soiling itself but because of the feeling of humiliation. Such tricks were also a source of much anxiety at a time when witches were still being burned, as all bodily waste was liable to be used in magic, for good or ill. It seems such aggressions were considered worse if they involved excrement. In the village of Montigny-en-Ostrevent in northern France, in around 1594, some young men of marriageable age accused a fellow drinker of disrespecting them in the courtyard of an inn where they were urinating by dropping his britches and defecating in front of them. Others at a wedding in nearby Gonnehem on 1 September 1612 professed themselves shocked at the sight of an ‘idler’ defecating in plain sight, five feet away from the table laden with food, an action which was ‘abominated by several’. The document is not explicit on this point, but the distaste of the witnesses would have arisen not only from the sight, but also from the smell wafting over the food as it was served. The closeness to the table suggests that the nearby guests found the experience most unpleasant. During a quarrel in Annœullin on 6 May 1644, again involving two young men of marriageable age, one dropped his hose, turned to the other, and shouted, ‘Here’s my arse for you. I will get the best of you.’32 He bested his opponent by symbolically equating him with his own excrement. This may also be the meaning behind an insult commonly proffered by women. In 1529, a peasant woman quarrelling with a man shouted in exasperation that she was not afraid of him: ‘I’d boldly show you my arse if it wasn’t all shitty!’33 The washerwomen on the banks of the Seine often jeered and mooned at passengers on passing boats, as did the women of Paris at their windows.
While country areas undoubtedly smelled ripe and unpleasant for visitors, they were by no means as foul-smelling or polluted as urban areas in the Ancien Régime, for the simple reason that villages were home to a few hundred people at most and housed few of the trades that generated much of the odour pollution typical of urban centres and their immediate surroundings. The urban population, hemmed in by the city walls that let epidemics wreak their deadly havoc, did not wait for the Enlightenment to set out for the countryside to breathe fresh air. Anyone who could afford to leave the Paris fug behind for the summer did so, moving to their country homes, which became increasingly common in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The trend became a major fashion in Rousseau’s day, partly due to his descriptions of enchanting, virtuous nature where the air bore the scent of simple happiness, but also largely due to the vital urge to flee the putrid, stifling air of the monstrously sprawling, expanding capital. The urban population also sought to leave behind the sheer noise, the crowded streets, the hordes of beggars and prostitutes, the dangerous, grumbling, threatening underclass whose ranks were swelling at a steady clip. The eighteenth century saw hosts of wellheeled, well-connected Parisians leave for the surrounding countryside to live in ‘rustic’ homes, bourgeois follies devoted to delights of the table and bedroom, or aristocratic manor houses. The richest built their own, or remodelled their family home in the modern style à la Versailles, creating luxurious family châteaux set in vast grounds ringed by walls and fences to keep the locals at a distance. This trend, a forerunner of today’s galloping rurbanization, was a way for many Parisian notables to return to their roots. Many had spent their early years with a country wet nurse, which might explain why they felt such sensory kinship with the rural sphere.
Life in the villages around Paris underwent profound changes as a result. To give just one example, Boulogne was a village of around 800 people in 1717. Its soil was not suited to cereal crops and was mostly given over to vines. It did a flourishing trade in laundry for the wealthy inhabitants of the nearby châteaux of Madrid and Bagatelle. By around 1789, its population had grown to 2,000. Nobles and wealthy bourgeois Parisians owned country residences there, set in vast grounds. Such residences were also popular in the Montmorency valley, half a day’s walk north of the city. Wet nurses living in the parishes where fruit orchards, particularly cherries, were the main source of income were much sought after for the babies of Paris.34
The urge for a rustic lifestyle was expressed in powerful terms by eighteenth-century philosophers and physiocrats. The Duc de La Rochefoucauld, descended from the Louvois family on his mother’s side, had a vast garden à la française laid out at his château in La Roche-Guyon, to the north-west of Paris towards Normandy, its crowning glory an experimental orchard planted with a hundred or so fruit trees. Following the illustrious example of Louis XIV and his kitchen garden in Versailles, the duke was part of a trend making the simple pleasures of country living fashionable once more. Cultivating one’s garden was not merely a philosophical metaphor popularized by Voltaire. It was the only way of healing a sense of smell constantly assailed by unpleasant odours in city and at court. Well before she became the king’s mistress, Madame de Pompadour, a Parisienne through and through, left the city and its foul air every summer for the delights of the château d’Étiolles, near the forest of Sénart, north of the city. She later owned, or rented, many other châteaux to give free rein to her passion for the produce from her own lands. She looked after her own dairies and loved plants, exotic or native to France, greenhouses, and growing her own food and flowers. She is said to have ordered beautiful porcelain imitation flowers doused in artificial perfumes to please the king on one of his visits to Meudon, just south of the city. Marie-Antoinette’s love of playing shepherdess is also well known. Louis XVI built her a play farm at the Hameau de la Reine in the grounds at Versailles. The prettily beribboned lambs may have smelled slightly of mutton, one of the most reviled of smells in ancient Greece, but the place must have been an olfactory paradise of fresh country air compared to the hellish pestilence of one of Europe’s two biggest cities.
Notes
1 1. Dominique Laporte, History of Shit, tr. Nadia Benabid and Rodolphe El-Khoury. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002, p. 86.
2 2. ‘Hommes, parfums et dieux’, Le Courrier du musée de l’Homme 6, November 1980.
3 3. Quoted by Augustin Galopin, Le Parfum de la femme et le sens olfactif dans l’amour: étude psycho-physiologique. Paris: Dentu, 1886, pp. 19–20.
4 4. Laporte, History of Shit, p. 4 and passim, wrongly fixes the date in 1539, when a French royal edict sought to solve the problem.
5 5. Jean-Pierre Leguay, ‘La laideur de la rue polluée à la fin du Moyen Âge: “immondicités, fiens et bouillons” accumulés sur les chaussées des villes du royaume de France et des grands fiefs au XVe siècle’, in Le Beau et le Laid au Moyen Âge. Aix-en-Provence: Presses Universitaires de Provence, 2000, pp. 301–17. See also by the same author La Rue au Moyen Âge. Rennes: Ouest France, 1984, and La Pollution au Moyen Âge dans le royaume de France et dans les grands fiefs. Paris: Gisserot, 1999.
6 6. Nathalie Poiret, ‘Odeurs impures: du corps humain à la Cité (Grenoble, XVIIIe–XIXe siècle)’, Terrain 31, September 1998, pp. 89–102.
7 7. Jean Liébault, Trois livres de l’embellissement et ornement du corps humain. Paris: Jacques du Puys, 1582, p. 507.
8 8. See Alfred Franklin, La Vie privée d’autrefois: l’hygiène. Paris: Plon, 1890, for the full text of the edict, pp. 232–41.
9 9. Ouarda Aït Medjane, Des maisons parisiennes: le Marais de 1502 à 1552. L’apport des inventaires après décès. Master’s dissertation, supervisor Robert Muchembled, Université de Paris-Nord, 2007, pp. 139–41.
10 10. Alain Croix, L’Âge d’or de la Bretagne, 1532–1675. Rennes: Ouest France, 1993, p. 306.
11 11. Quoted
