The French nobility are not famed for their sanitary restraint. In the eighteenth century they blithely reached new levels of degradation. But perhaps no-one could better these two noble ladies for bloody-minded depravity.
The Princesse d’Harcourt…
was a glutton, and so eager to relieve herself that she drove her hostesses to
desperation, for although she never denied herself the use of the convenience
on leaving table, she sometimes allowed herself no time to reach it at leisure,
leaving a dreadful trail behind her that made the servants of M. du Maine and
M. le Grand wish her to the devil. As for her, she was never in the least
embarrassed, but lifted her skirts and went her way, saying on her return that
she had felt a little faint.
(Duc de Saint-Simon –
Memoirs of Louis XIV and His Court c.1750)
The
Duchess of Orléans, sister-in-law to Louis XIII, even lacked the discipline to
wait until dinner was served…
She had contracted a singular habit of always running into another
room, pour se placer sur la Chaise percée, when dinner was announced. As
she never failed in this particular, the Grand Maître, or Lord Steward of
Gaston’s Household, who performed the ceremony of summoning their Royal
Highnesses to table, observed, smelling to his Baton of office, that there must
certainly be either Senna or Rhubarb in its composition, as it invariably
produced the effect of sending the Duchess to the Garderobe.
(Sir Nathaniel Wraxall – Historical Memoirs 1815)
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