The Art of Lying Down

by Bernd Brunner

  Germanic peoples were unfamiliar with any kind of bed-related luxury, at least until the Romans invaded their territory. Rolled up in furs, they slept on the ground. And Roman historians reported that Celts slept in holes filled with leaves. But the years brought improvements to northern European homes: people later slept in beds that were attached to the walls and held sacks of straw. More prosperous households even had pillows and covers filled with down and feathers.

  In the Middle Ages, mattresses were filled with a mixture of straw and feathers. Wealthy citizens had beds made of wood shaped by lathes. Ideas for improvements often came from cloisters, where such issues received careful consideration. This seems surprising since the monks themselves slept on simple wooden cots, perhaps with straw mattresses. St. Benedict ordered his followers to sleep on sacks of straw or leaves with felt blankest and pillows. Resulting from the body hatred and self-punishment typical of the time, the bed of a Capuchin monk, which was so hard that a sleeper left no trace on it, was held up as the ideal. Even outside monastery walls, soft beds were an object of derision. Charlemagne refused to use a mattress filled with feathers, claiming such a bed would promote effeminacy. His concerns raise the perhaps unanswerable question of just how much comfort any person needs and whether accounts of such supposed ruggedness are just myths that take on an air of truth, becoming impossible to deny or doubt.

  Around A.D. 1000, the Byzantines had wooden beds with high legs and raised heads. Wealthy citizens even had mattresses filled with goose down, and tapestries and furs provided additional comfort. In the Late Middle Ages, people often outfitted beds, placed in the middle of living areas, with canopies and curtains to keep insects away. Other beds were so high that lying down in them required ladders. Henry VII’s bed featured a cushioning layer of straw, which was covered with linen cloths, and a thick feather comforter with additional perfume-scented blankets and a cover made of ermine fur on top. Depictions of such magnificent beds convey the impression that people tended to sit rather than lie in them. One reason for this could be that those with high social status thought being seen lying down would damage their authority. Furthermore, lying in a flat position was associated with a very specific group, the dead.

  Reclinable: a state bed

  At the royal courts of Europe, bedrooms soon acquired an important role not only in private but in public life. State bedrooms, usually found next to the lord’s or lady’s actual bedroom, were used for receiving visitors of equal or higher rank. Permission to sit on the bed was considered a great honor. The state bed itself, elaborately formed of fine wood, stood in the middle of the room as a symbol of social status and success. The Countess of Maine (1676–1753) reportedly directed a masked ball from her bed while she was pregnant. Approaching the bed was not generally considered good form, especially when a man was visiting a woman. Such receptions were motivated by a host of reasons, from happy occasions to more serious ones, including births, weddings, and even deaths.

  The magistrate M. Simon, described at length by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Confessions, cleverly used the custom of receiving visitors while lying in bed to downplay a personal handicap. In this way he prevented the indignity that he surely would have suffered if people had met him under more conventional conditions. Simon, Rousseau explains, was not even two feet tall and spoke with two different voices: a sharp, penetrating voice—the voice of his body, which sounded “like the whistling of a key”—and a bass voice—the voice of his head. Rousseau continues:

  His legs spare, straight, and tolerably long, would have added something to his stature had they been vertical, but they stood in the direction of an open pair of compasses. His body was not only short, but thin, being in every respect of most inconceivable smallness—when naked he must have appeared like a grasshopper. His head was of the common size, to which appertained a well-formed face, a noble look, and tolerably fine eyes; in short, it appeared a borrowed head, stuck on a miserable stump.

  To minimize his disability, Simon held his official audiences during the morning from his bed, hiding his body under the covers. “For when a handsome head was discovered on the pillow,” Rousseau says, “no one could have imagined what belonged to it.”

  The bed’s popularity as a place for receiving guests was short-lived, and the salon soon became the preferred scene of such activities. Bedrooms returned to their primary function, sleeping, a development reflected in the rise of the expression chambre à coucher.

  The splendid beds and opulent temples of rest once popular in certain circles had nothing in common with the nighttime environments of most people at the time. If the rural life of past ages seems romantic to us now, it’s because we don’t really understand what it was like. Poor people normally slept on the floor and could count themselves lucky if they had a little straw. Or they made do with a wooden bank or a chest, perhaps next to the oven. They may not have even considered this setup “uncomfortable”; after all, they didn’t have much basis for comparison and often went to bed exhausted from punishing physical labor.

  In early farming households, humans and livestock shared the same living space, and the animals’ body heat was a source of warmth in the winter. Finding room for the laborers—the driving force of agriculture before industrialization—was a thorny issue. In addition to payment in the form of money or crops, they received food and lodging from their masters. Customs differed from region to region, but laborers usually were given spots to sleep outside the master’s quarters: in the loft under the barn roof, next to the cow or horse stalls, in the milking room, even right among the stalls themselves. Often beds weren’t provided, and the worker had to make do with a hard bench or a spot on the floor. In the late nineteenth century, a certain Franz Rehbein recorded his impressions of a particularly uninviting spot to sleep at a farm near Kronprinzenkoog, a town in the northern German region of Schleswig-Holstein: “Hardly big enough to be able to contain a bed, and neither sun nor moon shone in. It was a niche in the kitchen, void of any comfort, dark, low, drafty, dirty; a dog’s den, a coffin, a Chinese trunk; as cold in winter as an ice cellar.” Sometimes such retreats were referred to as sleeping platforms, but this elevated-sounding term did little to make the experience pleasant.

