In France the baths, being anathematized by both Catholics and
Huguenots, began to lose vogue and disappear. "Morality gained,"
remarks Franklin, "but cleanliness lost." Even the charming and
elegant Margaret of Navarre found it quite natural for a lady to
mention incidentally to her lover that she had not washed her
hands for a week. Then began an extreme tendency to use
cosmetics, essences, perfumes, and a fierce war with vermin, up
to the seventeenth century, when some progress was made, and
persons who desired to be very elegant and refined were
recommended to wash their faces "nearly every day." Even in 1782,
however, while a linen cloth was advised for the purpose of
cleaning the face and hands, the use of water was still somewhat
discountenanced. The use of hot and cold baths was now, however,
beginning to be established in Paris and elsewhere, and the
bathing establishments at the great European health resorts were
also beginning to be put on the orderly footing which is now
customary. When Casanova, in the middle of the eighteenth
century, went to the public baths at Berne he was evidently
somewhat surprised when he found that he was invited to choose
his own attendant from a number of young women, and when he
realized that these attendants were, in all respects, at the
disposition of the bathers. It is evident that establishments of
this kind were then already dying out, although it may be added
that the customs described by Casanova appear to have persisted
in Budapest and St. Petersburg almost or quite up to the present.
The great European public baths have long been above suspicion in
this respect (though homosexual practices are not quite
excluded), while it is well recognized that many kinds of hot
baths now in use produce a powerfully stimulating action upon the