Spending time at de Montesquiou’s side, Proust steeped himself in tales of bygone intrigues, minutely studying the aristocratic characters who surrounded him. (De Montesquiou himself later served as a model for Proust’s fictional Baron de Charlus.) The young writer also developed expensive tastes that meant he had not “a penny left for flowers,” as he told a friend. At the time of his literary debut in 1897, however, Proust’s connection to the great social lion would put him at a more serious disadvantage. Criticism of his melancholic first book, Les Plaisirs et les jours, a small collection of tales and poems, was, for the most part, unenthusiastic. But the review by writer Jean Lorrain was merciless.
Lorrain (1855–1906), de Montesquiou’s arch-nemesis, was another perfumed and decadent type, with his jewels, his hennaed mustache, and his addiction to both ether and rough sailor boys. That didn’t stop him from calling Proust’s writing “precious and pretentious,” or from claiming that the book was full of “inane flirtations.” And then he went a step too far, insinuating that Proust was having a homosexual love affair, which was illegal at the time. Instead of suing Lorrain for libel, Proust challenged him to a duel.
Dueling, a genteel way for courtiers to settle their differences since the Renaissance, was dangerous until the second half of the nineteenth century, when strict protocols kept the body count low. The new codes frowned on the most deadly forms of the duel and encouraged the aggrieved to rely on level-headed advocates, “seconds,” who could negotiate a low-risk contest and a bloodless resolution. Seconds, for example, could improve the odds by regulating the number of shots fired or substantially increasing the distance from which the parties would shoot. They also tended to work together to smooth things out so that the shooters were less intent in their aim. “Honor is no less sacred than governmental laws,” wrote Comte de Chatauvillard in 1836, and yet, the fencing expert continued, “honor might require us to risk our lives, but not to play with them.” Proust chose his seconds wisely: Impressionist painter Jean Béraud and socialite swordsman Gustave de Borda, known as an unequaled duelist. Lorrain took a painter and a novelist as his team.
While most dueling was done in the early dawn, the city’s haute-bohemians lived by a different clock. In a forest outside Paris, Proust, Lorrain, and their seconds met on a rainy afternoon in February 1897. Proust, ever the gentleman, nearly shook hands with the enemy before his seconds stopped him. At twenty-five paces, the two men faced off with pistols and exchanged fire. Proust almost hit Lorrain’s foot. But he didn’t. And that was that.
Proust’s friends took pride in his ability to rise above his habitual nervousness during the proceedings. “He showed a sang-froid and a firmness that appear incompatible with his nerves,” one noted. Later in life, Proust’s agitated condition and ill health would keep him in bed for long stretches at a time, but in facing his enemy, the idea that he might have to wake up early was more frightening than death by gunshot. “My sole concern was that the duel would take place before noon,” he remembered, writing to de Montesquiou years later. “When I was told that it would be during the afternoon, it was all the same to me.”
The ancient Roman workday ended around noon, the same hour that the public baths opened. A savvy habitué, the poet Martial (ca.40 CE–ca.102 CE), noted that the city’s spas were at their hottest during the first two hours, as attendants stoked the fires, and that the social scene was roiling by late afternoon. From the sound of it, he’d visited every spa in town. He liked the Thermae of Titus, and took his dinner guests to the Balneae of Stephanus. He went to the Thermae of Agrippa when he needed to see his patrons, and though he appreciated the luxury of the Thermae of Nero, for him the place was just too hot.
Everyone—freeman, woman, or slave—was welcome at Rome’s low-cost public baths. Paid for by the city’s elite and splendidly decorated with statues and mosaics, the baths were built for the pursuit of pleasure, though men and women bathed separately—most of the time. There were promenades, gymnasiums, hot rooms and cold plunge pools, masseuses who gave rubdowns, and snack vendors who served eggs, lettuce, and sausages. For Cicero (106–43 BCE), the bell that announced the opening of the baths each afternoon was a sweeter sound than the voices of all the philosophers of Athens. Even those who bathed at home dropped by the public baths to meet friends in the late afternoon, when social climbers and hungry poets prowled the steamy realms, hoping to land a dinner invitation.
