Sasha today in its history.
Author: Sasha
This article is Sasha's original and will not be reprinted by any media
The luxurious Palace of Versailles in France is full of open defecation? 6 May 1682: King Louis XIV of France announces the relocation of the court from the Louvre in Paris to the Palace of Versailles.
Is it true that the most luxurious Palace of Versailles in France does not have toilets?
Almost.
When Sasha went on a tour to the Palace of Versailles, the French Chinese brother introduced this to me.
Seeing the splendid Palace of Versailles, I really can't believe that there are not many toilets, and most of the people in the palace are defecating on the ground.
Take the Forbidden City in Beijing as an example, although toilets are also very rare, after all, there are special rooms for placing toilets, which is equivalent to public toilets. All kinds of people in the palace use these toilets for convenience, and there will be dung trucks to clean up the feces every day, and there are special people to wash the toilets.
In terms of health, the Forbidden City is still OK.
This is not the case for many courts in the world, and the cities of ancient France were relatively dirty.
In ancient Paris, there were gutters on both sides of the street like in China, and every morning residents poured feces and urine on the side of the road.
Unlike China, these feces and urine are not cleaned by special cleaners and have to wait for rain before being washed into a nearby river.
Fortunately, there are more rainy days in Paris, and it will definitely rain within a week, and the rain is an automatic cleaner.
Even so, even if the feces are exposed to the street for a day or two, they will stink and make people feel dirty.
And this kind of citizens who dump feces on both sides of the street downstairs are still considered to have public morality.
Many citizens who live upstairs are even more exaggerated, they do not want to go downstairs to pour feces and urine, so they directly fall down from the second floor balcony.
If someone happened to walk by at the time, they would be drenched.
To this end, there was a decree in Paris in 1270: "No one may throw a toilet on the balcony, and the offender shall be fined." ”
However, this decree is difficult to implement, so before it is changed to spilling, you must ask loudly three times whether there are people nearby to prevent people from pouring a poop.
As paris grows in population, so does the health problem.
The gutters on the side of the street cannot hold so much feces and urine, and the feces and water flow directly to the street surface, and pedestrians can only try to get around.
One theory is that the French invented high heels in the seventeenth century to make up for the short stature of some aristocrats.
At that time, there was dung on many streets, and aristocratic women liked to wear long skirts, and it was easy to get their clothes dirty when walking. After putting on high heels, the long skirt is not easy to mop the floor and touch the feces, and it becomes much cleaner.
In other words, high heels were first used to avoid feces.
The advanced underground drainage system in Paris was only built by Napoleon III in the nineteenth century. For hundreds of years, the city of Paris had been flooded with rain.
At this time, many streets in the city are quite scary, soaked in foul-smelling dung water.
In this case, the Paris government began to hire a large number of cleaning workers, using dung trucks to transport feces and urine to dig pits outside Paris to accumulate.
Feces were difficult to move farther away, and soon piles of dung, and even mountains of dung, soon appeared.
How exaggerated are these dung mountains?
When foreign enemies invaded, the Parisians had to urgently push down the dung mountain to prevent the enemy from attacking the city of Paris from the top of the dung mountain.
Therefore, the whole city is usually strangely smelly.
When the American ambassador Franklin first came to Paris in 1776, he almost fainted.
In this environment, the Palace of Versailles is understandably dirty.
In Versailles, the king, queen and others had their own toilets (inlaid chairs, a kind of seat inlaid with night pots) and did not need any public toilets. According to statistics, there were 274 recessed chairs in the Palace of Versailles during the time of Louis XIV, and the members of the royal family were enough.
There are only 30 small public toilets in the palace for other people.
The Palace of Versailles has more than 2,300 houses, and in its heyday there were 36,000 princes and grandchildren, noblewomen, princes and nobles, bishops and their attendants and servants who lived in the palace.
Only these few toilets, so many people are naturally not enough.
Except for the royal relatives, the men and women in versailles basically urinate in the garden or grass outside the palace.
Nobles such as princesses or countesses, with the phrase "I go to pick a flower", enter the garden and squat casually.
Interestingly, women in the court often wear skirts with large skirt supports and complicated skirts, and as long as they pay attention to them when squatting, they will not go out.
As for men, there is no taboo, excreted everywhere. The guards standing guard even pulled open their pants and urinated on the side of the road. Louis XIV's sister-in-law, Madame Paratina, complained many times that every time she went out, she saw soldiers standing guard, urinating unscrupulously in front of women. Those bare male organs made her feel ashamed and annoyed.
These people's defecation is outside the palace, and the impact inside the palace is not great.
Terriblely, versailles received many people every day, such as nobles, ministers, priests, diplomats, and so on.
These people are usually older and have the appearance of an old dragon clock. Once the elderly urinate urgently, they simply can't rush to the toilet in the distance, and they can't squeeze into the narrow toilet, most of them are solved on the spot.
Many of them were facing the fireplace in the remote room, urinating or even pooping. Some people don't have time to find a fireplace, so they simply find a corridor where no one is pulled on the floor, or find a room where no one is pulled behind the door. Anyway, there are many servants here, and someone will come to clean it every day.
Even the 30 public toilets do not have today's pumping facilities. There are too many convenient people every day, the public toilets are full of feces and urine, the smell is unbearable, and there is even no place to stand, and ordinary people are not willing to go in. Within a few tens of meters of the public toilet, you can smell the smell and make the scenery.
When Voltaire lived in the Louvre, the room was not far from the public toilet, and he smelled a strong odor every day. Voltaire was furious and believed that the king had deliberately despised him. The attendant immediately explained that in fact, the public toilet was upstairs, because the perennial feces and urine overflowed, resulting in infiltration downstairs, which affected Voltaire's room downstairs. As for the king, of course, he did not know this, so he gave Voltaire to live here, not deliberately rectifying him.
More importantly, such public toilets are male and female. If it is convenient for a woman to go, she also needs to bring a female companion to let her guard the door. If the woman goes alone, it is very likely that a man will break in when tidying up the dress, resulting in a spring break.
In fact, it was not the case at Versailles, which was the case in many palaces in France at that time.
On 8 August 1606, the King of France issued an order on the use of toilets, which strictly prohibited anyone from urinating or defecating in the Palace of Saint-Germain. This open defecation refers to being on the floor, in a corner, or in a staircase. Naturally, this decree is also invalid.
Then again, the European courts were generally like this at the time.
In the summer of 1665, King Charles II took a large number of nobles on a holiday to Oxford.
Afterwards, a local businessman complained that although they looked neatly dressed and happy, they were very rude and rude. When they left, all the places, in the chimneys, in the study, in the bedrooms, in the cellars, were full of the excrement they excreted.
Interestingly, it was the French Revolution that ended all this at Versailles.
During the Revolution, the masses stormed the Palace of Versailles, drove Louis XVI out, and eventually cut off his head. The Palace of Versailles was repeatedly looted by the people, the furniture, frescoes, tapestries, chandeliers and furnishings in the palace were looted, and the doors and windows of the palace were smashed and demolished. In 1793, the remaining works of art and furniture in versailles were transferred to the Louvre, another artistic treasure in Paris, and versailles became empty.
Since then, the Palace of Versailles has ceased to be inhabited and was later converted into a museum.
That way, at least it won't be bothered by anymore.
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