Читать книгу Smells - Robert Muchembled - Страница 13

From the fifteenth century on, the increasing number of regulations issued by local authorities seeking to police antisocial practices that caused odour pollution reflected not so much increased awareness of the problem as the severe and ongoing worsening of the situation, driven largely by urban expansion. In France, the urban population reached 10 per cent by around 1515 and 20 per cent in 1789; by the Second Empire, one in two French people lived in a town or city. Overcrowded urban centres, hemmed in by their city walls, almost literally choked to death during the dreadful outbreaks of plague that were an all too regular occurrence prior to 1720.

The noisy, dirty, crowded streets were home to more and more polluting trades, well before the Industrial Revolution. The ‘aerist’ movement of the 1750s was merely a flash in the pan, sparked by the concerns of a forward-thinking minority. The vast majority of the urban population took little notice of the aerists’ philosophical theories, preferring to put up with the stench rather than pay the significant costs of the works required by the authorities, particularly as several major instances of odour pollution arose from deeply ingrained habits that in some cases were a source of unspoken pride and pleasure. Nineteenth-century hygienists wrote despairingly that the size of the dung heap outside a peasant’s door was a visible sign of wealth that its owner refused to move. The same was true in urban areas, including in the Paris of François I.

In Grenoble, ‘masters of the street’ were responsible for the upkeep and cleanliness of public spaces. However, there was little they could do when their fellow citizens simply refused to cooperate: locals were ordered to clear away the heaps of dung from outside their homes in 1526, but by 1531 they were back again.⁶ Grenoble, a small town of some 12,000 inhabitants under Louis XIII, faced significant odour pollution, judging from evidence from regulations that were simply ignored and travel accounts: one visitor described its streets in 1643 as ‘very ugly and very dirty’. Yet the apocalyptic stench described by historians nonetheless formed the olfactory backdrop to many people’s lives. Their sense of smell was no less sensitive than that of outsiders; rather, they had become accustomed to the smell and simply no longer noticed it.

Despite its delightful setting, Grenoble shared all the unpleasant characteristics typical of urban areas of the time. Rubbish lay piled up everywhere, including human and animal excrement, which befouled the streets and ramparts. They mixed with rain and waste water and streamed down the streets, which were built with a slight downward incline towards a central gutter. The hoi polloi were expected to let their betters walk on the higher side away from the gutter, giving rise to the expression tenir le haut du pavé, literally ‘to keep to the upper paving stone’, meaning to have the upper hand. Walking on the higher side of the street meant avoiding being splashed with foul, stinking water or stepping in stagnant, fetid puddles. Dogs and pigs acted as walking rubbish disposal units, rooting around in the waste for food. Perhaps they appreciated the smell of human excrement, though a belief passed down by the medical theory of Antiquity held that it smelled much worse than animal droppings.⁷ The local population’s sense of smell, long accustomed to the urban fug, was triggered afresh by unusual events such as unexpected flooding from the Isère or Drac rivers, which left behind a tide of ‘stinking mud, a mix of latrines and graves’, as one observer wrote in 1733. The perhaps surprising evocation of graves came from the practice of burying bodies in very shallow soil. Just as in the medieval period, the stench arising from certain trades was also particularly off-putting. Butchers, skinners and tripe makers were among the worst offenders, along with candle makers, as pig tallow (or lard) smelled famously revolting. The seventeenth century saw the development of textile and leather workshops that generated foul-smelling emissions, though the urine and excrement used as raw materials in these trades did not trigger displays of disgust. Stored in abundance outside the workshop, they pointed to the owner’s prosperity just as dung heaps did, attracting customers. Until as late as 1901, barrels were left at major crossroads to ‘harvest’ urine from passers-by and local workmen. Tanners, leather curriers, dyers and fullers would share the contents out between them. Workers in the leather trade, including many glovers, used animal urine and dog excrement to prepare the hides. Fabric workshops were an equally unpleasant source of smells. Putrefied urine was mixed with vinegar to fix colours on fabrics and leather. Fullers soaked cloth in a blend of urine and warm soapy water to clean it before working it with their bare feet. Starch makers left ears of wheat to rot in water, generating stinking, acidic fumes. Lime and plaster kilns had to be built outside the town walls, though emissions of smoke and carbonic acid were still a nuisance if the wind blew the wrong way. Ironically, lime is excellent for neutralizing bad smells: it was used for whitewashing houses and bleaching canvas, readying latrines for emptying, and in burials, particularly in common graves following epidemics. It was also believed to protect against the plague: one author advised readers in 1597 ‘to whiten household linen often and to perfume clothes, as nothing else disinfects so well as air, water, fire, and earth, adding perfumes’. In Grenoble and towns and cities all over France, huge fires of sweet-smelling wood were lit morning and evening in each neighbourhood, sometimes sprinkled with violet or sorrel water.

Paris was on another scale altogether. Home to around 200,000 individuals by the dawn of the sixteenth century, it was the biggest city in Europe. It remained so until the late seventeenth century, when the population reached over half a million. It rose by at least 100,000 by the Revolution, but by this time it had been outpaced by London.

A royal edict issued on 25 November 1539 should be read with this population boom in mind. Paris was then nearing 300,000 inhabitants, a milestone reached in 1560.⁸ The edict criticized the ‘mud, dung, rubble and other rubbish’ piled up outside people’s doors and blocking the streets, despite earlier royal decrees. The filth also caused ‘great horror and very great displeasure to all people of decency and honour’ due to the ‘foulness and stench’ that they generated. Locals were ordered to remove the rubbish or face fines that would be increased if they persisted. They also had to pave the area outside their own home and maintain the road surface and were banned from throwing rubbish 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