IT’S NOT UP TO SCRATCH
I’ve heard there’s a bed bug infestation in Paris. For the record, a bed bug is a very small bloodsucker. They operate by night and sleep during the day, like minuscule vampires. The Cimex lectularius lies in wait for unsuspecting humans to fall asleep so it can feed on fields of flesh. Apparently, they’ve become much more numerous and proficient in the art of survival over the past three decades. Nobody knows why, but the teeny succubi are freaking out the French as the latter host ever greater numbers of tourists and in anticipation of the summer Olympics. Fits of intense scratching taken in concert with your vin rouge, your fromage, your crepes and couture are not a look. In some cases, people develop fits of fixation. They become so obsessed by the idea of the bed bugs that they are compelled to scratch compulsively before the buggers have even had a go. They can’t fall asleep for fear that they are lying in a colony of teeny tiny undead.
Bed bugs are notoriously difficult to exterminate and run-of-the-mill pesticides won’t do the trick. The traditional elimination solutions for the Nosferatu — crosses, mallets, holy water, sunlight — are nothing to these diminutive minions of the dark side. You could fall into a funk, as I imagine the bureaucrats tasked with horizontal hygiene at the tourism authority and the 2024 Paris Olympic committee have done. Or you could turn that frown upside down like Marie Antoinette. She launched a mania for the colour puce. It was huge for a couple of months in 1775. Nobody can agree quite where on the spectrum between mauve and purply brown puce actually falls, but according to Rose Bertin, Marie Antoinette’s dressmaker, the queen donned a frock in the colour range now known as puce and presented herself to the king. He took one look at it and declared: “C’est Puce.” To clarify, “puce” pronounced pooce is the French word for flea. They too are bloodsucking parasites. And so, a fashion trend was royally born.
Was the puce he was referring to the colour of blood (ie squashed flea) or the colour of an actual puce wandering up his silk stocking right that minute? Nobody knows. But before you could say “puce your daddy”, puce was being pushed across multiple channels in many variations on the theme. There was “ventre de puce”, or flea belly, “cuisse de puce”, which is flea thigh, and “vielle puce old puce. Indeed, it was the season of puce mania. It was a stylish and crafty measure to mask a very real problem infestations of fleas being typical of the time. Just like perfume, which masked the great unwashed populace of France, the puce trend blended nicely with your blood as you squashed the parasites sucking you dry.
Sadly for the marketing gurus at Versailles, “Let them wear puce” did not become a catchphrase for the Marie Antoinette brand like the cake version (they were playing around with both options). But you could see how this sort of lateral thinking could work for a new generation of marketers dealing with their own infestation. I’m just spitballing here “If you lie with the frogs, you wake with the ‘punaise’ (bed bug in French)” rolls of the tongue quite nicely. Give them time, they have a growing population of “punaise” to contend with so I’m sure we’ll be seeing some version of “vielle punaise” on the catwalk soon. “Ma petite puce” is a term of endearment in France. I can’t see why “ma cherie punaise” won’t do just as well.