The Art of Lying Down by Bernd Brunner

Author:Bernd Brunner [Brunner, Bernd]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61219-310-6
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2013-11-26T05:00:00+00:00

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:

His legs spare, straight, and tolerably long, would have added something to his stature had they been vertical, but they stood in the direction of an open pair of compasses. His body was not only short, but thin, being in every respect of most inconceivable smallness—when naked he must have appeared like a grasshopper. His head was of the common size, to which appertained a well-formed face, a noble look, and tolerably fine eyes; in short, it appeared a borrowed head, stuck on a miserable stump.

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