This is actually a story specifically about Versailles, as I understand it, rather than a statement about general hygienic norms. In Louis XIV's (1638-1715) time - which is actually the Baroque rather than the Rococo - yes, the standards of sanitation and toilet manners were quite low. At that time, it was considered quite a shining palace and to have an impressive courtly air, but with the sheer number of people there every day, the lack of modern toilet facilities, and an earthier sense of what should be done privately vs. publicly, people ended up urinating in corners. The Duc de Saint-Simon wrote that Françoise de Brancas, the Princesse d'Harcourt and one of Louis XIV's contemporaries, would walk away from company, urinate on the floor, and walk back, and people simply accepted it; he also wrote that Louis XV's regent would receive visitors while seated on the chamber pot. (That being said, court memoirs and diaries are notoriously subjective and unreliable. Saint-Simon used to be taken as a true authority, but he must be taken with a grain of salt like all the rest. If he had a grudge against these people or simply liked gossip, he may have made things up or passed along rumor as fact.) There were public latrines, but even today these can be barely better than using a spare corner.

Under Louis XV (1710-1774), there was an attempt to clean up Versailles. He had several bathrooms installed for himself, and made improvements to the latrine pipes so that waste was farther away from the people using them and living near them. But through the 1760s, people still found others using the corridors as toilets.

If people found the latrines closed, they would relieve themselves in the public corridor, as happened in 1741 after a privy in the attics of the north wing was converted into a lodging. People did the same in the first-floor gallery of the south wing. When the newly married dauphin and dauphine were lodged here in 1745, iron barriers were placed in front of the arcades opposite their rooms “to prevent indecency and dirtiness.” In 1762 the comte de Compans complained about the passersby and kitchen boys who “attended to their needs” in an inner courtyard in the same wing, “often breaking his windows,” presumably because he remonstrated with them.

(Versailles: A Biography of a Palace, by Thomas Spaforth (St. Martin's Press, 2006)

Flushing toilets, called lieux à l’anglaise (English places), began to be introduced in the 1730s, spread quickly to important members of court, and by the 1780s were even installed for footmen.