Parmi les curiosités de Paris, n’oublions pas ces pèses personnes aussi peu discrets qu’insolites qui jalonnaient les parcs et les quais de métro. Longtemps avant la généralisation des balances individuelles, ces machines permettaient aux passants de faire un petit bilan pondéral au hasard de leurs pérégrinations.
Autre temps, autres moeurs… A l’heure où règne le culte de l’apparence, difficile d’imaginer qu’une jeune fille puisse monter dessus et obtenir le fatal verdict aux yeux de tous. Malgré le passage à l’Euro qui rendit leur monnayeur obsolète, il en reste encore trois au Jardin du Luxembourg.
Out of all the curiosities that Paris has to offer, how could we forget the public weighing scales? Far from indiscreet, these remarkable contraptions were placed in rather prominent positions in parks and on metro platforms. Long before the greater public had access to personal weighing scales, these machines offered passers-by the opportunity to take a quick note of their weight as they went about their daily business.
It is difficult to imagine now, in a modern culture saturated with the cult of beauty and body-size, that a young lady might decide to climb onto this machine and have her weight displayed to everyone who passed by – but these were other times, with other norms, and of course other ideas of what beauty was. Despite the change-over to the euro early in the twenty-first century, which rendered the coin-operated machines obsolete, there are still three public weighing scales in the Jardin du Luxembourg.
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geppettoninetto
La più bella città dopo la mi roma