LOUIS XIV ROSE.
I had a girlfriend once who, rather than bother with a robe when she got out of bed, would slip on one of the ironed shirts hanging in my wardrobe. She was a dancer and economical in her movements, so the shirt seldom showed any more sign of use than a crease or two where she’d folded back the cuffs, so I’d return it to its hanger, and, wearing it a day later, enjoy the ghost of her presence; the faintest perfume, a breath of sweat.
As French laundering is, traditionally, the best is the world , I had high hopes when I moved to Paris. After all, maharajahs used to send their clothes here for cleaning. (A first visit to India suggested why. Linen services in California return your shirts boxed, with tissue between the folds. At the Royal Yacht Club in Mumbai, a relic of the British raj, with creaky wooden stairs leading to rooms floored with bare boards, vast enough to play cricket, they used newspaper.)
Royal Bombay Yacht Club.
For a while, a service around the corner in Paris offered repassage à l’ancienne - ironing in the old style. Inside her otherwise empty one-room shop, a tiny woman of uncertain age, alone and dressed entirely in black, spent the day working with two equally black irons, returning them in rotation to a hotplate that kept them barely below the temperature that would burn linen, cotton or silk. There was no steam; just a bottle from which she sprinkled a few drops of water. Periodically a young man – grandson? nephew? – loaded a van with her day’s product and disappeared across the river into those suburbs that could afford such personal service. I always meant to use her, but by the time we had the money to do so, she had closed the business. Besides, our daughter Louise had been born and Marie Dominique was back at work, necessitating the employment of a femme de ménage.
For centuries, Frenchwomen bored with the limited choices offered by the farm would head for the cities. Some married, others found jobs in shops or industry but many became femmes de ménage; maids of all work who did what all farm girls learned to do at home: cooking, cleaning, washing clothes, and caring for children. Creative people and intellectuals, chronically preoccupied and impractical, relied on them. Without their help, the Lost Generation would still be looking for their other sock. Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, despite Alice’s skill in the kitchen, employed a succession of cooks. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald paid Lillian Maddock US$26 a month as nanny for their daughter Scotty, congratulating themselves of having got a bargain: the going rate in New York was more than three times that.
Ernest and Hadley Hemingway, even when they lived in an apartment without heating or running water, had a woman named Marie Rohrbach to cook, clean and look after their son. She would also haul their laundry down to the Seine, where ancient boats, known as bateaux lavoir, acted as floating laundries. (When Picasso and Braque improvised studios in an old Montmartre piano factory that leaked and creaked in bad weather like those scows, they called it Le Bateau Lavoir, improbably co-opting the term into the lexicon of art.)
A bateau lavoir photographed by Eugene Atget in 1912
Today’s femmes de ménage are generally from Romania, Portugal or other countries where the art of ironing still flourishes, or at least survives. In return for not having to do it for oneself, we ignore the scorch marks, ironed-in grease stains and buttons either missing or cemented in place with starch. When I feel like complaining, I think of the ponds in villages around France where women used to pound clothes on the stones and rinse them in water so cold it left their hands chapped red and numb. Not everything was better à l’ancienne. At Bourbon Versailles, neither linen nor those who wore it was washed at all; in his lifetime Louis XIV took a total of two baths. The rest of the time, he just doused himself with rose water and put on a fresh shirt. His courtiers omitted the rose water.
Laundry as conducted in Australia during my childhood was better, but hadn’t changed in a century. Once a week, a husky lady with arms like hams would arrive, dump our clothes into a copper heated from underneath by a wood fire and, when they were satisfactorily boiled, heave them, with the use of a broomstick gone white and splintered with repeated soaking, into a vat of cold water, and thence, via a hand-operated mangle, to the two-handed cane basket in which they would be hauled to the clothes line and hung out with wooden pegs to dry. I can’t remember when I first saw a washing machine but it was long after I left home.
I’ve come to a truce with our current (Romanian) femme de ménage, based on the fact that our terrace is sufficiently high up to offer an alternative method of drying clothes. Rescuing my shirts and underwear from the washing machine before she moves them to the drier, I drape them in the sun on the balcony, either hanging over the railings or, if there’s no room, spread on the shrubs and bushes. With luck, they dry with no need for ironing, a degree of crumple fortunately being à la mode. And should the roses be in bloom, my shirts will even bear the same wisp of perfume that my dancer friend used to impart.
I wonder what the scent of the dancer’s perfume was ...
Delightful. No surprise there.