A picture is worth a thousand words..

Funny how a sentence can change your perception of a picture. Here is a outdoor sculpture at Versaille.

Classic male nude.

Now here is this from a book review of The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History by Katherine Ashenburg. “Shortly before Louis XIV died in 1715, a new ordinance decreed that feces left in the corridors of Versailles would be removed once a week.”

You can imagine the arguments that took place after that among the cleanup staff.

“Hey, I just cleaned up in here!” or

“No that can’t be more than three days old.”

Now, I am going to have to read the book to know more, and I am pretty damn curious about this, but was this some sort of accepted public activity? Was it common perhaps in mid conversation to drop em, squat and drop em, and just continue on as though nothing was out of the ordinary? Haven’t been to the place but the structure looks as though it consists of many long hallways, in other words, few corners to discretely duck around.

And what about before the decree?

We approach these magnificent structures with reverence and now there looms the image of the official opening, the chosen few entering, a few perhaps having eaten the wrong thing that day, stopping and undoing the belt, relieving themselves while all the while going “this is really nice, this is really something.”