… is from page 310 of the 1981 translation of Fernand Braudel’s remarkable 1979 The Structures of Everyday Life:
The problem posed by the defective emptying of cesspools in Paris even worried the Academy of Sciences in 1788. And chamber pots, as always, continued to be emptied out of windows; the streets were sewers….. The bathroom was a very rare luxury in these seventeenth and eighteenth-century houses. Fleas, lice and bugs conquered London as well as Paris, rich interiors as well as poor.
