Читать книгу Smells - Robert Muchembled - Страница 14

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, one of which simply involved crushing cow pat and snails in their shells together in white wine, then distilling the result. Some people were content simply with a morning purge of two or three glasses of cow urine for ten days every spring and autumn.²⁰ Meat, milk, dung and urine – cows really are man’s best friend! In 1755, Polycarpe Poncelet, a Recollet monk and keen agronomist, published a recipe for a cheap and excellent liqueur that simply required distilling a ripe cow pat in brandy. It is unlikely that the smell and taste would go down well with modern consumers … yet Poncelet was by no means joking: he was very keen to prove the health-giving properties of such liqueurs and the harmony of their flavours. Unfortunately, he neglected to mention where his delightful cow-pat-based drink came in his own theory of a correspondence between the ‘delicious music’ of the seven full notes and the ‘seven primitive flavours’: acid, piquant, insipid, sweet, bitter, bittersweet and austere.²¹

Like any raw material, urine and excrement were grist to the mill of rapidly expanding trade capitalism. They gave rise to surprising new black markets, as enterprising individuals spotted gaps for niche products, as they have always done. A royal decree of 1667 records the criminal activities of numerous market gardeners in La Villette, now in northern Paris, who fed their dogs and pigs on human excrement ‘harvested’ with the help of a corrupt night soil man.²² It is no exaggeration that the raw material was worth its weight in gold to the farmers working the land around Paris, furnishing vital fertilizer for vegetable fields, fruit orchards and vineyards outside the city. Without it, the lucrative market for intensively farmed produce destined for Paris would not have flourished. However, the regulations on such fertilizers were cautious, banning their use unless they had been kept in a dump for three years and reduced to powder. Even so, some specialists complained that the practice only yielded ‘poor seed and vegetables that are harmful to health’. There is no way of knowing whether the taste of such produce worked like Proust’s madeleine on the consumers who produced the organic fertilizer that grew the food. At least it can be said that the persistent ring of fug around the capital was the result of active and ongoing collaboration between Parisians and their more rural cousins.

It was even relatively common practice for farmers to sneak in overnight and steal night soil from the dumps where it was left to dry out, despite warnings from agronomists who were of the firm belief that using fresh excrement as fertilizer gave fruit and vegetables a foul smell. However, the rural population resisted pressure and obstinately refused to use the stinking sludge from various sources stocked in separate dumps, though the source was ten times larger than the city’s holdings of excrement in three permanent dumps that survived until 1779. These were estimated to have taken in 27,000 cubic metres of sewage in 1775 alone. The sewage dumps in Faubourg Saint-Germain and Faubourg Saint-Marceau had been moved some four kilometres out of town back in 1760, the aim being to avoid ‘foul air’ contaminating the foodstuffs transported through the vicinity, including fresh bread baked in Gonesse, north-east of the city. A further aim was to avoid visitors arriving in Paris from being assailed by a terrible stench. The third such dump, in Montfaucon near Buttes-Chaumont (now a park in north-east Paris), was the only one still in service in 1781. It had had a terrible reputation since the days of the late medieval poet François Villon, who wrote of the rows of hanged bodies dangling from the gallows there. Its ten hectares of cesspits full of fermenting sewage and its slaughterhouse piled high with rotting carcases could almost have been something out of Dante’s Inferno.

Even the heart of Paris was an unpleasant experience for the sensitive of nose. Sewage was removed from the Île de la Cité and Notre Dame neighbourhoods by boat, leading to complaints from local residents that they were forced to keep their windows closed and noxious emissions from the boats were tarnishing and bleaching their silverware, gilding and mirrors. The black, nauseating, corrosive sludge was a nightmare for people walking the streets of a city where pavements were few and far between. Over the course of the eighteenth century, work to remove the sludge, overseen by the lieutenant of police, had limited success. First, rag-and-bone men would go through the streets picking up anything of any value, including dead dogs and cats, to sell on. Then came the rubbish carts. To meet the needs of the swelling population, they doubled in capacity in around 1748 to reach 1.5 cubic metres. By 1780, 500 such carts were doing the rounds of the Paris streets every day. At the same time, the city’s seventy sewers, in dire need of maintenance, frequently overflowed, flooding the surrounding streets with sludge whenever there was a storm. Urban sprawl spread out to absorb the dumps that had lain outside the city since the days of Louis XIII, so that an unbearable stench drifted over the surrounding neighbourhoods whenever the wind blew in a westerly or south-westerly direction. The Vaugirard dump stank out Chaillot and Passy. The situation became so untenable by 1758 that the Royal Council ordered new dumps to be created well beyond the faubourgs. The lieutenant of police Henri Bertin (a favourite of Madame de Pompadour) estimated the annual cost of cleaning the city streets at 56,000 livres, given the distances covered: cleaning the sludge may have been one source of his considerable wealth.²³

Sewage was big business. When fines and corporal punishment were brought in for anyone caught relieving themselves outdoors, in around 1771, the lieutenant of police Antoine de Sartine had barrels set up on street corners for anyone caught short. Some ten years later, one enterprising Parisian came up with a folding portable privy, charging four sous a go. He soon had competition. The Tuileries terraces were so filthy and stank so badly that Louis XVI’s Director of the King’s Buildings had the yew trees lining the walk cut down. Rather than hiding beneath them to defecate discreetly, visitors could now use the latrines installed there at a cost of two sous. Finding the cost too high, many people simply crossed the river to Palais-Royal. The police had no control over the Palais, which was the property of the Duc d’Orléans. To stem the tide of urine, he had twelve privies built, earning him 12,000 livres in income in 1798, spinning filth into gold like something out of a fairy tale. A three-act tragedy published in 1777 by Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Nougaret and Jean-Henri Marchand, Le Vidangeur sensible [The Sensitive Night Soil Man], foreshadowed Freudian psychoanalysis in drawing a clear link between excrement and money. It starts with an argument between a wastrel son and his tormented father, William Sentfort [Smellstrong], who refuses to let his son and heir’s intemperate excesses dishonour his family and eventually poisons him. Early in the play, one of the son’s friends tries to persuade him of the value of his humble trade: ‘The disgusting mines you together dig shall one day become mines of gold.’ The wastrel son’s reply: ‘It is true he converts foul change into fine silver. I often let him work with his boys while I go and play.’