Over many centuries, the public bath came into and went out of fashion, spreading across Europe, first with the Romans, then with the returning Crusaders, who probably introduced the bagnio, or hammam, to twelfth-century London. By the late Middle Ages, fears that the baths spread disease and fueled prostitution forced many to close their doors. Another sea change occurred in the early seventeenth century, when medical writers championed the hot bath, though the Puritans could hardly agree. By the late seventeenth century, public bathhouses had cropped up across London once more, this time reimagined in a fantasy-Oriental style and dubbed “Turkish baths,” with a nod to Istanbul’s Roman thermal spas, many of which were still in operation.
The Duke’s Bagnio was the first. Then came the rest—the China Hummum, the Turk’s Head, Pero’s Bagnio, and the Hummums of Brownlow Street, where, one ad promised, “persons may sweat to what degree they please.” A hint of hedonism kept bathers happy. As in the ancient world, they were tempted by snacks and drinks—especially exotic coffee. And as in ancient Rome, the sight of so much skin, and the occasional brow-raising mix of male and female bathers, lent London’s bagnios a wicked reputation. In truth, some baths doubled as brothels, while others were aboveboard.
At the turn of the seventeenth century, the English writer Ned Ward (1667–1731), who wrote articles as the “London Spy,” visited a hammam in Covent Garden for an “hour’s baking.” Swaddled with a cloth “no bigger than a fig-leaf,” and wearing wooden-soled shoes to protect his feet from the scorching floors, he started in the steam bath. “I began immediately to melt, like a piece of Butter in a Basting Ladle, and was afraid I should have run all to Oil by the time I had been six minutes,” he reported. As he sat and sweated, “warm as a cricket at an oven’s mouth,” a man rubbed him down with a rough glove before sending him on to the sauna, where he could “boil out those gross humours that could not be emitted by a more gentle perspiration.”
A much more decorous English writer, James Boswell (1740–1795), dared only dip his feet into a hot bath while visiting Holland in 1763. The experience left him tantalized and slightly scandalized. “But if I receive so much delight from washing my feet, how great must have been the luxury of the Romans, who solaced thus their entire bodies,” he mused. “Truly, without exaggeration, one cannot imagine anything more consoling than after a day of annoyance and fatigue to undress and stretch one’s self out at full length in fluid warmth, to have one’s nerves gently relaxed, to enjoy indolent ease and forget all one’s cares.… A warm bath is, I confess, a most agreeable kind of luxury, but luxury is very dangerous.”
CLASSICAL PERSIAN POETS WROTE THOUSANDS of tender verses in praise of the rose, which bloomed briefly during the abrupt Middle Eastern spring only to wilt and crisp in the summer heat. Still, that fleeting span was heaven on earth. As the medieval Persian poet Hafiz (ca.1325–1389) wrote, “Earth rivals the Immortal Garden during the rose and lily’s reign.”
Roses of every variety became the focal point of the ancient Persian garden, secreted away behind high walls and inspired by the Koran’s descriptions of the otherworldly afterlife. They were arranged around flowing fountains, surrounded by fruit trees and planted in lavish banks. (The Persian word pairidae¯za, meaning “walled in,” became “paradise” in English.) “In no other country of the world does the rose grow in such perfection as in Persia,” wrote a nineteenth-century springtime visitor, “in no country is it so cultivated, and prized by the natives. Their gardens and courts are crowded with its plants, their rooms ornamental with vases, filled with its gathered
bunches and every bath strewed with full-blown flowers, plucked from their ever-replenished stems.”
As with the ancient Persians, the ancient Romans fell for the rose and loved it with abandon. Emperor Nero (37–68 CE) was said to have thrown a banquet during which several dinner guests suffocated under a heavy rain of rose petals released from the ceiling. It’s no wonder early Christians like Saint Clement of Alexandria (ca.150–ca.215) frowned upon the rose and its decadent associations, denouncing the flower and its perfume too. Women who scented themselves with rose, Saint Clement claimed, were “directed to the gratification of insatiable desire.” Admiration for the flower itself was acceptable, “if a concession must be made,” he granted, “but let them not crown themselves with them.” The rose slowly regained popularity without his support, and, ironically, would eventually become a symbol for the Virgin Mary.
