TO SPEND A PENNY IN PARIS

MADAME PIPI AND THE PISSOIR

Paris’s last surviving pissoir. Wall of the Sante prison in background.

            "Here I sit, broken-hearted/Paid a penny - only farted." This poignant couplet, once a popular toilet graffito, recalls the days when "spending a penny" was a euphemism for visiting the lavatory. That one should expect to pay for relief went without saying. British industrial wisdom succinctly articulates "Where there's muck, there's brass," a truth grasped as early as the 1st century by emperor Titus Flavius Vespasianus. Noting that tanners paid nothing for the urine they harvested from Rome's public urinals to use in preparing leather, he imposed a tax. In his honour, French urinals were called Vespasiennes.

            Paris lagged in the provision of public lavatories. Defecation wasn't regarded as something that necessarily required privacy. In 1589, King Henry III was fatally knifed by a monk whom he'd invited in for an audience while seated on his commode. The city provided "barrels of easement" for men who needed to urinate, but those wishing to defecate were advised, counter-intuitively, to do so facing a wall, so that passers-by wouldn't recognise their faces (faeces?)   For anyone desiring privacy, entrepreneurs with mobile toilets stationed themselves at major intersections. The travelling commode, a variation on the sedan chair, offered relief in comfort, with a retractable seat and a chamber pot. Women were less fortunate. As crinolines made them too bulky to squeeze inside, they had to make do with squatting under a tent-like canvas cloak that draped them from neck to ground.    

           Individual public urinals appeared in 1843. A hollow column, open on one side, with a simple ground-level drain, they were built of stone and ornately decorated, but with ample space for advertising posters. Haussmann, who scorned frippery, replaced them with the pissoir. All-steel, and consisting of a trough behind a knee-to-neck screen, they were practical, easily cleaned, and could be used by more than one person at a time. The public character of pissoirs discouraged their use as gay meeting points, the practice known in Britain as "cottaging," but in such areas as Pigalle, popular with street prostitutes, potential clients assessed the women from their cover while the ladies loitered nearby,  making eye contact over the screen.

Just looking……

          Henry Miller was an enthusiastic patron of prostitutes and pissoirs both. "Standing behind a tin strip," he wrote, "and looking out on the throng with that contented, easy, vacant smile, that long reminiscent pleasurable look, is a good thing. How many times have I stood thus in this smiling gracious world, the sun splashing over me and the birds twittering crazily, and found a woman looking down at me from an open window. Standing thus with heart and fly and bladder open, I seem to recall every urinal I ever stepped into. To relieve a full bladder is one of the great human joys." He particularly patronised a facility near the Jardins du Luxembourg, from which he could spy on Parisians enjoying the sun and families picnicking of the grass.

           In the nineteen-thirties, Paris had 1230 pissoirs, a number that, by 1966 had dwindled to 329. Today, only one survives. A lonely throwback, it stands outside the grim walls of the Santé prison.  The automated toilets, technically known as Samisettes, that replaced them were a mixed blessing. These unisex cabins, originally coin-operated but now free, function with a ponderous efficiency that seldom accords with the urgent needs of their clients.  Every week, a few hapless newbies, jumping the cycle by ducking through an open door as the last user departs, discover, to their  dismay, that they not only flush after each use but also deluge the walls, floor - and any occupant - with a high-pressure spray. The newest installed Samisettes have acquired a refinement. Tacked onto the side of the existing mechanised cabinet is...imagine!...an old fashioned pissoir! But why didn't they just....? Oh, never mind.