The Smelly History of French Royals at the Palace of Versailles
Beneath its opulence, the palace had a dirty secret
that no visitor would ever forget
Sajjad
Choudhury
May 14,
2021
IIt’s the
18th century, and you’re in the grand palace of Versailles, the seat of French
power and royalty. You gaze at the ornate paintings and beautiful marble
structures only to be distracted by something that seems off. It’s a smell but
not one that you’d expect from a majestic palace; it reeks of feces and urine.
Everywhere
you go, you’re reminded of the foul stench that emanates from the walls, from
the cesspits, and even from the gardens. No place is safe.
Although
today we think of Versailles as an architectural masterpiece, to the people
living there, it was like being in a smelly nightmare. But how did it get so
bad, and why did the French nobility tolerate such horrible conditions?
The answer
lies in common hygiene practices or the lack of them.
Disease Riddled the Court
Louis XIV
(1638–1715) was known to have only bathed three times in his entire life.
Although the palace of Versailles had running water and numerous baths, there
was a common belief that water spread disease, so the less you bathed, the
safer you were. As a result, the king would often encourage his courtiers not
to bathe at all.
Of course,
you can imagine what would happen if hundreds of people who never bathed roamed
around a palace in close proximity; awful body odour!
Not
everyone had access to a bath anyway. Although the king and other aristocrats
would wipe themselves with a wet cloth, the baths were usually reserved for
intimacy rather than for cleanliness.
Instead,
the emphasis was placed on washing one’s face rather than one’s body, leaving
many to wonder how so many courtesans and mistresses were at the palace.
The sheer
amount of people, along with the squalid filth in which they lived, led to the
spread of syphilis, a disease that riddled the nobility at Versailles and
plagued the court up until the French Revolution.
Smallpox
was another terror, and two epidemics swept through Paris in 1719 and 1723.
There was no cure, and if you did survive, it would leave pockmarks on your
face, or if you were really unlucky, turn you blind. It infiltrated the palace
of Versaille as well and famously killed Louis XV.
But it
wasn’t just disease affecting the body that plagued Versailles. The lack of
hygiene practices meant that many French aristocrats would be infested with
lice. Compound this with the fact that you could lose hair as a side effect of
syphilis, and it’s no wonder why many opted to wear wigs.
We like to
imagine that the powdered wigs were for fashion, but they were merely designed
to hide the fact that many men and women simply shaved their heads. The irony
was that the same practice was employed by Ancient Egyptians over 2000 years
ago!
The lice
would still infest the wigs, but it was much easier to clean them than your own
natural hair as you could immerse the wig in boiling water which would kill any
nits or eggs.
Still, this
was an accepted way of life, and no one was safe from disease because no one
practised proper hygiene, not even the rich and wealthy who appeared to be more
susceptible than even the masses.
Only Clean Clothing Was Important
The one
thing that the French nobility did maintain was their clothing. Bedsheets and
undergarments were made of linen as it was believed that these could absorb
dirt and grime.
When filth
was everywhere, wearing a clean white shirt was seen as a sign of wealth.
Consequently, Louis XIV would change his shirt multiple times a day and
reportedly change his undergarments three times a day too!
However,
this rule did not extend to outer garments, which would be tricky to wash due
to being made from fur or being covered in jewellery. Some of these garments
would likely never be washed and instead be left to dry out in the air. While
some aristocrats had a huge wardrobe of clothes to choose from, lesser nobles
could not afford them and had to make do with wearing smelly clothes.
Of course,
good clothes didn’t mask the stench of body odour or even foul-smelling breath.
Louis XIV developed a fistula between his mouth and nose, which caused his
breath to smell bad. Many other nobles suffered from poor dental hygiene as
well, with the king's spouse, Maria Theresa having really bad teeth by the time
she was 22 and married.
So how did
the French royalty cover these smells up? By spraying copious amounts of
perfume.
Louis XIV’s
mistress, Madame de Montespan, bathed in water scented with vanilla and applied
heavy doses of perfume because she couldn’t stand the king’s smell.
Masking bad
smells with perfume became such a trend that many nobles had their own
‘brands’.
It became
the custom for people of rank to superintend the making of the special
fragrances they favoured. The Prince of Condé, for instance, always had his
favourite snuff scented in his presence. The Duchesse d’Aumont’s scent was
known as ‘à la Maréchale’ (she was married to the Marshall of France), and was
created from coriander, sweet flag (iris) and nut grass. Madame du Barry‘s
favourite scent came from an Italian perfumer, Giovanni Maria Farina: Aqua
Mirabilis, the original eau de Cologne (as it became known as), upliftingly
scented with bergamot, neroli, lavender, rosemary, in grape spirit.
As the
years went on, the role of the perfumer became more glamorous. A young man
named Jean-Louis Fargeon caught the attention of Marie-Antoinette, the wife of
Louis XVI, and he was later invited to become her chief perfumer.
So the next
time you apply some French fragrance, remember its origin. Remember that a few
hundred years ago, it wasn’t just used to enhance a person’s scent; it was also
used to mask the hideous smell of body odour, bad breath, and sweat and grime.
The Palace Itself Was Filthy
During the
18th and 19th centuries, people would do their business in chamber pots. These
would be thrown into a cesspit or, more commonly in some cases, be thrown out
the window. However, large palaces like Versaille were awash with feces and
urine. In the Royal Art of Poison, Eleanor Herman described how:
‘Some
courtiers didn’t bother to look for a chamber pot but just dropped their
britches and did their business — all of their business — in the staircase, the
hallway, or the fireplace’
In a 1645
report of the Louvre Palace in Paris:
‘On the
grand staircases’ and ‘behind the doors and almost everywhere one sees there a
mass of excrement, one smells a thousand unbearable stenches caused by calls of
nature which everyone goes to do there every day.’
The
situation at Versaille, however, was grimmer. There could be 10,000 people on a
given day, and all the waste that accumulated had to go somewhere, right?
According
to historian Tony Spawforth, a lot of this was simply thrown outside. Marie-Antoinette
was once hit by human waste as she walked through the inner courtyard,
prompting her courtiers to rush back and get a new pair of clothes.
And if that
wasn’t bad enough, pipes carrying waste would sometimes leak into bedrooms, and
blockages would cause a buildup of toxic fumes leading to even more sickness.
Even the
gardens weren’t safe from the filth.
‘The
passages, the court yards, the wings and the corridors were full of urine and
fecal matter. The park, the gardens and the chateau made one retch with their
bad smell’
One of the
reasons for this was that Versailles was built on former marshland, and some
areas still retained a foul odour. When summer came, this was even worse as the
smell would mingle with the sweat, feces, and grime creating a truly pungent
mix.
No matter
where you were, inside the palace or outside in the courtyards, the stench was
everywhere!
The squalor
of Versailles wasn’t unique to France, and many palaces throughout Europe were
just as filthy. But what made Versailles far worse was its sheer size, both in
how much land it took up, as well as the number of people that inhabited it.
With no
concern for personal hygiene, it was inevitable that it would reek of filth. It
makes you wonder that if this was how the upper classes lived, how bad must it
have been for the masses?
While today
we can gaze at the opulence and grandeur of Versailles, let’s not forget that
beneath the rose-tinted view, it harboured a very smelly secret that lasted for
centuries.
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