Gilded Age Bathing à la Française

“Queen Marie Antoinette made liberal use of a “tub,” putting into the water wild thyme, laurel leaves, marjory and a little sea salt.” – on French bathing in 1893
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 French styles in under garments, fashions, fads and fancies have always been popular with America’s young women, and were especially so during the gilded age. Above is a period advertisement for “French Model Corsets.”

Gilded Bathing in Paris

All fashionable Paris is buying a new volume entitled "Directions for Woman's Toilet," and the publication of such a book in France is not without significance as a sign of how ideas are progressing in that country.

“Unhappy ages,” says the author, “in which people were ignorant of the use of water, ‘a thousand years without a bath,’ as Michelet puts it in one of his historical works. Bad pestilences and other horrible maladies desolated poor humanity- in fact, only to read how the courtiers of Louis XIV neglected their persons makes one sick with disgust.”

Even in the unwashed ages gone by the noted beauties found out the secret of preserving their loveliness by ablutionary aids. Isabeau of Bavaria heard that chickweed was good for the skin, and had enormous decoctions brewed and bathed in them daily. Diana of Poitiers was another of the cleanly coquettes and plunged into a tub of rain-water every morning.

The Eighteenth century beauties likewise went in for tubbing, and put all sorts of funny decoctions into the water to improve their skin, such as the bouillion in which veal had been broiled, water distilled from the honey extracted from roses, a preparation of almonds, lemon juice, the milky juices of green barley and linseed distilled with Mexican balm dissolved by the yolk of an egg. These rather nasty sounding concoctions were freely used by the ladies who sunned themselves at the courts of Louis before the revolution.

Queen Marie Antoinette made liberal use of a “tub,” putting into the water wild thyme, laurel leaves, marjory and a little sea salt. Marie Czetwertynoska, the Russian beauty who exercised so great an influence over Czar Alexander I, used to bathe in Malaga wine, after which the wine was sold to persons about the court for their table consumption without disguise as to its previous use.-Paris Letter, 1893

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