Okay so, don’t get me wrong, I love Aix. It’s a beautiful town and it just gets more beautiful as the flowers bloom and the trees green up. It’s historic, it’s quiet, and it’s got great food. I could explore it’s nooks and crannies for days. I LIKE IT HERE.
Now, with that out of the way.
France is famous for having the worst sewer systems in the modern world. The French have been improperly dealing with their waste since the Gauls. And unlike countries like Britain and Spain, they never really improved. In short, every street in France has a smell of human feces.
I do mean every street. The strength varies from place to place. For instance, my block is hardly smelly at all. The apartments were built in the twentieth century, so they do have toilets in every space, not just one per hallway, and the toilets do flush into a sufficient sewage system, not the open street. So the smell is almost unnoticeable.
But if I went blind tomorrow, I could get around Aix just fine by nose, judging streets and neighborhoods by stench alone. In Centre-Ville, the oldest and most densely populated part of town, the smell is so strong that dogs turn in circles and toddlers complain to parents. City developers in oldest France are constantly faced with a difficult choice: do we renovated our sewage system and remove the smell, or leave our historic buildings intact and standing? For the most part, it seems (smells) that France decided history was more important that civic upkeep.
Whatever they’re doing with all the tax revenue generated by tourists, I can say it’s not going to plumbing.
But it certainly is going to every other kind of construction. Aix has been under construction since the birth of Christ, and that glorious tradition continues to this day, with jackhammers starting at six in the morning and earthmovers choking you with dust and sound as you walk to class. Off the top of my head, I can think of ten different construction sites on the walk from my apartment to Centre-Ville. That’s about twenty minutes on foot, five by car. Actually, they just started something else down the street from the coffee shop where I’m typing this, so make that eleven.
They’re only ripping up and changing the newer stuff — the older stuff is only ever closed for cleaning or restoration. I don’t know why they don’t just leave the roads to become historic markers too, like the sewage rivers directly underneath the sidewalks and the toilets which do not flush past a certain hour of the night.
Here in Aix you can still find and purchase a trinket from a bygone era known as a perfume locket. See, back in Louis 14’s time, everybody thought that water was what gave you illness, so nobody, like, bathed ever. That is true. Hot water, the latest thinking went, opened your pores and made you more susceptible to disease, so never ever wash with hot or warm water. So aside from everybody dying all the time, everybody smelled just as bad as people would smell after going months without showering. Even the royalty! So it became vogue to wear a locket of hard perfume around your neck and just hope it masked your horrible BO. It was absolutely necessary to wear one to court, so that the Duke your mom wants you to marry doesn’t pass out when he tries to kiss your unwashed grimy little hand.
And, as I said, you can still buy them in Aix. Wonder why.
HOWEVER! The people of France clean themselves! Just as much as Americans! Showers and sinks and soap and the whole nine yards. The French are not unwashed and smelly, as the stereotype goes. It’s just their streets, and it’s just because they are too proud to lose one of their 30,000 17th-century town houses to a plumbing improvement.
But I still do love Aix.
Cordialement,
Allison
P.S.: My parents are coming to see me in the next couple days, so I might post pictures.
Flan in France 