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| In the painting below, a 3-year-old princess is dressed in clothes that are beautiful but not very comfortable. She wears
a stiff corset to keep her back straight. Courtesy of the Musée du Louvre, Paris/High Museum, Atlanta |
What if you lived in France during the 1600s and 1700s?
If you were a kid in the 17th or 18th centuries, everything about your life – from your clothes to what you eat – would have been very different.
By J.C. Speck and Marilynne Scott Masonfrom the November 27, 2007 edition
Page 1 of 2
Mmmm ... nothing like a steaming mug of hot chocolate after you've been outside playing in the cold!
Can you imagine that once upon a time in Western societies, chocolate in any form was a luxury? Only royalty could afford it.
You would know that if you'd visited the Denver Art Museum recently. From now through Jan. 6, it's showing an exhibition called "Artisans and Kings: Selected Treasures From the Louvre."
The exhibit is meant to teach us as much about the society and culture of old France as it does about the art of a special period in history. It has brought art and artifacts from the famous Louvre Museum in Paris to illustrate how French aristocrats lived during the 17th and 18th centuries under the reigns of kings Louis XIV, Louis XV, and Louis XVI.
Everything was different from how it is today. Of course, there were no telephones, no TV or movies, no Internet, no central heating, no fast food, no microwave ovens or refrigerators, no cars, and no electricity. So life could be difficult, and information was hard to share and slow to get where it needed to go.
Food had to be prepared from scratch. That means, for instance, that you had to grow the wheat and grind it into flour (or buy it ground from the miller). Only then could you even mix it into a batter, knead dough, and bake bread in a fire-fueled oven. No food came in frozen packages or from fast-food restaurants. Every piece of clothing had to be made by hand and washed by hand in homemade soap.
If you were rich, servants did all the housework for you. But even then, life was not as comfortable for anybody – even the French aristocrats – as it is for most Europeans (and other Westerners) now.
For one thing, most people during this time hardly ever bathed! Taking a bath (there were no showers then) was not considered good for people. Consequently, there was a real problem with lice and bugs infesting clothes. And, as you might imagine, the palace was really smelly! So, many of the beautiful artifacts in the show were made to hold a fragrant mixture of dried herbs and flowers called potpourri (pronounced poe-poo-REE).
You can see pretty porcelain pots that are decorated with small, delicate flowers and tiny, perfectly painted landscapes. Also shown is a set of "firedogs" (also called andirons). It was made to hold potpourri or incense that would burn slowly in the fireplace to cover a multitude of unpleasant odors. Ew!
Clothing from 17th- and 18th-century Europe looks really beautiful because it is made of fine silks, satins, lace, furs, and even jewels. (Among the rich, jewels were a must – even for men.) Dressing up in such finery might sound like fun for a party – but what if that's the way you had to dress everywhere you went? It wouldn't be nearly as comfortable as jeans and T-shirts!
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