  Sultry fantasy: the bed of maharaja Sadiq Muhammad Khan Abbasi IV of Bahawalpur

  Beds have existed in every conceivable form and with every kind of decoration imaginable. Some offer such excesses of bad taste that they prompt us to wonder how anyone lying on them could have slept at all. Fortunately, it’s usually dark when we go to bed. One spectacular example is the ostentatious bed built by Christofle, a Parisian manufacturer of luxury goods, for the Indian maharaja Sadiq Muhammad Khan Abbasi IV of Bahawalpur. Weighing more than a ton (including 290 kilograms [about 640 pounds] of silver), it featured a statue of a female figure at each corner. As soon as the maharaja got comfortable, music began to play and the arms of the figures began to move, stirring up a pleasant breeze at the head of the bed and shooing away flies from the foot.

  To understand a construction recommended by Charles de l’Orme, Louis XIII’s physician, it helps to know how difficult it was in the past to effectively heat a room and that the good doctor had a horror of dying from the effects of cold that can only be called pathological. The bed itself was set in a brick housing rather like an oven. The sleeper’s head protruded through a small opening with a curtain, and the structure was insulated with layers of fur. When de l’Orme was ready to go to bed, hot bricks wrapped in linen were placed along the sides and foot of the chamber. Lawrence Wright, the peerless chronicler of the history of the bed, relates that de l’Orme was gripped by a missionary zeal to promote his design as the best possible bed. Yet it still was not enough. To satisfy his need for warmth, he supposedly also put on six pairs of socks and boots lined with cotton padding before turning in for the night. Another curiosity Wright records is an enormous funnel installed over beds to channel fresh air to sleepers who chose to keep windows closed.
Essentially, it was an exhaust hood in reverse.

  Can they hear the snoring outside? Sleeping under the spell of fresh air

  Another common setup for sleeping is the alcove. The modern word and its relatives, the Spanish alcoba and the French alcôve, come from the Arabic al-qubba, which has several meanings, including “tent,” “vault,” and “chamber.” A bed like this could easily be mistaken for a cabinet. While the details could differ, an alcove was a windowless “bedroom” separated from the main room by a door or curtain. This opening was the only source of light and ventilation. Alcoves are remnants of a time when dwellings were not yet divided into multiple rooms with different purposes. They date from the fourteenth century and were likely inspired by the heavy, boxlike beds of oak or chestnut popular during the Renaissance or perhaps by the cabins in ships. Alcoves were most common in the north and west of Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but could also be found in North America, where they were known as cupboard beds.” Alcoves were often built to accommodate two sleepers, who had to climb in using a bench at the entrance. Those inside were protected from drafts and cold and enjoyed a measure of privacy but could still keep tabs on any household members or animals in the main room. Such a setup lacked the intimacy of a real bedroom, but few people at the time could have imagined something so exotic, let alone missed it. According to contemporary accounts, sleeping in such a cabinet was not necessarily restful. To stay warm in the winter, the sleeper had to keep the door or curtain closed, and the oxygen in the small space was quickly exhausted. The result was not only a stuffy atmosphere but ideal conditions for mice and parasites. Furthermore, the space was usually so small that those inside couldn’t stretch out and had to try to get comfortable in a half-sitting position. Perhaps the discomfort was worth it; if a French legend can be believed, alcoves were built to protect sleepers from wolves that could get into houses at night.

  Alcoves came under criticism at the end of the eighteenth century, when people began to recognize the health benefits of fresh air, especially as a way to combat tuberculosis. Still, shepherds in the Auvergne and Pyrenees continued to use a type of alcove, called the lit clos, a sleeping cabinet on wheels. Thanks to this mobile arrangement, they could spend the night near their flocks and scare away any wolves or bears that might turn up.

  The Oriental Roots of the Art of Lying Down

  Typical European furniture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries offered a range of solutions for basic problems but could hardly be described as comfortable in the modern sense. Nevertheless, it apparently met the needs of the time. Outside influence was necessary to make more comfortable lounging part of our modern lifestyle and add it to our day-to-day behaviors. The impulse for this development came from the East. Enthusiasm for the “Orient” left countless marks among Europe’s upper classes. Drinking coffee was one example; Louis XIV’s quirk of giving himself and his mistresses “Oriental” pet names was another. The British diplomat Paul Rycaut (1629–1700) was one of the first outsiders to describe the world of the Ottoman rulers in detail. For seventeenth-century Europeans, the opulent palaces with their marble floors, velvet curtains, and divans upholstered in heavy silk were indescribably exotic. In many accounts, these Ottoman interiors became stage sets for the tellers’ fantasies of unbridled eroticism. But some observers had more elevated ideas. The great German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s intensive occupation with Persian poetry and his realization that Orient and Occident were inseparable inspired West-Eastern Divan, one of his major works.

