The conjugal shirt

Cut from a rather rustic fabric, it wasn't meant to facilitate relations between spouses, such was the barbaric night costume of our forefathers.

In the 18th century, prudish nuns in convents invented the "conjugal shirt" for the trousseau of their young boarders ready for marriage.
According to Anatole France, this nightgown had various names, such as " chemise du père La Pudeur", "chemise à faire un chrétien" or "chemise parisienne". It had an opening that enabled spouses to ensure offspring without revealing their "shameful parts"...
Emilie Carles mentions this when talking about her father in her autobiographical novel " Une soupe aux herbes sauvages ":
" He belonged to that generation which had known the long hemp shirts which one never left, even between spouses, even at the time of making love... A hole, "the pertuis", practised at the level of the lower abdomen made it possible to carry out the necessary operations without ever revealing the body".
In this way, God's commandment to grow and multiply could be fulfilled, which in those days was, after all, the primary purpose of marriage.
This hole was sometimes embellished with encouraging comments such as " God wills it", not to exacerbate the libido muzzled by so much puritanism, but to encourage the most pusillanimous to practice the act commanded by God. Some more elaborate models were equipped with buttons to close it momentarily, to let the husband know that it was not advisable to venture out that way at certain critical times.
For men, the shirt was fitted with a " portal " equipped with a " drawbridge " whose operation is easy to imagine. The size of this opening was standardized at " one hand below the navel". This fuelled the sarcasm of certain wives, probably disappointed, who would say among themselves, " There are more gates than cattle" , which must have provoked a few giggles and blushes, because such things were done but not said. This night dress continued for a long time; in 1952, for example, a wife was still quoted as giving birth to her twelfth child, even though her husband had never seen her naked...
We're really lucky to have seen the light of day, because our ancestors had to obey their only animal instinct for reproduction to be able to procreate in such conditions.
Thanks to its geographical position, the town of Pertuis, or pertus in Latin, means " hole " in the sense of " passage". It has always been a crossroads of communication between the sea and the mountains, and this is the relationship (if I may say so in this instance) between the opening of the garment and this town.
Claude Boyer
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