Free Kate Berridge by Madame Tussaud: A Life in Wax

young boys would lay down planks for passers-by. Street valets similarly made a living with a form of on-the-spot dry-cleaning service so that people could still appear presentable. They would whiten stockings with a coating of flour, and blacken shoes with a mixture of oil and soot. The streets also stank of the animal and human ordure–hence the development of scent and a burgeoning consumer market for pleasant smells: the parfum for which Paris remains famous originated as air freshener.
    One of the most precious commodities was water. Only a third of houses had their own wells, and migrants from the Auvergne carted large barrels through the streets from which they sold water for a few sous a pail. They did a brisk trade, as public fountains were often dry. In a city where daily newspapers were in limited supply, and literacy by no means commonplace, the water carriers also acted as a valued news service, taking the latest gossip from one district to another. With tallow factories, tanneries and slaughterhouses all sluicing out their waste into the Seine, cleanliness was ambitious, and spotting a vast gap in the market the Perrier brothers, before they started bottling water, pioneered water supply for domestic premises. Familiarity with filth gave rise to popular beliefs that it was actually beneficial, and it was widely thought that a thick crust of dirt on a baby’s head would promote growth. Similarly, it was widely believed that bodily contact with water was harmful for health and weakened the internal organs, so bathing was not common practice. While Parisians prided themselves on keeping up appearances by wearing the requisite fashionable details such as lace ruffles and going to great trouble to style their hair, the reality was that under both the second-hand wigs of the poor and the society ladies’ more elaborate horsehair padded wigs were itching weals on unwashed scalps. On closer inspection lace ruffles revealed a thin dusting of white powder to hide dirt, for as Mercier said, ‘Cleanliness no one expects, but it is only decent to seem well to do.’ The skewed priorities were such that a Parisian visited a hairdresser every day, but put on clean clothes only once a month.
    As an entertainment district, the Boulevard du Temple was permanently thronged. Marie only had to step outside to be plunged into a mêlée of people selling a vast range of goods and services,encompassing domestic needs and practical amenities, besides the purely recreational diversions. Given the restrictions on print for public display, street cries were still the most common form of advertising. The soundtrack of Marie’s life then was a perpetual chorus of public announcements and invitations to buy, from the simple ‘Portugal! Portugal!’ of the orange-sellers to the barkers with their exaggerated claims for assorted entertainments. There were also the shouts of the oyster-sellers, or écaillers –the hot-dog vendors of the day–who could bisect the bivalves in seconds with an expert flourish of a knife and who sold sugared barley water in the months when oysters were not in season. Also part of the urban cacophony was the ubiquitous hurdy-gurdy.
    Increasingly popular in the streets too were the mobile coffee-sellers, and the sheer numbers of them in this period represent the democratization of a drink that was formerly a luxury. Whereas an Englishman was said to have snuff in his pocket at all times, a Frenchman had sugar, for the increased sugar supply from the plantations in the West Indies had made sweetened coffee the preferred drink. Coffee wars broke out between the coffee women on the street corners, with their tin urns and earthenware cups, and the confectioners who sold the same coffee at more than twice the price in the mirrored splendour of cafés–although, as Mercier noted, workmen had neither the time nor the inclination to be looking at themselves while they drank.