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of Decorum in Christian Civility, published in 1703. “Imitate not certain persons who busy themselves in
reading and other matters; stay not in bed if it be not to sleep, and your virtue shall much profit from it.”
And Jonathan Swift, at about the same time, ironically suggested that books read in bed should be given
an airing: “In the Time when you leave the Windows open for Air,” he advises the chamber-maid in charge
of cleaning her mistress’s bedroom, “leave Books, or something else on the Window-seat, that they may
get Air too.” In New England in the mid-eighteenth century, the Argand lamp, improved by Jefferson, was
supposed to have furthered the habit of reading in bed. “It was observed at once that dinner parties,
formerly lighted by candles, ceased to be as brilliant as of old,” because those who had excelled in talking
now took to their bedrooms to read.
Complete privacy in the bedroom, even privacy in bed, was still not easy to come by. Even if the family
was rich enough to have individual beds and bedrooms, social conventions demanded that certain
communal ceremonies take place there. For example, it was customary for ladies to “receive” in their
bedchambers, fully dressed but lying in bed, propped up by a multitude of pillows; visitors would sit in the
ruelle or “alleyway” between the bed and the partition. Antoine de Courtin, in his New Treatise of Civility
as Practised in France by Honest Folk, sternly recommended “that the bed-curtains be kept drawn” to
comply with the laws of decency, and noted that “it is unbecoming, in the presence of persons of whom
one is not a superior, to fling oneself on the bed and from there conduct a conversation.” At Versailles, the
ritual of the waking of the king — the famous lever du Roi — became a highly elaborate procedure in
which six different hierarchies of the nobility took turns proceeding into the royal bedchamber and
carrying out appointed honours such as slipping on — or off — the royal left or right sleeve, or reading to
the royal ear.
Even the nineteenth century was reluctant to recognize the bedroom as a private place. Demanding that
attention be paid to this “sleeping-room in which nearly half of one’s life is passed,” Mrs. Haweis, in the
chapter “Homes for the Happy” of her influential book The Art of Housekeeping, complained that
“bachelors — why not brides? — sometimes disguise and adorn the bedroom, where space is precious,
with sofa-beds, Chippendale or old French closed washstands, palm-plants and gipsy-tables, that it may
serve as a thoroughfare without a suspicion that anybody but a canary ever sleeps in it.” “Commend us,”
wrote Leigh Hunt in 1891, “to a bedchamber of the middle order, such as it was set out about a hundred
years back,” in which he’d have “windows with seats, and looking upon some green place” and “two or
three small shelves of books”.
For Edith Wharton, the aristocratic American novelist, the bedroom became the only refuge from
nineteenth-century ceremony where she could read and write at ease. “Visualize her bed,” suggested
Cynthia Ozick in a discussion of Wharton’s craft. “She used a writing board. Her breakfast was brought to
her by Gross, the housekeeper, who almost alone was privy to this inmost secret of the bedchamber. (A
secretary picked up the pages from the floor for typing.) Out of bed, she would have had to be, according
to her code, properly dressed, and this meant stays. In bed, her body was free, and freed her pen.” Free
also was her reading; in this private space she did not have to explain to visitors why she had chosen a
book or what she thought of it. So important was this horizontal workplace that once, at the Hotel
Esplanade in Berlin, Wharton had “a minor fit of hysterics because the bed in her hotel room was not
properly situated; not until it had been moved to face the window did she settle down and begin to find
Berlin ‘incomparable’.”
Colette’s social constraints differed from those imposed on Wharton, but on her personal life too society
constantly intruded. In her time, Wharton was seen to write — at least partly — from the authority
granted her by her social standing; Colette was considered far more “outrageous, audacious, perverse”,
so that when she died, in 1954, the Catholic Church refused her religious burial. In the last years of her
life Colette took to her bed, driven by illness but also by a wish to have a space entirely of her own
devising. Here, in her apartment on the third floor of the Palais Royal, in her radeau-lit — “the bed-raft”,
as she christened it — she slept and ate, received her friends and acquaintances, phoned, wrote and read.
The Princess of Polignac had given her a table that fitted exactly over the bed, and served her as desk.
Propped up against the pillows as when she had been a child in Saint-Sauveuren-Puisaye, with the
symmetrical gardens of the Palais Royal unfurling through the window to her left, and all her collected
treasures — her glass objects, her library, her cats — spreading out to her right, Colette read and reread,
in what she called this solitude en hauteur, the old books she loved best.
Colette celebrating her eightieth birthday in 1953. (photo credit 10.5)
There is a photograph taken of her a year before her death, on her eightieth birthday. Colette is in bed,
and the hands of the maid have deposited on her table — which is cluttered with magazines, cards and
flowers — a birthday cake ablaze; the flames rise high, too high to seem mere candles, as if the old
woman were an ancient camper in front of her familiar fire, as if the cake were a book alight, bursting
into that darkness sought by Proust for literary creation. The bed has become at last so private, so
intimate, that it is now a world unto itself, where everything is possible.
Walt Whitman in his house in Camden, New Jersey. (photo credit 10.6)
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