But the English monarchy was never as clever with ice as Russia’s imperial leaders. During St. Petersburg’s bone-numbingly cold winter of 1740, Empress Anna of Russia (1693–1740), known for her cruel and grandiose sense of humor, ordered giant slabs of ice pulled from the Neva River to construct a palace. The royal architect directed workers in transforming the slabs, which were “carved into ornamental architectural shapes, measured with compass and rule, and one slab placed upon another by means of levers,” a visitor recorded, “water being poured over each and, freezing immediately, serving as strong cement.” Once complete, the palace facade glowed blue like some strange precious stone and was decorated with carved columns and statues and an ice balustrade. Periodically, an ice cannon shot off iron cannonballs. Nearby, an enormous ice elephant spouted water from its trunk and “uttered a sound just like a real elephant, made on a trumpet by a man hidden inside it.” The interior of a walk-in ice pyramid was lit up by a magic lantern, which projected flickering images across the slick walls.
Even more wonderful were the palace’s interiors. The drawing room shimmered with an ice sofa and chairs, and an ice table, as well as an ice clock, its ice wheels visibly turning inside its frozen case. In the bedroom, visitors marveled at an ice bed, with its ice canopy, ice sheets, ice pillows, and ice blanket, and an ice dressing table stocked with an ice mirror, ice jars, and ice candlesticks. There was a carved ice fireplace filled with logs of ice. Even the palace’s windowpanes were ice-glass, lit from within at night to give off a pearlescent glow.
Two people who came to know the place a little too well were the empress’s poor jester, Prince Mikhail Golitsyn, and a young servant whom he was forced to marry, in order to amuse the court. After a grand mock wedding feast and a ball, the doomed couple were brought to the ice palace and ordered to stay the night dressed only in their nightclothes, or, in some versions of the story, nothing at all. To keep warm, they ran through the palace slapping each other. In any case, they survived.
In March, when the south wall of the ice palace gave way, the largest remaining blocks were carted off to the real imperial palace to restock the ice cellar.
It was a morning ritual. As the first rays of sun rose behind Notre-Dame de Paris and shone through his window during the winter of 1899, Henri Matisse (1869–1954) slipped out of bed to stand before Three Bathers by Paul Cézanne (1839–1906). The painting, done in a lush Impressionistic style, depicted three sturdy nude women splashing near a riverbank. Matisse was thirty years old. He had just moved to Paris and was flat broke. In grubby corduroys, he worked as a day laborer for one franc an hour, while his wife, Amélie, a dressmaker, supported the two of them. Matisse’s painting career had been on the rise. The French government had even bought some of his canvases. But that was before he had laid eyes on audacious new works by Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Cézanne and had decided to join the avant-garde. Matisse’s painting teacher refused to comment on his distorted new vision, except to say, “Under the circumstances I really don’t see how any remarks that I might have to make could be of any particular service to you.” But seeing Cézanne’s bathers gave Matisse resolve. He offered a gallery owner his own paintings in exchange for the work, and Amélie pawned her prized emerald ring to cover the balance. She didn’t understand the painting, but she knew her husband needed it. “If I am wrong, then Cézanne is wrong,” Matisse would tell himself. “And I know Cézanne is not wrong.”
Others weren’t so sure. Ultrarealism ruled the day, and Cézanne’s hazy vision was utterly unorthodox. It took thirty years for the intrepid painter to land his first show. Even then, when the gallerist displayed a Cézanne bathing scene in his front window, his friends rushed in and convinced him to take it down. Inside the gallery he hung Cézanne’s nudes facing the walls.
Throughout his career Cézanne repeatedly painted groups of bathers, always with slight variations. The writer Émile Zola (1840–1902), a childhood friend, described how as young men living in Paris the two spent their Sundays out in the countryside lounging near a watery spot, their “green pond,” where the trees came together “as in a chapel.” From that vantage point, Cézanne took “haphazard glances” at people scantily clad and bathing near the shore. His eye was like a camera. It had to be, because finding a group of artist’s models audacious enough to pose together naked out in the woods was out of the question.
