#majorarc

Oh, that was popular TikTok History a couple years ago, but the myths are older than that. “There were no toilets in the palace of Versailles” (true, those had not been invented yet) + “it was a pretty public and very active place with lots of people coming and going, so sometimes commoners, servants, or visitors who were not allowed access to the courts’ commodes and were far away from the public latrines would urinate in the corner of a hallway or courtyard” (apparently true) + court writings and letters with salacious gossip about other nobles and their gross behaviors (unclear how true these are because politics and salacious gossip and mocking one’s political rivals haven’t changed in 300 years, but in any case, the descriptions of nobles peeing in a corner are portrayed as gross and beneath them, not something normal and fine) became a widespread popular myth of “everyone in Versailles was just pooping and peeing in the hallways” (not true). Like… chamber pots and commodes and outhouses were a thing, even if late 1600s/early 1700s sanitary standards were hardly up to ours, and dumping the chamber pots out windows and into courtyards and gardens was common. For a lot of its history, Versailles was a central government building as well as a noble palace, so there were also a LOT of people coming and going rather than being exclusively a private residence for royalty. And not that Common People are worse than royalty, but rather that chamber pots and commodes were kept in the private residence areas so there were limited places for visitors to pee and there seems to be a real history of them sometimes going ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ okay then!

Well if you're going to blow something up, then a firing range is the most responsible place to do that; I mean that's what Mythbusters did.