In the late 16th century, France was divided both politically and religiously. King Henri III was hated by almost everyone. His closest natural heir was Henri of Navarre, a kingdom in southwestern France, but Navarre had converted to Protestantism. The Catholic Henri III was prepared to recognize Henri of Navarre if he would reconvert to Catholicism. The right-wing Catholic Leaguists, as they were known, would have none of this, however. They were rabidly anti-Navarre. One of their number, a young Dominican friar named Jacques Clement, pretending to bear a secret message from his supporters, gained an audience with Henri III who received him on August 1, 1589, while sitting on the toilet. Clement thereupon drew his dagger and plunged it into the king’s abdomen. Henri III soon bled to death, but not before declaring Henri of Navarre his rightful heir provided he returned to the Catholic Church. Navarre did so and assumed the throne as Henri IV. (“Paris is well worth a Mass,” he supposedly said.)
Many BAR readers will instantly recall a similar episode in the Bible. In Judges 3, we learn that the Moabite king Eglon had oppressed the Israelites for 18 years, demanding heavy tribute. When an Israelite tribute-bearer named Ehud delivered the Israelite tribute, he told the king he had a secret message for him, so the king’s courtiers were dismissed. At the time, Eglon, a very fat man, was apparently sitting on the toilet, and Ehud thrust his dagger into Eglon’s belly. The fat closed over the blade and even over the hilt. At this point, Eglon apparently lost control of his bowels—“and the filth came out” (Judges 3:22; Hebrew uncertain). When Ehud left, he locked the door of “the cool upper chamber.” When Eglon’s courtiers returned and discovered that the door was locked, they assumed Eglon must be on the toilet. When they finally broke the lock and entered, they found Eglon lying on the floor dead.
I learned of the episode involving Henri III from Sarah Bakewell’s recent best-selling biography of Michel de Montaigne, the famous essayist.1 Sitting on the toilet, Bakewell says, was “a common way for royals to receive visitors.” That remark hit me like a brick. It seems at least possible to conclude from the Biblical text that this was also true in Eglon’s time.
We have long known that ancient notions of privacy are different from ours. But how different and in what ways remain far from clear. At several Roman-period sites, like Ephesus, Rome and Pompeii, archaeologists have found long benches with rows of adjacent toilet seats with no provision for privacy. What is less well known is that these provisions were not for the ordinary person but were for the elite.
Which leads me to another observation: The higher the social station, the less concern for privacy. Which brings me back to Eglon (and Henri III): Royalty was unconcerned with privacy. But the issue may not have been privacy at all. Royalty could do what it wanted. What might be distasteful for the average person was a prerogative of status. What would be offensive to or for the average person was permitted to royalty—indeed, may even have been a mark of privilege.
The rabbis seemed to be ambivalent about toilet privacy, one of Israel’s Talmudic masters, Ze’ev Saffrai, informed me. The toilet in the Temple was for but a single person and had a lock (Mishnah, Tamid 1:1). On the other hand, women were permitted to talk in the toilet, indicating that there was minimal privacy (Palestinian Talmud, Megillah 4:1, 75a).
An impressive stone toilet from the seventh or sixth century B.C.E. was found in a tiny room of an elite, perhaps royal, structure in the City of David in Jerusalem,a which suggests 064 that privacy was valued by the users of this toilet.
The passage from Montaigne’s autobiography on which Sarah Bakewell relies is also a little ambivalent. While he seems to say that royalty did indeed receive guests while sitting on the toilet, Montaigne himself likes his toilet privacy:
“I have often been moved to pity rather than envy [at a king who has] a swarm of courtiers prating at him and a mob of strangers staring at him eat. King Alfonso said in this respect the asses of his kingdom were better off than he, for they could feed at their own ease and pleasure. And it has never struck my fancy that it could be any great benefit to a man of sense to have twenty 065 people babbling at him while he sat at stool.
“The Emperor Maximilian had a humor quite contrary to that of other princes, who for the dispatch of their most important affairs convert their closestool [toilet] into a throne of state. He [Maximilian] permitted no one to see him in that posture, and stole aside as scrupulously as any virgin to make water. I myself, who have an imprudent way of talking, am naturally so modest in this respect that, unless it is a case of necessity or pleasure, I hardly ever communicate the sight of these parts and actions custom bids us conceal.”2 [emphasis supplied]
It is also said that Louis XIII had a throne that was a toilet and he would receive visitors while sitting on it.
I talked to Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow, who wrote an article on toilets for our sister magazine.b Ann referred me to a Dutch scholar of the subject, Louise L. Raimond-Waarts, who wrote me an interesting memo. It has lots of information about toilet privacy in the renaissance in Europe. At this time, she writes, “the body was considered a gift of God and not to be ashamed of even when its natural function needed to be relieved in the presence of others.”
In an age when medical understanding was often based on “humors” (elemental fluids of the body), everything that came from the body was important. Doctors continually had to observe the bodily discharges in order to safeguard the king’s health. To ensure that the royal body fluids were properly identified “could also be a reason for sitting on the toilet in the company of others,” Raimond-Waarts wrote me.
Columbia University Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro told me that the privy counselors of Elizabethan royalty included a “groom of the stool” who slept in the king’s bedroom. (The situation with respect to Queen Elizabeth remains unclear.)
Whether any of this will take you to a deeper understanding of the Eglon-Ehud story in Judges 3, the reader will have to decide.
In the late 16th century, France was divided both politically and religiously. King Henri III was hated by almost everyone. His closest natural heir was Henri of Navarre, a kingdom in southwestern France, but Navarre had converted to Protestantism. The Catholic Henri III was prepared to recognize Henri of Navarre if he would reconvert to Catholicism. The right-wing Catholic Leaguists, as they were known, would have none of this, however. They were rabidly anti-Navarre. One of their number, a young Dominican friar named Jacques Clement, pretending to bear a secret message from his supporters, gained an audience with Henri […]
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How to Live—or a Life of Montaigne (New York: Other Press, 2010).
2.
The Autobiography of Michel de Montaigne, translated by Marvin Lowenthal (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1935; republished, Jaffrey, NH: David R. Godine, 1999), pp. 84–85.
