Why Living in Versailles Was Pure Nightmare Fuel скачать в хорошем качестве

Why Living in Versailles Was Pure Nightmare Fuel

Gilded halls. Crystal chandeliers. Ten thousand people crammed into one palace — and almost no plumbing. Welcome back to Rotten Ages, where today we’re pulling back the velvet curtain on the Palace of Versailles. Because behind all that gold and glamour was one of history’s most spectacular hygiene disasters. In 1682, Louis XIV moved his entire court to Versailles permanently — nobles, servants, officials, soldiers, all packed together. Over 10,000 people living shoulder to shoulder in a 17th-century palace with virtually no modern sanitation. The result? Catastrophic. Let’s start with the basics: nobody was bathing. The prevailing belief at the time was that hot water widened the pores and let disease in. Louis XIV himself is said to have bathed only a handful of times in his entire life. Marie-Antoinette bathed once a month — and even then, it wasn’t really about getting clean. Instead, courtiers wiped themselves down with perfumed cloths and absolutely drowned themselves in perfume. Louis XIV’s court was literally nicknamed la cour parfumée — the perfumed court — because the smell underneath was that bad. And then there were the lice. Rampant, inescapable, everywhere. The aristocracy was infested — including royals. Wigs became fashionable partly to deal with this: shave your crawling head, slap on a powdered wig, problem (sort of) solved. Lice remedies of the era included rubbing a paste of arsenic, quicksilver, and butter onto your scalp. The cure was arguably worse than the infestation. Now for the truly rotten part: waste disposal. Versailles had public latrines, but nowhere near enough for 10,000 people. They constantly overflowed, and sewage seeped through walls and floors into neighboring rooms. Chamber pots were dumped out of windows — and eyewitness accounts confirm that even Marie-Antoinette was reportedly hit by flying waste. Courtiers who couldn’t be bothered to find a chamber pot simply went in the corridors. A German princess visiting in 1702 wrote in horror that people were urinating in every corner of the galleries outside her room. Contemporary observer Turneau de la Morandière described Versailles as “the receptacle of all humanity’s horrors,” with passageways and courtyards filled with human waste. The first flush toilet at Versailles wasn’t installed until 1738 — for Louis XV’s personal use. Everyone else? Chamber pots and corners. And if the smell, the lice, and the open sewage weren’t enough — the contamination got into the food too. Louis XVI himself reportedly suffered multiple bouts of tapeworm. The latrines leaked into kitchens. Pipes corroded and “poisoned everything” near Marie-Antoinette’s kitchen. Versailles wasn’t dirty because people didn’t care — it was dirty because 10,000 people were performing the theater of power in a building never designed to handle them. Appearances mattered more than plumbing. You didn’t have to be clean. You just had to seem clean. Rotten, indeed. Sources: • Ranker — “What Was Hygiene Like at the Court of Versailles?” by Setareh Janda • Rose George — The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters (2008) • Alain Corbin — The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (1986) • Eleanor Herman — The Royal Art of Poison (2018) • Primary source: Princess Elizabeth Charlotte of the Palatinate (Liselotte von der Pfalz), personal letters, 1702 • Primary source: Turneau de la Morandière, 18th-century contemporary account of Versailles