But at this same period, fortunately, there were many women who did not need so much luxury to feel happy in their homes. They had chosen them and furnished them without much regard to fashion, and they liked them because they suited their tastes. Julie Talma, for instance, on going to live in the Rue Neuve-du-Luxembourg, has this to say to her faithful friend Benjamin Constant:
£ A great problem has been solved. They have managed to make an apartment small enough for me. You thought I had no furniture, but you were much mistaken — and anyhow it all depends on the apartment you take. Mine is so well suited to rny size and my fortune that I have been obliged to distribute my furniture to all my friends. The joke of it is that I had gone begging all round for things to ornament my rooms. Nobody refused, but instead of giving me anything, each of them went off with what took their fancy. To tell the whole truth, however, I'm having some mahogany furniture made for a little room I call my drawing-room. Did I tell you that my windows look straight on to the boulevard? Did you know that the looking-glass over my fireplace will reflect either the green or the dust of the trees? For such advantages as these I would have been content to live in a mouse-hole.'
Erard's reputation was increasing at that time. He sold small pianos of the harpsichord type for 59 louis, and large ones, lavishly decorated, for up to 200. These were delivered to all countries 'accessible by water transport'.
This little note, almost in the style of de Sevigne, is surely worth any number of the lyrical dissertations of that intolerable phrasemonger in her greenhouse.
When we said that the First Empire was little more advanced than the age of Louis XIV, we were thinking partly of two problems equally badly solved: the lighting and heating of the houses.
All foreigners passing through Paris agreed that the houses were icy, and curiously enough it was the people from the north that complained the most. Thinking with regret of their comforting stoves, they referred ironically to our fireplaces with a few miserable logs burning in them.
The larger the rooms, the loftier their windows and doors, the more difficult it was to protect oneself from draughts, and this was true of course of all official apartments. In the drawing-rooms of the Luxembourg and the Tuileries Bonaparte was always to be seen handling the tongs.
It was by the fire that he once received Fortune d'Andigne and the heads of the Royalists; he gave many of his audiences leaning against the mantelpiece, for in his case chimney-corner conversation was by no means a metaphor. When the Court went into residence at Saint-Cloud, all this fine company found their teeth chattering at the first frosts of autumn. 'In spite of the greatcoats piled up on the beds it is impossible to get warm/
A few inventors had new ways to suggest for fighting the cold. In the Great Hall of the Institute, for instance, which was undergoing alterations by Antoine Vaudoyer, steam pipes were being installed, as like our modern radiators as two drops of hot water. But* all this was done mainly by way of experiment, and for many years to come private individuals would continue to heat their rooms by log fires.
The peasant trader at the corner shop charged thirty-eight francs for a load of wood, the contents of a medium-sized cart. 1 One could also burn blocks of peat, costing only seventy-five francs for 4,000. It was poorish fuel, but our ancestors had not yet been spoilt by progress. They thought it quite natural to use flint and steel to light their fires, and to end their evenings by candle-light 5 in front of a fireplace in which smoked a few charred embers.
J A load was the equivalent of two cubic metres.
In most middle-class houses the lighting was no better than the heating. The pump lamp and the Carcel lamp - the latter in need of considerable improvement — were reserved for grand occasions. The rest of the time people used candles, taking care not to burn them at both ends, since they cost four francs a pound. There were two kinds, known as the ordinary and the bastard, and the wags remarked that it was just the same with children.
With such rudimentary comfort, the most critical hour was that of bedtime. Because there were no matches (they were not invented till 1809, and did not come into common use until the reign of Louis-Philippe), night-lights had to be kept burning. Because the bedrooms were cold, head-coverings were needed — Madras handkerchiefs for the gentlemen, caps with strings for the ladies.
To the French of the twentieth century, enjoying central heating and sleeping every night with an electric switch within reach of their hand, these habits must appear rather strange. They will find it difficult to imagine the heroes of the First Empire transformed at the hour of the curfew into comedy characters, and appearing next morning, after getting out of bed, in the costume of the Malade Imaginaire. Yet the most august personages set this example. It was with his handkerchief tied round his head, its two corners falling on his shoulders, that the Emperor spent hours every morning, working beside his secretary and even receiving a few ministers in his back room.
Audiences held in this sort of costume would not surprise anybody, for people of all ranks behaved in much the same way. Until a good fire had sent the thermometer up ? dressing-gown and nightcap were perfectly admissible as morning wear. It was one of the features of the time, one of the little freedoms of family life, far more numerous under the Empire than is generally supposed.
Because in the paintings and prints of the time we are shown rooms of exemplary tidiness, furnished in a rather stiff fashion, we are apt to forget that a room in which people sleep and dress is not an exhibition stand, and that this edifying scene must often be upset. Many a kerchief, many a gorget, many a vulgar flannel waistcoat must have littered a Jacob sofa, many a pair of boots have been left about on those handsome carpets with their flowered rosettes. The material conditions of life, lack of water, poor lighting, dust from wood fires, insufficiency of toilet utensils, resulted in a certain disorder, even in apartments that were well kept; and many were probably very badly kept.
For proof of this, we have only to accompany Maria Edge-worth and Mme Recamier on a visit to that old mountebank La Harpe, who received them in a horrible little room dignified by the name of office, clad in a dressing-gown c that had once been red* and a "superlatively dirty nightcap'.
Or let Norvins show us Fouche — now Duke of Otranto — at his toilet, his cotton nightcap lying beside a shaving-brush on a corner of the mantelpiece, himself in shirtsleeves, his feet in down-at-heel slippers, stropping an old monk's razor before shaving off a beard as yellow as his face, in front of a looking-glass costing thirteen sous. Or to complete our edification, we might push on to the Arsenal, to take Mme de Genlis by surprise and glance at her worktable. There, among volumes of verse and watercolour sketches, we should see a medley of toothbrushes, an inkstand, two pots of jam partly consumed, eggshells, a roll, the remains of a cup of coffee, some paper flowers, a candle-end, a tress of false hair and a piece of Brie cheese.
Poor Mme de Genlis! Napoleon used to say of her, 'When she talks of virtue, she seems to be making a discovery/ If she had been talking of cleanliness the subject would have seemed no less novel to her.
CHAPTER X. PARIS AT TABLE
A generation of big eaters — Time and nature of meals - Cambaceres's dinner-parties - Grimod and his Almanac — Other famous epicures - Talleyrand's two salmons — Middle-class tables - The hardships of the Continental System