The question of water

A brave paleographer, Jules Legras, who once wrote an entire library on the Slavs, their customs and their history, has earned immortality for having written this astonishing sentence: "The Russians wash their faces and hands every morning, like us!"
Hygiene, hydrotherapy and the simple concern for cleanliness have made some progress since then, and many French people are no longer satisfied with these rudimentary ablutions. It seems, however, alas! that despite the efforts of the Touring-Club, too many hoteliers in France still stick to the simplistic conception of Mr. Jules Legras.

Those who, like Rouff and me, seek to reconcile gastronomy with comfort are most often reduced to staying in a modernized hotel or a palace and eating elsewhere... Because it is a law of French Tourism that everyone can see every day: France still abounds, fortunately, in excellent country inns where one eats well, in small second-rate hotels where the best traditions of our incomparable cuisine are preserved and perpetuated; but ninety times out of a hundred, in these good houses, running water is replaced by the most frank cordiality, the toilet paraphernalia is reduced to a water jug ​​with a capacity of six deciliters and a basin as big as the bottom of a hat; and as for the bathroom, when there is one, one could write a whole volume with the misadventures that befall this poor sacrificed room. How many times have we not heard:

— The bathroom? Ah, sir! We are all there and it is inhabited by a traveler.
— The bathroom? It is being repaired
— The bathroom? Oh sure, we have one. But the City cuts off the water supply from 8 in the morning to noon and from 6 in the evening to midnight.
Etc..., etc...

And if in desperation, we ask for a tub and a large pitcher of hot water, the whole staff is in disarray. A tub??? That still passes in many small provincial hotels for a hydrotherapy accessory for the use of eccentric and manic Englishmen.

— A tub?... Oh! sir, replied a pretty maid in a hotel in the center, blushing... Oh!... no! we don't have that here!

She had doubtless understood some unspeakable obscenity. ...Elsewhere (no! I won't say the name of the city), a hotelier told me in a somewhat contemptuous and threatening tone that "if I were so keen to take a bath, I would find the hospital perfectly organized."

At a time when our country is invaded by so many foreigners, some of whom wash and wash themselves more and better than the Slavs of Jules Legras, this question is of great interest to the hotel industry and we cannot return to it and insist on it too much, even at the risk of being suspected of repeating ourselves. It was Dumas fils who said it.
"Ideas are like nails: the more you hit them, the more you drive them in; we're not finished with that nail!"

CUR (nonski).