Cézanne’s bathers directly influenced a whole generation of painters, including Matisse, Pablo Picasso, André Derain, Georges Braque, and, later, Jasper Johns. Pierre-Auguste Renoir once persuaded an adventurous collector to buy one of the radical paintings. Then, in order to get the man’s wife used to it, Renoir dropped by with it, as if it were his own, and pretended to leave it behind accidentally. “At the Salon d’Automne of 1905 people laughed themselves into hysterics before his pictures,” wrote Leo Stein (1872–1947), Gertrude Stein’s brother, and a passionate collector of Cézanne’s work. “In 1906 they were respectful, and in 1907 they were reverent.”
Few who appreciated Cézanne, however, were as reverent as Matisse, who called him “the father of us all.” The Matisse family closely guarded Three Bathers for more than thirty years, refusing to sell it even when money was tight during World War I. They sold a Gauguin instead. And then they pulled the children out of school to save on tuition fees. “In the thirty-seven years I have owned this painting, I have come to know it fairly well, though I hope not entirely,” Matisse wrote when he finally presented Three Bathers to the city of Paris in 1937. “It has supported me morally at critical moments in my venture as an artist. I have drawn from it my faith and my perseverance.”
The Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) was fascinated by what he called “the sleep of plants,” periods when various species closed their blooms, folded their leaves, and seemed to be at rest. At home in his gardens at Uppsala, Sweden, he kept meticulous records of the times flowers opened and shut. Around 1751, he began dreaming of a flower clock, which, unlike a sundial, “could tell the time, even in cloudy weather, as accurately as by a watch.” Planted in a round garden patch in twelve wedged sections, like the face of a clock, the marigolds would open at seven in the morning, the red pimpernels at eight, and on through the hours, with night-blooming flowers, such as the evening primrose, opening around six. “But pray consider what will become of the clockmakers if you can find out vegetable dials,” a friend teased. Further exercising his fascination with the rhythms of nature, Linnaeus carefully reconceived the yearly calendar. There was the month of Reviving Winter, encompassing December 22 through March 19, followed by the month of Thawing, through mid-April, the month of Budding, through the beginning of May, and on.
Independent of Linnaeus’s plant watching, in the summer of 1877 English scientist Charles Darwin (1809–1882) observed time’s passage with the help of sleeping seedlings. “I am all on fire at the work,” he wrote to a friend. Studying tiny red cabbage cotyledons, he gummed a single brush bristle dipped in ink to a tiny leaf, and as the plant moved throughout the day, the hair traced its path across a white card. (The delicate results were actually quite pretty.) Darwin’s conclusion: Light affected his cabbage plants “almost in the same manner as it does on the nervous system of an animal.” Nearly every living thing ticks in time with an internal biological clock responding to light.
Like flowers, humans have their own rhythms, a “human clock” set in motion by the tasks of the day, and German Romantic writer Jean Paul Friedrich Richter (1763–1825) liked to imagine synchronicity between the two. “At three o’clock the yellow meadow goat’s-beard opens, and brides awake, and the stable-boy begins to rattle and feed the horses beneath the lodger,” he mused. “At five, kitchen-maids, dairy-maids, and buttercups awake; at six, the sow-thistle and cooks.”
Each lived and worked in harmony with a unique internal clock—as did Darwin himself, of course. Once, a friend asked Darwin’s gardener about the great scientist’s health. “I often wish he had something to
do,” the man replied. “He moons about in the garden and I have seen him stand doing nothing before a flower for ten minutes at a time.”
The coquette’s “first care after getting out of bed is to consult her mirror,” one eighteenth-century Parisian noted. In lands far and wide, people have greeted the morning with a peek at their reflected selves since at least the fifth century BCE, when Greeks primped before small disks of polished metal. In ancient China, mirrors were mystical love tokens, engraved across the back with bits of poetry, like one that read “Looking at the light of the sun, let us forever not forget one another.” Couples in those days broke a small mirror in half so that when they were apart each could carry a piece, and, when the time came, each would be buried with his or her mirror shard.
