Encyclopedia of the Exquisite: An Anecdotal History of Elegant Delights Read online

  The Bon Chrétien, a singularly delicious pear brought in 1481 by Saint Francis of Paola (1416–1507) from the saint’s home in Calabria all the way to the sickbed of Louis XI (1423–1483) in France, was later named the “good Christian” in the saint’s honor, or so the story goes. The variety was later called Williams’ Bon Chrétien, or the Bartlett, after its first distributors in England and the United States. But by any name, it is tender, perfectly granular—and juicy.

  The saint’s reputation preceded him in France. Francis, a precocious hermit, retired to a cave at age fourteen and quickly began racking up miracles after his six-year stint in solitude: he strolled into a blazing furnace without getting burned; resuscitated a favorite lamb by calling its name; and cured the paralyzed and the blind. Disciples followed his pious example, refusing meat, eggs, or milk. His fame grew, and soon enough Louis XI, determined to stave off death, summoned the miracle worker to his château at Plessis-les-Tours, though Francis refused to come until Pope Sixtus IV gave the order.

  The king, lonely, isolated, and grim, let the world know he was alive by shopping—ordering horses from Naples, a leopard from the Duke of Ferrara, and reindeer from Scandinavia. No one was allowed to speak the word “death.”

  When Francis arrived at the château, after delivering two cities from the plague en route, the king asked him to work his magic. But Francis was frank. “The lives of kings are in the hands of God and have divinely appointed limits,” he said, advising Louis to put his affairs in order and to prepare for death. Francis presented the king with a Calabrian pear he’d brought from home (pears can be kept for several months), and, eventually, they became friends. Louis ordered sweet oranges sent from Languedoc for the vegan saint. Soon after, the king died in Saint Francis’s arms.

  More than a century later, Francis’s lingering reputation brought the French queen Anne of Austria to pray each week in the Paris chapel housing one of his vertebrae. She had yet to bear an heir to the throne after two decades of marriage, when she finally—miraculously—gave birth to Louis XIV, who took the crown at four years old and soon acquired his grandiose taste.

  Thanks to innovative hothouse techniques, the royal gardener at Versailles, Jean-Baptiste de La Quintinie (1624–1688), could accommodate Louis XIV’s cravings for asparagus in December, peas in April, and strawberries nearly all year round. The Bon Chrétien pears that La Quintinie produced—prized distant cousins to the one Saint Francis delivered to Plessis-les-Tours—were so luscious that Louis gave the fruit to favorite courtiers as gifts. “One must agree,” La Quintinie wrote, “that nature has not given us anything as beautiful and as noble to see as this pear.” In 1996, Versailles gardeners reintroduced the Bon Chrétien pear to the château’s celebrated kitchen garden, the Potager du Roi. Beyond Versailles, and better known as the Bartlett, it’s the most widely grown pear in the Western world.

  BOUDOIR

  A woman’s private lair

  Lying in her bed, Catherine de Vivonne, Marquise de Rambouillet (1588–1665), oversaw France’s first true salon, then called a ruelle, the name for the little alleyway between the bed and the wall where a lady’s friends sat to chat with her while she lounged. The horizontal marquise, raised in genteel Italy, retired early from Henri IV’s licentious Parisian court, claiming ill health, and established instead a weekly rendezvous of the city’s brightest lights—Madame de Sévigné, Guez de Balzac, Richelieu, La Roche-foucauld—in her boudoir, the famed chambre bleu. There, she reigned for over forty years, surrounded by admirers, hundreds of lit candles, and baskets of fresh-cut flowers. The scene that was, as one habitué noted, “less crowded and more refined than that at the Louvre.”

  Rambouillet’s cozy boudoir, built to encourage conversation, caused nothing short of a revolution in domestic architecture. Her rooms were more intimate than the grand halls in old-fashioned houses, and much easier to heat. And they were bright—accustomed to Italy’s sun, the marquise had her windows enlarged and elongated to the floor. Queen Marie-Thérèse soon emulated Rambouillet’s scheme—as did the rest of Paris—constructing, beyond Versailles’ formal reception rooms, a petit appartement of her own, which included an intimate boudoir, a refuge from the rigors of court life.

