OLDEN TIME MANNERS.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume VIII, Issue 43, 24 October 1891, Page 505

OLDEN TIME MANNERS.

#NTIL about the year 1650 all the barbers in France and most other countries of Europe practised the art ot surgery. In dark and dirty shops they shaved and bled, cut hair and applied cupping glasses, opened tumours, and performed surgical operations still more difficult and dangerous. They were despised as labourers, as everyone was despised who made a practical application of his knowledge in the form of a trade regularly followed. As a class they were much liked by the common people, who applied to them for all ordinary medical service, but as society became more refined, and consequently more exacting in respect to neatness, it became necessary to separate the care of the hair and beard from the treatment of diseases, not only because the association of the two professions was often repugnant in itself, but there was ' great danger of the transmission of diseases. Louis XIII. first ordered the separation of the two professions, directing that the barbers should confine themselves to the hair and beard and operations incidental thereto, but the shavers and hair-cutters appealing to Parliament the matter dragged on for nearly forty years, and was not definitely decided until the issue of an edict by Louis XIV. in 1673. As a French writer remarks, this was none too soon, it being absolutely necessary that there should be a trade whose business it should be to care for the general neatness of the public. At this epoch the Parisians, and much more the inhabitants of the other cities of France, had almost lost the habit of cleansing the face and hands with water, to say nothing of other parts of the body. In the dark ages it had not been quite so bad, there remaining in Gaul something of the Roman custom of bathing, which gradually disappeared, owing to the opposition of the monks and clergy. An ecclesiastical work published in 1760 declares that the use of the bath is only to be regarded as a necessity, never as a luxury. So filthy were the monks of the fifteenth century that they put to Hight the beggars at their gates if the wind happened to blow from the direction of the monastery. Nuns of the same epoch and later were no better provided for, as we learn from the experience of a noble lady, who, being a temporary inmate of a convent, and having demanded a foot-bath, was refused by the superior, the luxury being unheard of within those walls. In default of other appliance she made use of an old trunk, with no other result than to produce a general inundation of the sacred edifice. In 1292 there were twenty-six public baths in Paris, then a small city. Bath tubs were common in private houses at the same epoch, made usually in the form of a half-hogshead, the use of metals for the purpose being unknown. Wash basins were also familiar objects in the palaces of kings and in the castles of the nobility. There were bath tubs at the barber’s shops, used indiscriminately, as it would appear, by the well and sick, a circumstance that helped to render neatness u npopular, and keep the people from visiting them. Therefore, the public baths being discontinued for want of patronage, and those at the barbers’ .shops feared for sanitary reasons, the practice of bathing, common to a certain class in the dark and the early part of the middle ages, disappeared. Having ceased to bathe the person, the hands and face became equally neglected, the application of water once a week being considered sufficient among the nobility, and once a month, or not at all among the burgesses and the common people. In one of her dialogues Margaret of Navarre, author of the ‘ Decameron,’says to an imaginary lover : * Look at these beautiful hands. I have not washed them for a week, but I will wager they are cleaner than yours.’ It was some two hundred years later that the eccentric Lady Mary Wortley, friend of Horace Walpole, made a reply quite as characteristic to some one who remarked that her hands were not as clean as they might be--* Si vous voyiez mespie /s.’ The habit of bathing was less common in England in the time of Queen Elizabeth than in France, whence it appears at this epoch to have almost disappeared. The virgin Queen insisted that the gentlemen and ladies of her court should be magnificently dressed, but their fine apparel often covered persons that were repulsive. Bath tubs were not common in the castles of the nobility, and they would not have been much used if they had been. Henry IV., who was Elizabeth’s contemporary, was as careless of his extremities as Lady Mary, if the Protestant d’Aubigny is to be believed ; but if this testimony is not sufficient we have that of another writer of the epoch, who alleges that the King was once told by a lady of his court that * he smelt like a dead horse.’ The generations that succeeded did not practise this cardinal virtue much more efficiently, but outraged neatness revenged itself in sending swarms of parasites to torment the human race. Methods of killing fleas and other animal-

cube that infest the human body, formed one of the principal features of the handbooks published in France during some hundreds of years. Recipes were given for ointments to be used as insecticides, which were the germ of all the cosmetics, pastes, essences and perfumes which have from that day to this been among the most essential elements of a lady’s toilet. The range for these toilet appliances was at its height at the commencement of the reign of Louis XIV. If at this epoch there was a festival given at the Louvre, noblemen and grand dames, reeking with the accumulated nastiness of weeks of abstinence from water, but arrayed in silks aud satins, and covered with pastes, perfumes and precious stones, came on horseback to the palace, the wife on a pillion behind her husband. Then they seated themselves at table, and, using a knife now and then (the fork had not yet come into general use), thrust the food into their mouths with their hands, making such constant use of the napkin that it was necessary to change it with every course. The use of the handkerchief was not then determined, and it was permitted to sc mouther at table, but always with the left hand, the right hand being needed to convey the food to the mouth.

In 1640 a book called ‘ The Laws of Gallantly ’ appeared in Paris, suggesting among other things that it would be well to go once in a while to the baths, and to wash the

hands at least once a day. The face, it is added, should be washed almost as often, the cheeks should be shaved, and at intervals it would not be a bad thing to wash the head. When society had arrived at such a degree of refinement that it seemed desirable to wash the face almost every day, it began to see that it was not a very sensible thing to be shaved or have the hair dressed by a barber who lanced ulcers, dressed wounds, and performed other common acts of surgery. So the barber’s duties became a trade apart, and the surgeon’s duties a nobler profession. ’ For generations after it became a sort of habit to wash the hands and face. Water was rather tolerated than loved and was used sparingly. Most of the people confined themselves to the use for the morning toilet of perfumed alcohol, applied to the face with a cotton ball or sponge. Throughout the middle ages and down to a date not long preceding the French Revolution, neatness was supposed to be a virtue appealing only to the eyes. If the principal garments and shoes were reasonably clean, one did not trouble himself greatly about what they might conceal. A manual of politeness published in the seventeenth century says one should keep the head, teeth, eyes and hands clean, and the feet sufficiently so not to 'fairc mat an cveur a eeux avec nous convcrsons.'