In medieval Europe, mirrors were treasured objects, magical and rare, worn as jewelry or brought to holy shrines, where their shining surfaces could capture a saintly aura. Then, suddenly, in the mid-seventeenth century, the magic disappeared. Mirrors were everywhere. “This precious miracle is found today as often in the hands of the great as in those of the small,” a French writer noted. Mirrors were made of tin, polished jet, rock crystal, or silvered glass—anything that could reflect a face. Peddlers walked the streets singing, “Little mirrors shiny and snug / Ready to reflect your ugly mug!” Ladies carried pocket mirrors ever at the ready, enclosed in a small ivory or ebony box, or worn attached to their belts. As glass became cheaper and easier to manufacture during the 1800s, mirrors grew ever larger. There were mirrors hung in parks, for instance on all the walls of a grotto housing a waterfall, in order to amplify the views. The most stylish people hung them in every room, delivering a “disastrous blow” to the art market, as mirrors replaced canvases.
One of the most emphatically creative artists to use mirrors in her work, however, was American dancer Loie Fuller (1862–1928), known for her new-tech vision and curvy physique. She intrigued audiences with her reflected image during a “Danse du Miroir” in fin-de-siècle Paris, performing her choreography on a tiny octagonal stage. The stage was open at the front, with mirrors forming its walls, hanging above, and laid below on its floor—requiring, surely, a delicate step—and all illuminated by tiny electric lights at the interstices. Wearing hundreds of yards of billowing, flyaway silk, she was a butterfly, a cloud, a flame, inspiring Art Nouveau–era artists from Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec to René Lalique to Auguste Rodin. Inside her mirrored prism, Fuller became a small troupe of synchronized dancers, all fluttering in voluminous robes. “By some mysterious arrangement, eight Loie Fullers appear to be dancing at the same time,” a spectator wrote, “and the whole stage is bathed in a flood of glorious tints, in which may be seen arial forms, in cloudlike vestures.…” Then Fuller added the coup de grâce: a sheet of transparent glass, stationed between her and her audience, that served as a one-way mirror when the auditorium went dark. The crowd watched Fuller watching herself from every angle and echoed a thousand times, her undulating dress floating in a spectral haze.
During Fuller’s performances, “one feels subtly transported into the strangest regions of the dream,” wrote a French critic, finding “in these astonishing apparitions, something satanic and demonic, but of a gentle Satanism, of a poetic and suggestive demonality, which sets one on the starry and luminous path of hashishian dreams.” Once she danced with photographs of snowstorms and moonscapes projected onto her silks, and once she wore robes treated with phosphorescent salts so that they glowed blue and gave off light enough to read by.
Her artfully enhanced image didn’t always mirror the offstage reality, however. “No, no,” complained a child visiting Fuller’s dressing room after one show. “This one here is a fat lady and it was a fairy I saw dancing.” Fuller tried to be “equal to the situation,” she recalled in her memoirs. “Yes, my dear, you are right,” she told the young fan. “I am not Loie Fuller.”
In centuries past, two quintessentially American breakfast foods, pancakes and doughnuts, were rich treats that Europeans indulged in before embarking on the lean forty days of Lent. On Shrove Tuesday, or “Pancake Day”—the last day before that yearly deprivation—fifteenth-century London mayor Simon Eyre ordered a pancake feast made for all the city’s apprentices. Every parish rang a bell—the pancake bell—so the boys could leave work early, a tradition that continued into the 1800s with a rollicking pancake toss held at schools. If a boy was lucky, he caught a hot pancake winged right out of the frying pan, as described in several lines penned in 1614:
And every man and maide doe take their turne,
And toss their pancakes up for feare they burne.
And all the kitchen doth with laughter sound,
To see the pancakes fall upon the ground.
The French made beignets, and the Dutch made their fried-dough cousins the oliekoeken, or oil cakes, which migrated to America in 1796 when a Dutch housewife opened New York City’s first proto-doughnut shop. But for more than a century, most Americans associated doughnuts and pancakes with hearty New England fare. Lumberjacks working the Maine wilds ate five meals a day, including doughnuts furnished “ad libitum,” according to The New York Times in 1878, as well as stacks of flapjacks, and tea “strong enough to float an ax.” New Yorkers thought that all the sweet fare made for an odd breakfast. “Pie and doughnuts go hand in hand all over New England,” the paper reported several years later. “What New York man or woman can think of pie as a breakfast dish without a shudder? The New Englander doesn’t shudder. He likes it at any time.”
