Blue Arabesque by Patricia Hampl

Author:Patricia Hampl
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

FIVE

Les Bains Turcs

In 1683 the Turkish army of Mustafa the Black (also the Terrible—the Europeans piled on the scary adjectives) surged west, threatening the easternmost imperial capital of Christendom on September 12 at the Battle of Vienna. The successful European repulsion of the invaders is directly credited to Georg Franz Kolschitzky, a Turkish-speaking Pole (or Armenian—the sources vary) working for a trader in oriental wares, who made his way through enemy lines to give Charles of Lorraine (or King Sobiesky—more scholarly dispute) the intelligence he needed to outwit the rampaging armies of the Ottoman Empire.

In their flight, the retreating Turks left behind five hundred sacks of “dry black fodder”—coffee. With the award (or theft?) of this war bounty, Kolschitzky opened Vienna’s first coffeehouse, Zur Blauen Flasche, the Blue Bottle.

So goes the tale, the moral being that the Turks, by means of this dark elixir, conquered the Europeans after all, initiating the Continent into the comforts of the coffeehouse and layabout society. A stealth victory for the oriental pleasure culture and its ideology of leisure.

Beyond coffee drinking, the epitome of the pleasure culture, East or West, is embodied in the time-wasting luxury of the bath. The Romans had considered the baths essential to their otium cum dignitate, the dignified leisure, the absence from business activity, at the root of their conception of a civilized society. The Central European lands of early modern times carried forward this theme with their own medicinal variation—the spa. The most renowned spa, Karlovy Vary (Carlsbad) in Bohemia, was founded in 1350 near warm mineral springs by Charles IV, the Holy Roman Emperor. During the eighteenth century it became the spa of choice for the European elite, most famously Goethe and Peter the Great. J. S. Bach took the waters there, as did Casanova and Schiller, Gogol and Liszt.

But the European spa was not le bain turc. It was hygienic and improving, a genteel retreat of several weeks combining a course of treatment with edifying cultural events (concerts, lectures), everyone dressed to the nines. It was not an Ingres painting, not a vision of soporific pleasure. In fact, the spa culture catered to dispirit and the narcissism of self-improvement. It was useful to possess a complaint—a poor liver was ideal—to indulge in this AWOL behavior.

What le bain turc and the spa had in common was not sensuality (the East) or hygiene (the West), but a dream of ease, a brush with the Golden Age: days passed amid the leisurely contemplation of passing details, drawing a lazy finger across the surface of scented water in a warm pool of peachy marble, reaching for a sugared date, gazing at white birds warbling in a silver cage, watching, like the thoughtful subject of Woman Before an Aquarium in Chicago, fish glinting in a bowl. In fact, the idea was to become something of a fish oneself, floating in a watery social medium, free of the usual associations, the routine social circle.

But the Turkish bath embodied the Golden Age ideal with

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