Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History) (19 page)

No windows are placed at the sides of the front pit. The walls there are left unbroken so that the spectator will not be blinded but will sit in darkness and have greater wonder at the [simulated] daylight falling in at the streets between the houses, as well as at the light of morning coming from between the clouds … It were better if no windows were put at the sides of the audience, so that the spectators,
left in darkness like the night
, would turn their attention to the daylight on the stage.
⁶⁶

So began a new epoch of European theater, which relied on staging at night or in darkness. Strong’s reading of the visual politics of the Teatro Mediceo applies to all the chiaroscuric theaters set up at courts from Versailles to Vienna, Stockholm to Madrid: “Enclosed within the
teatro
of the Uffizi Palace, an audience of some three thousand
was to be subject time and again to some amazing spectacle glorifying the Medici in whose eyes all lines of vision met.”
⁶⁷

The association of the theater with darkness and illusion in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries becomes especially significant when we note that this age saw the theater as the supreme metaphor for human existence. Like the apocryphal last words of Cardinal Mazarin (“Tirez le rideau, mon rôle est joué”), countless funeral sermons and funeral orations of the age begin with the baroque commonplace: “Our life is well compared with a play.”
⁶⁸
As one scholar of German literature has observed: “At no time has the word ‘Theater’ or its Latin form ‘theatrum’ had anywhere near as wide a range of meaning as in the baroque.”
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The darkness and illusion fundamental to the theater of the age shadowed this wide range of associations.

After these spectacular baroque celebrations came to their conclusion with a magnificent fireworks display or radiant theatrical performance, did life at court return to the dawn-to-dusk rhythm typical of early modern life? At courts before the mid seventeenth century, this was usually the case. But slowly the new emphasis on the night in court celebrations began to reorder everyday routines at court. New uses of the night at court converged with urban developments as princes and courtiers regularly extended the legitimate social part of the day long past sunset, and often past midnight.
⁷⁰

This growing emphasis on the night is reflected by a new theme in the moral criticism of court life. Long characterized as an immoral
space
(as the German proverb “bei Hof, bei Höll’” indicates),
⁷¹
the court was now condemned for its immoral use of
time
: “the night is turned into day and the day into night” at court, reversing the divine order. This misuse of daily time could be seen “in the lives of the courtiers of both sexes, who make night into day and day into night.”
⁷²
As the French Benedictine Casimir Freschot remarked in his guide to life at the imperial court in Vienna in 1705: “The brevity
of the day for persons of quality, who never rise before noon, and who consequently do not have even four or five hours of daylight, makes social intercourse at night necessary.”
⁷³
Another commentator, the Pietist Phillip Balthasar Sinold, complained that “the courtiers alter the order of nature by making the day into night and the night into day.” These night people “stay awake in order to indulge in their entertainments, though other people sleep: afterwards to restore the vigor lost by their sensual pleasures they sleep while other people are awake and attend to their business.”
⁷⁴

The nocturnalization of court life is documented by a wide variety of sources.
⁷⁵
Much of our evidence comes from the polycentric Holy Roman Empire, with its profusion of courts great and small. In their (less than constant) search for discipline, concord, and good order, most princes left detailed court ordinances and court diaries, a fairly consistent set of sources on everyday life at court. The court ordinances of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries prescribe a daily schedule no different from that of the other orders of society: early to bed and early to rise. At the Brandenburg court in Berlin in the late fifteenth century the Privy Council met at 6 a.m. in the summer and 7 a.m. in the winter.
⁷⁶
The times set for worship, for meals, and for the closing of the palace gate are the most common indications of the course of the day at court.
⁷⁷
Under the last Valois kings, the French court also kept a traditional daily schedule, reinforced by the dangers of nocturnal violence in the periods of civil war. A 1585 court ordinance of Henry III (1574–89) set the king’s
souper
, the last meal of the day, at six in the evening; at 8 p.m. the king would retire to his chamber. The gates of the Louvre were to close not long after eight in the evening and open at five in the morning.
⁷⁸
Members of the court, including the king, might well be out much later at night, but such activity remained clandestine.

At the Saxon court, the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ordinances show a traditional division of the day. At the court of Elector Augustus I (1553–86), meals were to be served “in the morning around ten o’clock and in the evening at five.” The 1637 court ordinance of John George I (1611–56) set the day’s meals at nine in the morning and four in the afternoon; the gates were to be closed at nine
in the summer and eight in the winter.
⁷⁹
Surveys of everyday life at sixteenth-century courts confirm these impressions. By about nine at night the court was to be quiet, with the gates locked. Any later nocturnal gatherings would have been dimly lit at best: court inventories recorded and limited the number of tallow lights and (much more expensive) wax candles used each week.
⁸⁰

For Saxony after 1656, court diaries are an especially rich source on everyday life. The diaries, which recorded daily events at court, became particularly important when the Saxon electorate was divided among the four sons of Elector John George I upon his death in 1656.
⁸¹
The four brothers agreed to pursue a common foreign policy and to maintain good relations: to this end they registered the daily events at their respective courts and regularly sent copies of these court diaries to one another. Offering a day-to-day view of Saxon court life, the diaries describe, often in minute detail, the visitors, ceremonies, and celebrations at each court, including the time and place of each event. In Dresden, the birthday celebrations for Elector John George II in 1664 and 1665 began with prayers at six or seven o’clock in the morning. After a service lasting several hours, the court sat down to a midday meal, followed by an afternoon worship service. No celebration in the evening is mentioned for either year.
⁸²
At the smaller Halle court of Duke Augustus in 1676, the court diary shows a traditional daily schedule: no activities after the evening meal are described.
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Most often, the duke took his evening meal in his own chambers or those of the duchess: the official or social part of the day had come to an end. When a troupe of traveling actors came to the Halle court and performed
Love’s Great Garden of Confusion
and
The Two Husbands Duped
on August 14, 1676, they did so in the afternoon. That evening, meals were again taken separately in the chambers.
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Both norms and practices reflected a dawn-to-dusk rhythm.