  Regal European bedrooms of the era were of two sorts: the rooms where the master or mistress of the house actually slept, and opulent rooms anchored by a lit de parade, an imposing canopied bed, where every morning a clutch of courtiers—sometimes as many as one hundred of them—gathered to watch their betters pretend to wake up. To be allowed such intimate contact with royalty was thought to be an honor. The boudoir was something in-between, a cozy, feminine hideaway where select friends were invited.

  The word “boudoir” comes from the French verb bouder, to brood or sulk, but in the eighteenth century it also became a place of pleasure. The grand courtesan Anne-Victoire Dervieux (1752–1826), supported in her prime by a consortium of dukes, was the daughter of a washerwoman. She made her stage debut as a dancer at thirteen, then switched to singing opera. Her town house perfectly matched her theatrical urge. Decorating her domain, Dervieux amassed 124 chairs, showed her collection of embalmed exotic birds behind glass, and devoted a whole room to her porcelain collection. Her bathroom was done in a Pompeian motif, while her formal lit de parade dripped with Persian fantasy—swagged in blue brocade and topped off with a spray of ostrich feathers, with the inside of its canopy lined in mirrors.

  But a sumptuous boudoir—a “little temple of Venus,” according to one lucky guest—was her sanctuary. Continuous mirrors covered the ceiling, walls, and the floor, “so two lovers could, in the midst of their voluptuous embrace, consider themselves in each attitude,” wrote memoirist Antoine Caillot (1759–1830). Cushions strewn around the room were the plush weapons of her “amorous combats.” Yet, as racy as it was, Dervieux’s tantalizing boudoir set the tone “for young ladies of quality and bourgeois women of the better sort.”

  When one of those women, a duchess, wanted a firsthand glimpse of the place, she badgered her lover, who knew the courtesan, to get her inside. Thinking they were alone in the house, she offered her noisy opinion about Dervieux’s infamous boudoir. “Oh, this is too much,” she shrieked. “It could only be equaled in the Arabian Nights!” Just then, a hidden door swung open, and there was the famous courtesan herself, laughing. “You are right,” she announced, “and I doubt much whether you could offer anything half so charming.” After years of pleasing the men around her and pillow fighting, Dervieux married her architect.

  CAROUSEL

  A tournament of horsemanship, or a merry-go-round ride

  The carousel, that spinning joyride, with its gaudy flash and old-world pomp, has been around in one manner or another since at least the sixth century, when dizzy thrill-seekers rode in big twirling baskets tied to a strong center pole, as seen in a Byzantine bas-relief. Likewise, low-tech rides swung daring riders through the air in India, as well as in Turkey, where they competed in knocking the turban off the head of a man standing below.

  Before the word “carousel” meant a ride, however, it described a different sort of amusement: a splashy chivalric pageant staged live on a vast field to showcase lavish displays of horsemanship, like the pretty war games put on by medieval Arabian warriors. Performing elaborate feats on horseback in the sixteenth century, brilliantly dressed nobles demonstrated their agility and prowess by jousting, or by lancing a gold ring while seated on horseback. At one of the most spectacular events, six hundred aristocratic riders competed in the courtyard of the Louvre in 1662, called the Place du Carrousel to this day, during a festival to celebrate the birth of Louis XIV’s son, though, according to Voltaire, the king really staged the show to impress his teenage mistress. The fête was months in the planning, with five teams of horsemen all flamboyantly costumed as Turks, Persians, Indians, American Indians, and ancient Romans. In decorous faux combat, they galloped toward one another in a newly built Roman amphitheater before fifteen thousand g
uests, firing brightly colored balls filled with perfume. In the midst of all the scented pageantry, Louis cantered out to play the part of the Roman emperor himself. The vividly colored trappings worn by their horses still festoon the mechanical carousel’s carved horses hundreds of years later.