The Persians’ Rosa centrifolia certainly smelled divine, and various foods and drinks made use of it. The damask rose, thought to have sprung up from a droplet of Muhammad’s sweat, became the prime source for the kingdom’s rose water. Heady Middle Eastern recipes of the medieval era called for rose water and rose petals. The celebrated Persian doctor Avicenna (980–1037) prescribed rose water cordials as a cure for ailments of the heart, and therefore the spirit, mixing in pomegranates, saffron, egg yolks, and, sometimes, ground gems or pearls. After Avicenna, rose became a key ingredient in ancient love potions—a concept that, once again, traveled to Europe. Later, Portuguese traders would quench their thirst with a Persian drink made of five ingredients—grape juice, rose water, sugar, cinnamon, and lemon juice, over ice—called panj, the Persian word for “five,” which became “punch” in the West. Meanwhile, the Persian word for rose water, gula¯b, became the name of another sweet drink, known in English as the “julep.”
Yet, in ancient Persia, the rose was never just a rose, but a solemn representation of both the beauty of the beloved and the transcendent yearning for the divine. “I am so drowned in my love for the rose,” wrote the twelfth-century poet Attar, “that my own existence has become effaced.”
Rose Julep
Emily Butters and Forrest Butler of Royal Rose syrups created this fresh, rosy take on the mint julep, to be sipped and savored come springtime.
2–3 mint sprigs, torn, plus one for garnish
1 ounce Royal Rose rose syrup
1 ounce fresh ruby grapefruit juice
½ ounce fresh lime juice
Splash of soda or seltzer water
Shake the first four ingredients with ice and strain into a rocks glass filled with ice. Top with soda water. Garnish with a sprig of mint.
Women of polite eighteenth-century society made music at home with ladies’ instruments—the guitar and the glass harmonium. “There is hardly a private family in a civilized nation without its flute, its fiddle, its harpsichord, or guitar,” the English music historian Charles Burney (1726–1814) noted. The guitar, introduced in Britain in the 1750s, was easy to learn, but it was also known for showcasing its players’ best attributes. “The Attitude this Instrument almost naturally throws the Performer in, is very graceful, and forms a Line of Beauty,” explained an early English player, Ann Ford (1737–1824), “not to mention the Advantage which the Hands and Arms are seen in, &c. &c. &c.” Women in Ford’s circle often kept a guitar close at hand when posing for artists like Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds.
For all the guitar’s sophisticated allure, however, Ford’s own father had her arrested—twice—while she was en route to perform. He couldn’t bear the indignity of her musical talent going on public display. On her third attempt, he hired a pack of thugs to block ticket holders from entering the concert hall. Not surprisingly, his efforts turned her into a sensation. Eventually Ford married, moved out, and arranged a series of small afternoon concerts in which, between one o’clock and three, she’d sing Italian arias and play the viola da gamba and the guitar. She was “partly admired & partly laugh’d at” around London, according to Gainsborough, though others said that she played so sweetly it moved her audience to tears.
During her stage career, Ford also pioneered the use of another novel instrument, the glass harmonica, once performing an entire concert by tracing the rims of a set of tuned wineglasses with a damp fingertip, which she kept moist by dabbing it on the pulp of an unripe grape. The “armonica,” as it was known, was a quintessentially feminine instrument. American inventor Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) created the device, lining up a graded series of stemless lead crystal glasses along an iron spindle attached to a foot pedal. When a player pumped the pedal, the glasses spun, ready to give off their slightly macabre, saccharine sounds. “The advantages of this instrument are, that its tones are incomparably sweet beyond those of any other,” Franklin crowed. The armonica’s glassy music—which sounds something like an enchanted calliope—was credited with reconciling fighting friends, but also with making women faint. “No instrument that I know has so celestial a tone,” wrote English poet Thomas Gray (1716–1771). “I thought it was a cherubim in a box.” (Composers from Beethoven to Björk have tried it since, and several craftsmen worldwide still fabricate the instrument.)