Naturally, it fell to a New Englander, Maine’s Captain Hanson Gregory (1832–1921), to invent the doughnut hole. When eating a fried cake and steering his ship through a swell in 1847, he impaled his cake on his ship’s wheel in order to save it for later, or so the story goes. (Another version claims he cut out the undercooked, over-greased center of his mother’s doughnuts with a round lid after a bout of indigestion.)
Yet doughnuts were slow to spread countrywide until Red Cross workers served them to soldiers during World War I. After that they quickly became comfort food, “the epitome of domestic bliss and family welfare,” according to House Beautiful. In the 1930s, when every cigar shop and corner drugstore installed a soda counter, young men in smart white caps served breakfast doughnuts and pancakes every morning in an exuberant flurry.
Like doughnuts, pancakes were still popular at sea. A reporter asked Captain Bob Bartlett about eating flapjacks out on the open ocean in 1935. “Did we have pancakes in the Arctic? Sure we did,” he answered. “There we’d be, all hands around the fire, and the fellow making the pancakes would put it right in the plate of a man.”
Jenkins-Style Maine Pancakes
2 cups sifted flour (or gluten-free substitute)
½ teaspoon salt
Tiny pinch of cinnamon
2 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
2 tablespoons sugar (or none, if you prefer)
Whisk together the dry ingredients. Then beat together and add to the dry mix:
1 egg
1½ cups buttermilk (or sour milk that’s just gone off)
When the batter is uniformly mixed, gently stir in:
3 tablespoons melted butter
1 cup Maine blueberries (frozen okay, or high-bush blueberries, if necessary)
Fry up the pancakes, slowly but surely, in a cast-iron pan greased with a little butter. Serve with dark, rich B-grade maple syrup.
Gluten-free tip: At home we use Bob’s Red Mill gluten-free all-purpose baking flour plus ½ teaspoon Bob’s Red Mill xanthan gum.
As the queen of France Catherine de’ Medici (1519–1589) wrote, when all the princes, lords, and aristocrats came to the bedroom of François I to watch him put on his clothes, they were “greatly contented” by the sight. France’s kings offered such contentment for centuries, as they were dressed each morning by the highest court officials at ceremonies extolling the royal waking—the lever—and undressed at night for the ro
yal bedtime, the coucher. Not surprisingly, the extravagant Louis XIV (1638–1715) took the ritual to the brink, turning the moment when he changed out of his pajamas into a daily pageant.
Each morning, eagerly waiting courtiers, having conducted their own lever ceremonies at home, filled the king’s antechamber at Versailles. As the palace clock sounded eight, the king’s valet, Bontemps, approached his bed and said, “Sire, the clock has struck.” Over the course of the next hour and a half, as Louis rose, shaved, and dressed, more than a hundred people filed into the royal bedroom, beginning with those holding the highest credentials and continuing by degrees.
First in were the male family members, permitted early entry while he was still in bed. The valet presented the king with wine for washing his hands over a silver basin. Sieur Quentin, the barber, showed him a selection of wigs. Louis’s valet brought the royal slippers, and one of the courtiers, usually the Duke de Beauvillers, was granted the right to hand over his dressing gown. After the king knelt beside his bed for a few short prayers, he sat in his armchair so that the next round of nobles and officials could be let in.
Friends took precedence, as well as those with status—cardinals, dukes, presidents of parliament, governors of the provinces. Before each entered, a page murmured the name of the proposed caller to the Duke de Beauvillers, who quietly repeated it to the king. If the king had no objection, the caller was ushered in. Meanwhile, another page handed the king’s stockings to an official, who passed them to the king, who put them on. Another official offered the shoes. Someone held the king’s mirror for him while he shaved. And they weren’t done yet. After the king paused for a quick breakfast, the dressing continued, with yet more people arriving to watch.
All the Time in the World Page 2