  Young riders prepared for these grand displays by training with a prototype of the mechanical carousel. On real horses, they charged after a golden ring hanging from a hand-cranked wheel rotating overhead. Eventually, the game evolved into a horseless ride with carved animals perched on a turning platform, often powered by strong servants. And by the eighteenth century, such a device had become an eccentric extravagance. The Duke of Chartres installed one in his Parisian garden, the Parc Monceau, so his guests could ride on dragons or on little cushions held by sculpted Chinese attendants.

  But even after the carousel ran on steam or electricity and became a more common sight around Paris, it retained its strange magic. Poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) was hypnotized by the whizzing, turning carousel in the Jardin du Luxembourg while in one of his wistful moods. He wrote:

  … And on the lion whitely rides a young

  boy who clings with little sweaty hands,

  the while the lion shows his teeth and tongue.

  And now and then a big white elephant.

  And on the horses swiftly going by

  are shining girls who have outgrown this play;

  in the middle of the flight they let their eyes

  glance here and there and near and far away—

  and now and then a big white elephant …

  CHAMPAGNE

  Sparkling white wine from the French region of Champagne

  At the coronation of the sixteen-year-old Louis XIV (1638–1715), one of the locals at Reims, the capital of the Champagne region, told the new king, “Sire, we offer you our wines, our pears, our gingerbreads, our biscuits, and our hearts.” “That, gentlemen,” the cocky new king replied, “is the kind of speech I like.”

  What he didn’t like, however, were bubbles in his wine, thought to be a flaw in the fermenting process until the blind Benedictine monk Dom Pierre Pérignon (1638–1715) gave sparkling champagne its big start, regulating the effervescence when he couldn’t get rid of it. All wines bubble naturally when the grapes are first pressed, but in colder regions, like Champagne, the yeasts that cause fizzing hibernate during the winter, waking up again in the spring to bubble anew. Champagne’s wine came to life in March, and by summertime it was “en furie.”

  Because the highly pressurized bottles shattered at the slightest provocation, champagne’s prices soared. Winemakers sidled into their cellars wearing iron masks as a protection against exploding glass. One vineyard owner was left with just 120 bottles out of 6,000 after the rest were blown to smithereens in 1746.

  Its explosive property aside, champagne wasn’t an easy sell in the beginning. One winegrower proclaimed that froth was only appropriate in “beer, chocolate, and whipped cream.” Doctors expounded on the dangers of drinking champagne. Others, such as professor Benigné Grenan, issued warnings in verse:

  Lift to the skies thy foaming wine,

  That cheers the heart, that charms the eye,

  Exalt its fragrance, gift divine,

  Champagne, from thee the wise must fly!

  A poison lurks those charms below,

  An asp beneath the flowers is hid.

  Nevertheless, fizzy fans like Madame de Pompadour loved the delicacy of the drink. As Voltaire (1694–1778) put it, “This wine where sparkling bubbles dance/Reflects the brilliant soul of France.” The Faculty of Medicine of Paris finally ruled in champagne’s favor.

  A good champagne, like those blended by Krug, is feathery with small bubbles and complex, revealing a taste that is tart like a green apple, flowery with roses and violets, sweet like roasted pineapple, and toasty as a golden brioche.

  Technical advances kept bottles from bursting during the nineteenth century, which should have lowered prices, but by then champagne was draped in a luxe legend all its own. Its bubbles were synonymous with celebration, and were required to toast any important moment, from the launching of a boat to a marriage or the birth of a child.

  Its pull was so strong that even Stalin couldn’t resist. Under his guidance, Professor Frolov-Bagraev launched Soviet champagne—Sovetskoe shampanskoe—in Russia in the mid-1930s. Cheaply mass-produced, sugary, and still available today, it offered workers of all walks a sickly sweet taste of the good life.

  CLAUDE GLASS

  A convex hand mirror used to view landscapes

  The English poet Thomas Gray (1716–1771) climbed onto a hilltop near the village of Keswick in 1769, and instead of simply taking in the view of the misty meadowland below, he took out his Claude glass, a convex, tinted mirror, something like a lady’s compact, which artists and tourists kept close at hand in the late eighteenth century, convinced that the reflection of a pretty view was usually prettier than the view itself. In order to see the landscape in his mirror more clearly, Gray turned his back to the sight and aimed the Claude glass back over his shoulder, framing up “a picture, that if I could transmit it to you, & fix it in all the softness of its living colours, would fairly sell for a thousand pounds,” he wrote to a friend. “This is the sweetest scene I can yet discover in point of pastoral beauty.”