The eerie, ethereal tones charmed some, but the sound was a little too airy for those of a superstitious bent. “Like every pleasure of a refined nature that leads the mind to contemplation, if too much enjoyed, it abstracts us from the ordinary enjoyments of social life, and thus may become an evil,” German musicologist Friedrich Rochlitz (1769–1842) warned. “Also, we should not indulge in its soft and pleasing tones too much at night.” The glass harmonica was consequently banned in some German towns. It was also often blamed for the physical ailments of professional players. It was said that “permanent nerve damage” induced by the instrument forced the musician Marianne Davies (ca. 1743–1818) into an early retirement. When one of the best-known players, Marianne Kirchgessner (1769–1808), died suddenly of a fever, rumors circulated that the cause of death was “nervous excitement” aggravated by the armonica’s penetrating sound.
On the other hand, the famous German hypnotist Dr. Franz Mesmer (1734–1815) praised the power of the armonica’s angelic tones, which charged the atmosphere, he explained, channeling the “magnetic fluid,” or “ether,” from another plane, and thereby easing his patients into a trance. Mesmer played the instrument himself, spinning the glasses after dinner in the twilight, improvising warbling, mournful melodies. His deathbed wish was to hear the glass harmonica one last time.
Ultimately, however, the instrument was remembered as a means for a woman to show off her delicate feminine nature, as with the guitar. “When it was claimed that the armonica exerted a magical influence on the nerves,” one writer remembered, “the instrument could not fail to captivate every sensitive soul. For any young lady of breeding it would have been most ill-advised, as soon as the glasses were even touched, not to fall into a tolerably convincing swoon.”
Aristocratic ladies whiled away the hours for centuries by embroidering, spinning, weaving, and making lace. As the Venetian noblewoman Christine de Pisan (1364–ca.1430) wrote, a proper princess would go to mass in the morning, distribute cash among the poor, and then, after a meal with her ladies-in-waiting, spend the afternoon doing needlework with them. The only other option seems to have been doing nothing at all. “Rather than be idle, she will take up some handiwork, such as sewing fine cloth. Then they may all indulge in some amusements,” wrote Christine. The recent introduction of strong, thin needles made such delicate amusements possible. Past instruments weren’t as user friendly. Bronze needles were too coarse. Bone needles broke. Silver needles were fine, but expensive. Steel needle manufacturing developed in the mid-sixteenth century, but even two hundred years later needles were prized, kept close in tiny decorated cases.
Some women stitched little gifts for their lovers—slippers or suspenders—weaving in locks of their own hair, or they crafted elaborately worked curtains for four-poster beds. Edi
th, wife of Edward the Confessor, embroidered robes for him in eleventh-century England. In France, Catherine de’ Medici, famously handy with a needle, kept the ladies of her court busy fabricating hundreds of lacy squares to decorate her boudoir. Queen Jeanne of Navarre (1528–1572) was so bored by the long hours she spent in church that she petitioned the synod to allow her to work on her tapestry while listening to sermons. England’s Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603) gave up the needle when she took the throne, but Mary, Queen of Scots (1542–1587), could not keep her hands still and received her ministers and ambassadors while at her embroidery.
Other women sang as they stitched. According to Homer, who is thought to have written in the eighth century BCE, Circe sang at her loom. In medieval France, women trilled sad tales of love, chansons de toile, or “weaving songs.” One chanson, for example, described a heartbroken belle who, “with a silk cloth on her knees,” worked as “warm tears rolled down her face.” How similar it is to a weaving song from ancient Egypt:
Singers are at the looms in the weaving rooms.
What they sing to the goddess are dirges.
Like the noblewomen hidden away behind castle walls, nuns in European convents spent most of their time embroidering and lace making when they weren’t at prayer. It’s said that Saint Etheldreda, in seventh-century England, entered a convent just so that she could embroider without interruption. But in the next century, the English church tried to discourage too many hours spent at needlework, cautioning nuns that it was better to sing and read religious texts instead. Nuns in the thirteenth century were warned away from attempting the fanciest frills when a guide urged opting for the “plainer kinds” of patterns. “Do not make purses in order to win friends,” the book advised, and “do not make silk caps or bandages or lace without permission.”
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