The Art of Lying Down (9 page)

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:

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.

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.”