The afternoon performance of the strolling players who came to Halle in August 1676 was far removed from the latest lighting techniques of baroque theater seen, for example, in the Dresden Komödienhaus or the Nuremberg Nachtkomödienhaus. The small provincial court of Saxony-Weißenfels at Halle lagged behind the latest trends in nocturnal sociability.
⁸⁵
In Saxony, these trends emerged
from the court in Dresden, where the Saxon princes and their court nobles began to exploit the expressive possibilities of the night. When John George III became elector of Saxony in 1680, he reduced court life and expenditure on festivals in favor of the military, and performances in the Komödienhaus dropped off for several years.
⁸⁶
But in the 1680s Dresden saw a new form of elite sociability: nobles and court officials who had attended evening performances at the Komödienhaus began to hold their own evening balls and masquerades.
⁸⁷
These elites also held the city’s first honorable nocturnal funerals.
⁸⁸
Slowly, the social uses of the night were expanding beyond court celebrations and entertainment. The Saxon court diaries of John George IV (1691–94) and Augustus II (1694–1733) confirm this shift to evening entertainments in the everyday life of the Dresden court.
⁸⁹
In addition to the court diaries, the essays of Johann Michael von Loen (discussed below) describe the wide range of nocturnal entertainment the author enjoyed there during visits to Dresden from 1718 to 1723.

Nocturnalization shaped almost every aspect of life at court, from architecture to cosmetics.
⁹⁰
Matthaeus Daniel Pöppelmann (1662–1736), the architect of Dresden’s Zwinger, described the innovative uses of daily time and courtly space in the elegant galleries and gardens he had designed in Dresden, noting in 1729 that “in the comfortable season of the year the most esteemed ladies and cavaliers of the court and many residents of the city go strolling in this garden … until late in the evening.”
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At the imperial residence in Vienna the streets were full of traffic after dark, as Freschot observed:

in this great city … one is underway just as often by night as by day; some to pursue the pleasures on offer, some to wait upon secret dealings, of which there can be no shortage in a place where ministers from all the powers of the world are found.
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Freschot also refers to audiences with the emperor scheduled for about seven to nine in the evening in winter.

At Versailles, the center of European court life, a range of sources document everyday “night life” during the reign of Louis XIV. The typical day began with the royal
lever
at nine and ended at midnight. In 1692, the duc de Saint-Simon (1675–1755) described evenings of
music, cards, and billiards, called
appartements
, held thrice weekly in winter. These gatherings lasted from seven until ten in the evening in rooms that were “beautifully illuminated.”
⁹³
Saint-Simon noted that even after Louis stopped attending the
appartements
and “spent the evening with Madame de Maintenon, working with different ministers one after the other,” the king “still … wished his courtiers to attend assiduously.”
⁹⁴
Although she was an outsider at Versailles, Charlotte Elisabeth d’Orléans (Liselotte von der Pfalz, 1652–1722) reveals in her letters that she also lived in the fashionable new rhythm of court life, rising around 9 a.m. and retiring at midnight.
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Research on the courts of Henry IV and Louis XIII shows that this kind of regular night life was just beginning to emerge in the last years of the reign of Louis XIII.
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In 1641 the journalist Théophraste Renaudot observed that “all the great lords and ladies of the court, the most refined spirits and those most able to judge all things, and even most men of affairs go to bed late and rise late” – one of the very first references to the nocturnalization of daily life at court.
⁹⁷

At the Bavarian court in Munich, which vied with Dresden and Vienna to rank as the most magnificent in the Empire, Elector Max Emmanuel (1679–1726) began holding
appartements
in the mid 1680s: “five or six rooms, one after the other, all beautifully adorned and illuminated, with various tables for gaming” were set up, along with another room for dancing. As the introduction of the
appartements
suggests, daily life at the Bavarian court slowly but steadily shifted to later hours and more nocturnal activities: a 1589 court ordinance set the
coucher
of the Bavarian duke at nine in the summer and eight in winter, but by the eighteenth century, eight to ten in the evening was the normal supper hour; the
coucher
usually took place around midnight.
⁹⁸

Extending the day into the night had become a part of aristocratic style, and one’s appearance by candlelight became correspondingly more important. During her stay at the electoral court in Hanover in December 1716, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu noted that “French Comedians play here every night” and remarked that

All the Woman here have literally rosy cheeks, snowy foreheads and bosoms, jet eyebrows, and scarlet lips, to which they generally add coal black hair. These perfections never leave them till the hour of their death and have a very
fine effect by candlelight, but I could wish they were handsome with a little more variety.
⁹⁹

Telling time at night, which for centuries had apparently been of little concern at court, also became more important. In his 1665 diary describing the visit of Bernini to France, Paul Fréart de Chantelou mentions a novelty presented to the cavaliere: “His Eminence [the abbé Buti] showed the Cavaliere a clock for use at night, which had a dial illuminated by a lamp, so that one could tell the time at any hour.”
¹⁰⁰
These night clocks, like urban street lighting, were an invention of the seventeenth century. They were first and foremost luxury objects, but they also indicate a new interest in marking time more accurately at night.
¹⁰¹