In the days of royal licenses, when the grocers and apothecaries formed but a single guild, it was the same with the barbers and surgeons. In the year 1620, forty-eight patents had been granted to _barbiers-baigneurs-étuvistes_, who were perruquiers following the court. Later, their number was largely increased. The right to keep hot or cold baths was specially attached to the guild of master perruquiers. A fashionable bathing establishment, with both hot and cold baths, stood on Rue Saint-Jacques, near the corner of Rue des Mathurins. From a long distance one could see its basins, painted a light blue as the ordinance required; and over the door were these words in huge letters: BEARDS PROPERLY SHAVED WITHIN; HOT AND COLD BATHS At this time the price of a bath varied from six to twelve livres [francs]; and when we consider that a livre then was worth almost three times as much as to-day, we must agree that there is a vast difference between that price and the price in our modern bathing establishments, where one obtains five tickets for three francs. The result is a great improvement in respect to health and cleanliness, for everybody cannot go to the river to bathe. What did the poor people do in those days; for six livres was an enormous sum to them? If, in the good old times, a bath was such an expensive luxury, on the other hand, the houses where they were supplied bore a very bad reputation; they were, it is said, places of assignation for lewd women, who, because of their rank or condition, were obliged to try to cloak their evil conduct. Many preachers thundered from the pulpit against these places, which had been adorned with an honest name. Maillard, in sermons noteworthy for their power and their crudity of expression, said, as he declaimed against the scandal caused by these establishments: "Mesdames, do not go to the baths, and do not do there what I need not name!" Sauval tells us that the baths continued their existence for a long time; people did not cease to frequent them until the end of the seventeenth century. They had become so common then that a person could hardly take a step without passing one.