Читать книгу Smells - Robert Muchembled - Страница 16

Nineteenth-century hygienists, appalled at the filth and stink of the villages they visited, bequeathed later generations a very negative image of rural life. Yet in insisting on the need to control odour pollution in the countryside, they were merely projecting their own standards of decency onto country folk. The civilized noses of today, even that of the careless historian, experience the countryside as ‘a concentration of bad smells: sweaty livestock, poultry droppings, rotting rat carcases, bodies living together in a single room, rubbish hidden in dark corners, and combustible fumes steaming from the dung heap outside the door’.²⁷ The country folk themselves had a very different point of view, using the height of dung heaps as a measure of wealth, as has been seen. They were also practical, as the locals used them to relieve themselves. One villager in Flers, near Douai in northern France, was accidentally shot in the buttock at dusk on 17 December 1651 as he ‘did his easement on a mound outside his house’.²⁸ Nor were powerful smells of human or animal origin considered repulsive, particularly as they fulfilled significant social and cultural functions for the community as a whole.²⁹ It is more than likely that for such villagers, their city visitors were the ones who smelled unpleasant.

The myth of the terrible stench polluting the country air spread along with the ‘civilizing process’ from the seventeenth century on, when life in urban centres and at court was increasingly shaped by refined codes of civility that rejected animality and gave rise to new expectations of modest behaviour. Previously, bodily functions were openly carried out in public. Even the king gave audiences from his commode, a practice that proved fatal to Henri III of France, stabbed to death while on the ‘throne’ by the monk Jacques Clément. People would relieve themselves wherever convenient. The seventeenth-century scholar Antoine Furetière recounted an anecdote from the court of Louis XIII in which the queen’s gentleman usher let go of her hand to go and urinate on a wall hanging. The great puddle that formed at the feet of Mademoiselle de Lafayette on another occasion simply made the king laugh. It was common to urinate in corners, on staircases and particularly in fireplaces.³⁰ While such behaviour met with increasing disapproval among the upper classes, it remained common practice lower down the social scale, feeding into elite attitudes of scorn for the masses.

The county of Artois, a province of the Spanish Netherlands before it was conquered by Louis XIII’s troops, offered a rich documentary record of the lives of the rural population. Drinkers at country inns would ‘make water’ outside, in the garden or outbuildings, on the walls of the inn itself or the nearest church or graveyard wall. Some even simply urinated out of the nearest window, like one young man in 1602 who found it highly amusing to soak anyone unfortunate enough to be standing outside. Some documents record the existence of channels in the floor at the foot of each table. Apparently the smell was not a problem. One constant practice was urinating in the fireplace, even when it was lit. One evening in around 1550–1, in Éperlecques, near Saint-Omer in northern France, the innkeeper’s wife was sitting by the hearth when two drunken young bachelors came in to urinate on the fire. One of them turned and splashed her, perhaps as a joke. The other criticized his ungentlemanly behaviour. A quarrel broke out, and the splasher ended up dying from a stab wound. The rural population was aware of the new codes of decency, as the second man’s disapproval in this case indicates. However, his comment on the wrong done to the innkeeper’s wife was intended mainly as an appeal to clemency from the judges at his own trial for murder. After all, he had himself 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.