Look Back in Langour by Holly Brubach NY Times

The stereotypes are by now so deeply entrenched that we take them for granted. Americans walk the streets of Paris, where every aspect of the landscape has been painstakingly art-directed, in tracksuits and sneakers, like derelicts who have wandered onstage in the middle of a performance to the endless irritation of the actors and the audience. Meanwhile, Parisians set off for a Sunday in the country wearing polished loafers and jeans just back from the cleaners, pressed, with a crease. For the French, with their knee-jerk formality, looking good for others is part of the unwritten social contract, and refusing to make the effort constitutes an affront. For us, the oblivious Yankees, dressing casual — feeling comfortable — is our inalienable right, no matter how inappropriate. Don’t like our Crocs? Get over it.

So it comes as a surprise to learn not only that the French excelled at comfort three centuries ago, but that they actually invented it. In “The Age of Comfort: When Paris Discovered Casual — and the Modern Home Began” (Bloomsbury), Joan DeJean documents a time when the advent of the sofa, the invention of the flush toilet, the proliferation of cotton fabrics, the delineation of specific rooms for specific functions, the concept of a private life and the birth of the Enlightenment all converged, making life in Paris easier than elsewhere and making it the model the rest of Europe aspired to. For those who subscribe to the idea that progress is chronological, DeJean sets the record straight: from 1670 to 1765, France ushered in conveniences that promptly disappeared after the revolution, only to be reinvented in a more prosaic, “hygienic” form in 19th-century England.

Though few of us would think to make the connection between Mies van der Rohe’s streamlined furniture and a cabriolet armchair, DeJean persuades us that the worldview we consider “modern” was prefigured by the age of Louis XV. In fact, the Louis XV chair — with its graceful contours made possible by the invention of a curved saw, its ergonomic padding and proportions, its perfectly engineered armrests — was an early experiment in a more natural posture. Suddenly, people reclined and put their feet up. They draped one arm over the back of their chairs. They crossed their legs for the first time. Bodies spoke a new language that encouraged candor, intimacy and contemplation.

Has there ever been another society so expert in facilitating pleasure? DeJean’s inventory of the small, movable tables that proliferated during the period is itself a window onto a way of life: tiny gaming tables, each a different shape devised for a particular card game; bedside tables with compartments for a midnight snack; dressing tables; tables with bookstands for what DeJean calls “a new type of reading,” not educational or scholarly but recreational; writing tables throughout the house for whenever and wherever the epistolary impulse struck.

Many histories that chronicle the life of an idea make it sound as if change, like the weather, happened as the result of mysterious forces, affecting everyone but brought on by no one. This one gives us the vivid personalities who broke with convention by following their own whims: Louis XV, the restless monarch whose renovations at Versailles carved out a zone where he could abandon ceremony in the company of friends; Madame de Pompadour, his mistress, whom DeJean calls “the original brand name in the history of interior decoration”; the Duchesse de Bourgogne, darling of the court of Louis XIV and inspiration for the fauteuil à coiffer, a chair with a hinged back, for shampoos; the Comte de Pontchartrain, chancellor of France, and his wife, role models for a new notion of marriage based on romantic love, prompting an overhaul of the standard sleeping arrangements.

Though DeJean focuses on the French court as the epicenter of the changes she describes, her field of vision extends beyond Fontainbleau and the royal chateaus to the recently constructed Place Vendôme, inhabited by a class of financiers for whom the term nouveaux riches had been invented.

As living quarters were slowly reconfigured to include wardrobes and other female spaces, the boudoir was conceived as “the archetypal room of one’s own,” DeJean writes, a place where women could collect their thoughts, read and write. “There, they could be casual and relaxed in the way possible only when one is sure of being alone.” But within a few decades, Pompadour’s bold example gave way to a more salacious use of private space, as the boudoir became the setting for choreographed seduction by kept women and chorus girls. Its reputation has yet to recover. Still, you have to admire a society willing to consecrate a room to a woman’s inner life. You don’t need to be a Francophile to read this book, but you will be one by the time you finish it.