Ah, Versailles. Poofy-wigged French monarchs strolling down gilded hallways and glorious paths ...

Cut! Read this, romance-mongers: "Shortly before Louis XIV died in 1715, a new ordinance decreed that [human] feces left in the corridors of Versailles would be removed once a week."

So it goes in "The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History," by Katherine Ashenburg (North Point Press, 359 pages, $15, now in paperback), a highly readable history of personal hygiene, or the lack thereof, in Western culture.

Poop lining castle corridors; clothing sewed onto grubby bodies, there to remain for years; dust being used to "wash" lice-laced hair; indoor stairwells routinely serving as urinals -- the dirty facts pile up faster than sewage in 18th-century Paris. You'll want to wash your hands every few pages, which will give you something in common with your ancestors if you're of European extraction; hands and faces were pretty much all Europeans ever washed before the 1800s.

Rich and poor alike were filthy; the only difference was that the rich wore relatively fresh clothing, while the poor wore theirs until the crude cloth or leather rotted off. (Non-European cultures had higher cleanliness standards; visitors routinely exclaimed over the randy, rancid stench of Europeans.)

How could people stand each other enough to even, er, reproduce?

Writes Ashenburg: "The scent of one another's bodies was the ocean our ancestors swam in. ... Twenty years ago, airplanes, restaurants, hotel rooms and most other public indoor spaces were thick with cigarette smoke. Most of us never noticed it. Now ... we shrink back affronted when we enter a room where someone has been smoking."

Filth was general until the late 1700s, when a few "eccentrics" cleaned up and began to complain about how others smelled. In Dickensian England and U.S. Civil War tent hospitals, doctors and reformers began to link dirt and disease. By the early 1900s, Americans were the cleanest people on Earth, mostly because plumbing was easier to add to new infrastructure built on cheap, abundant land.

Fast-forward to the present, when most Americans shower daily and you can get a sanitary wipe for your grocery cart handle. Ashenburg points out that such fastidiousness springs more from culture than science and that too much bacteria-slaying actually may trigger asthma and other ailments.

"Dirt" is well worth getting your grubby hands on. It'll have you examining photos of Great-great-great-grandma with fresh interest -- are her clothes sewed on? Is that dirt in her hair? Hygiene's history is, indeed, highly personal.

Pamela Miller is a night metro editor for the Star Tribune.