  Like Gray, fastidious European aesthetes set out in pursuit of the sweetest scenery, armed both with clear colored glass filters that tinted their views pink, green, or blue, and with black-tinted Claude glass mirrors, which distorted the landscape, while seeming to improve it. Condensed in the smoky-hued mirror, almost any landscape turned into an unspoiled Shangri-la in miniature, a tiny glowing vista that conjured the idyllic pastoral paintings of the seventeenth-century painter Claude Lorrain. Claude, as he was called, wasn’t known to use the device (though other artists used it as a drawing aid), but like the mirror named in his honor, Claude’s work “conducts us to the tranquility of Arcadian scenes and fairyland,” artist Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) wrote. Nostalgic travelers like Goethe compared every attractive landscape they saw with Claude’s sylvan dreamscapes, often preferring the painted version to reality. That is, until—like modern tourists wielding digital cameras—they took out their magic mirrors.

  In the days before the camera, capturing and framing wild scenery in a Claude glass gave an artsy thrill. The rambling English vicar William Gilpin (1724–1804), calling himself a “picturesque traveler” in search of “visual effects,” trekked all over southern England, watching the world go by in his mirror. “Shall we suppose it a greater pleasure to the sportsman to pursue a trivial animal, than it is to the man of taste to pursue the beauties of nature?” he wondered.

  The mirrors remained popular until the mid-nineteenth century, when the formidable English art critic John Ruskin (1819–1900) held sway, blaming the painter Claude for his dreamy distortion of reality, and calling the Claude glass “one of the most pestilent inventions for falsifying Nature and degrading art which was ever put into an artist’s hand.” Instead, Ruskin recommended carrying a magnifying glass in one’s pocket to examine the truth up close.

  CONFETTI

  Scraps of colored paper thrown during festive occasions

  Throwing confetti wasn’t always such dainty fun, though it began decorously enough. In medieval Italy, confetti meant candied spices or fruits—like the hard, sugarcoated almonds that Venetian traders brought back from the Far East. Wealthy families served confetti at first-rate feasts, and, during the Lenten Carnival, tossed it from their balconies to the eager throngs below. (The good stuff didn’t shatter.) At baptisms and at weddings Italians still hand out powdery, sweet confetti bundled in pouches of ribbon-tied tulle, though it’s now called coriandoli, to distinguish it from the cheap, rock-hard candy that masked combatants hurled at one another in mock battles during Carnival in the nineteenth century, when revelers caroused in open carriages, flinging it at each other with tin ladles.
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  Novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) jumped into the fray in Rome, receiving “a handful of confetti, right slap in my face,” as he wrote in his diaries in 1859. Courteous players threw bouquets at ladies, but when stockpiles of the genteel projectiles ran out, they grabbed dried peas, sawdust, eggs—anything. Hawthorne was hit with sugarplums, and took a blast of seeds. From his balcony, he bombarded the enemy in retaliation—and he loved it. “Though I pretended to take no interest in the matter, I could have bandied confetti and nosegays as readily and as riotously as any urchin there,” he wrote.

  Parisians played a polite version of the game with festive scraps of colored paper, but with an equal passion. An estimated 1.5 million pounds of paper confetti were sold in the days preceding Lent one year during the 1890s. Confetti blanketed the big boulevards, inches deep, like tutti-frutti snow, and everyone joined in—women and men, rich and poor—except policemen, who made the best targets.

  That European sense of decorum vanished at New York’s Coney Island during Carnival season in 1906. Young toughs lobbed handfuls of wet paper confetti at innocent bystanders and threw punches at one another, as the police station filled up with arrests. “The hand that flung confetti was not more than four inches from the victim’s face,” reported the New York Times. “There was malice in the thrust, and often the confetti was moistened so that it was quite compact.”