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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   22859 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026

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I ran it through ChatGPT and /r/askhistorians for a source and apparently it isn't a pure invention. The rumors about a person peeing on themselves weren't about Marie Antoinette either (though the below book's assertion that it was cheerfully accepted is weird since the original source is unflattering). Tony Spaworth's book on it does mostly complain about the smell leaking from nearby latrines so maybe the regularity of that was conflated with people in the public galleries "pissing in all corners" as Princess Charlotte apparently complained being standard practice.

Sanitation, or lack of it, did something to level these differences in living conditions. Although French people of the time saw Louis XIV’s Versailles as a gold standard of refinement, older habits died hard. Versailles “cheerfully accepted” the princesse d’Harcourt, whose obnoxious behavior—she sometimes relieved herself in her skirts, nonchalantly leaving a foul trail behind her for the servants to clean up—was like a throwback to a less polite age, when aristocrats had bothered themselves less with self-restraint.

Even members of the royal family—women as well as men, the king included—thought nothing of giving audiences or chatting to intimates while installed on the closestool. In 1723 the high-living Regent received Saint-Simon in this way at Versailles the morning after one of his late-night suppers, horrifying his friend by his befuddled manner and thick voice. Within a month the Regent was dead.

The privies of Louis XIV’s Versailles have so far escaped close study. In the eighteenth century there were public latrines placed in the corridors and stairwells of the palace, the Grand Commons, and the other annexes: these latrines consisted of a room with a wooden seat, or lunette, closed by a cover in a vain attempt to shut in the odors, and connected by a waste pipe to a cesspit. Some were kept locked and the key distributed to nearby residents.

Versailles was no different from Paris in the squalor of this type of latrine. For instance, in 1785 we find seven lodgers in the attics of the Grand Commons, among them one of the king’s dressers and one of the queen’s chaplains, petitioning for the closing down of a fourth-floor privy because “the smell penetrates the lodgings … and infects furnishing, clothes and linen,” as well as “serving certain riff-raff who use it as a meeting place.”

Noble courtiers fared no better. In 1766 the king’s daughter, Madame Adélaïde, demanded new rooms for a lady-in-waiting lodged above the queen’s apartment, “far too near the privy.” Two years earlier the comtesse du Châtelet, who lived in the attics of the south wing, complained of the smell from the nearby privy and also—a glimpse of the cheek-by-jowl living at Versailles—of the fact that she could be seen in her cabinet from its window.

To the smell was added the risk of leaks, whether through the floor of latrines to lodgings beneath them, from which not even the rooms of the royal children were safe, or from iron or lead pipes prone to blockage and corrosion, like the ones that let their contents “leak and poison everything” in Marie-Antoinette’s kitchen.

If people found the latrines closed, they would relieve themselves in the public corridor, as happened in 1741 after a privy in the attics of the north wing was converted into a lodging. People did the same in the first-floor gallery of the south wing. When the newly married dauphin and dauphine were lodged here in 1745, iron barriers were placed in front of the arcades opposite their rooms “to prevent indecency and dirtiness.” In 1762 the comte de Compans complained about the passersby and kitchen boys who “attended to their needs” in an inner courtyard in the same wing, “often breaking his windows,” presumably because he remonstrated with them. Bombelles, an admirer of Versailles under Louis XVI, wrote in his journal that more effort could be made to address the “dirtiness” of the public galleries.

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