  People were drawn to a world that seemed to be the opposite of theirs. The historian Sigfried Giedion describes the typical perception that the Western lifestyle was based in effort, as opposed to the relaxation at the root of life in the East: “In the East everyone, poor and rich alike, has time and leisure. In the West no one has.” And in his “An Idyll on Idleness,” Friedrich Schlegel claimed “only Italians know how to walk and only Orientals how to repose.”

  The Oriental influence on furniture design first became apparent in France. In the eighteenth century, the first upholstered chairs were produced. Soon bed-chair hybrids like those we still use entered the scene, making it possible to lie down without going to bed. “Couch,” “chaise longue,” “canapé,” “divan,” “recamier,” “ottomane,” “méridienne,” and “duchesse” were labels applied to very similar pieces of furniture. But no matter what the name, they all had very little in common with their Oriental models. They were pseudo-Turkish or pseudo-Persian, because of not only how they looked but how they were used. The art historian Lydia Marinelli points to a fundamental misunderstanding between the two cultures: “While the Orient understands the cushion as an amorphous surface on which the user actively seeks a comfortable position of his own choosing, the West attempts to tailor furniture to the body in order to support its functioning.” Relaxation in the East comes from lying down or sitting with crossed legs on the floor or a cushion—no armrest or backrest required. Europe’s supposed Oriental furniture followed a different principle. “The languorous chaise longue encouraged an easy intimacy, not to mention lovemaking,” writes the architect and writer Witold Rybczynski. “Sofas were broad not to provide for many sitters, but to allow space for the grand gesture, the leg drawn up, the arm thrown out over the back, and for the capacious clothing of that time.”

  The original: divan in Topkapi Palace

  A Turkish divan is a spot for sitting or reclining; it consists of a mat on the floor or a flat ledge that can run along an entire wall. In a French boudoir, on the other hand, a divan means an upholstered bench, often decorated with tassels and fringe, in the middle of the room. The term can even be used for a row of chairs grouped around a raised platform. In any case, divans demanded a position consisting of equal parts sitting and lying down, one enjoyed primarily by that traditionally idle class the aristocracy.

  Before long this furniture developed a reputation for encouraging laziness, slackness, and “Oriental” behavior, all thoroughly at odds with the bourgeois work ethic. Sofas were also associated with drug use. All this aimless yet unbridled sprawling about was a thorn in the side of champions of propriety, who considered a military-style upright posture a prerequisite for moral integrity. Marinelli describes the sofa as a “risky location” that “leads to indecently hiked hems and unexpected touches.” At the turn of the century, the German etiquette expert Konstanze von Franken was still emphatically forbidding hosts from receiving guests “lying on the chaise longue” in her perennial bestseller Handbook of Good Form and Fine Manners. To head off questionable situations, she recommended allowing only older ladies to sit on the sofa at all. Any man brazen enough to take a seat on the couch was summarily dismissed as being “inappropriate” and “tasteless.” For von Franken, taking a more or less horizontal position was a prerogative reserved for dandies.

  Field Studies of Bedrooms and Reclining Habits

  Beds have to accommodate not only human biomechanics but also the ways people in a certain time and culture lie down. In his 1924 carpentry dictionary, Carl Wilkens writes: “As a piece of furniture that serves the purpose of complete rest—in other words, sleep—the bed must be designed to afford the human body the state of relaxation only achievable when it lies at length, and meet all requirements of health and comfort.” Rarely has the function of the bed been so clearly stated. Several decades later the philosopher Otto Friedrich Bollnow described the bed as “the place from which we rise in the morning and go to our daily work, and to which we return in the evening when our work is done. The course of every day (in the normal state of affairs) begins in bed and also ends in bed. And it is the same with human life: it begins in bed, and it also ends (again, assuming normal circumstances) in bed. So it is in the bed that the circle closes, the circles of the day as well as that of life. Here, in the deepest sense, we find rest.” The bed is the primary or innermost home within the home, a place that allows and encourages a retreat to the unco
nscious form of our being. Yet the bed also has a flip side: it is a site of suffering and distress. The travel writer Bill Bryson has captured the paradoxical nature of beds and the rooms that house them:

  There is no space within the house where we spend more time doing less, and doing it mostly quietly and unconsciously, than here, and yet it is in the bedroom that many of life’s most profound and persistent unhappinesses are played out. If you are dying or unwell, exhausted, sexually dysfunctional, tearful, wracked with anxiety, too depressed to face the world or otherwise lacking in equanimity and joy, the bedroom is the place where you are most likely to be found.

  During the last centuries, sleep was turned into a private matter and forced backstage, and a sense that the intimate activities occurring in bed were shameful or embarrassing became more acute. Beds ceased to be used for representational purposes, and by the twentieth century the only publicly visible bedrooms were those for sale in furniture stores. There, as Bollnow wrote in the 1960s, they are “placed shamelessly on display.” At home, the right to enter bedrooms remained limited to the immediate family.