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.”73Another 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.83 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.84Both 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.”91 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.92
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 theappartements 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.95 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.96 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
By the early eighteenth century, evening diversions and nocturnal entertainments such as gaming and dancing were considered typical of everyday life at court. In his Introduction to the Knowledge of Ceremony of Great Rulers (1729) Julius Bernhard von Rohr distinguishes between orderly and disorderly courts, based on the regular division of the day: “At some courts … a certain hour is set at which the princely rulers and their servants take their rest, and in the morning arise from their beds.” Fixed schedules made for orderly court life, but the pursuit of pleasure meant indulgent disorder. “The night is turned into day and the day into night” at these disorderly courts, where “a large part of the time meant for nightly rest” is spent “in eating, drinking, gambling, dancing and other divertissements” by courtiers who “then sleep almost until noon.”102
In his Introduction to the Knowledge of Ceremony of Great Rulers, Rohr’s criticism of night life at court is circumspect, typical of his tone when discussing “great rulers.” Rohr’s comments on dancing in the companion volume to the Great Rulers, hisIntroduction to the Knowledge of Ceremony of Private Persons (Einleitung zur Ceremoniel-Wissenschaft der Privat-Personen, 1728) show how disturbing the new uses of the night could be:
The balls of the well-born or the common dancing-parties are held at just that time of terror and darkness when the spirit of darkness rules: [he] arranges these [dances], and he is obeyed there … The darkness, the snares, the masks behind which one hides often permit shameful liberties.103
According to Rohr, the grave moral dangers of dancing arose because “one goes too far with regard to the hour, one does not stop at the proper time, [and so] the night, which was made by God for rest, is transformed by this sensuality into day.”104 In his guide to comportment for “private persons” Rohr presents a general critique of the disorder of nocturnal sociability. Late hours at coffeehouses and nocturnal funerals also come under his criticism as widespread but improper uses of the night.
Rohr’s association of night life with the well-born is reflected in the London diary (1717–21) of William Byrd of Virginia (1674–1744). After noting his attention to his evening prayers consistently for several weeks, Byrd attended a masquerade on February 6, 1718:
I dressed myself in the habit of the Marquis and went to Mrs. B-r-t, and from thence to Lady Guise’s, and from thence to Lady Foley’s, and at about ten went to the masquerade, where I was well diverted … I stayed till 6 o’clock [a.m.], having kept up my spirits with chocolate. I neglected my prayers, for which God forgive me.105
Phillip Balthasar Sinold warned his readers of this new temptation to late hours. The division between day and night, he reminded his readers, was created by God as “a special sign of his unfathomable wisdom.” Sinold then related how this divine order is ignored by two exemplary members of the “so-called beautiful world,” Clorinde and Cleomenes. The two are censured equally by Sinold for staying out “nearly until morning” dancing, gossiping, and gambling, completely forgetting their evening and morning prayers, to the detriment of their bodies and souls. Their evening socializing (commencing “after seven o’clock”) is an “assembly of vanity.”106 “One must realize,” Sinold added,
that such nocturnal gatherings are allowed and approved in Christendom, while in contrast gatherings meant for the practice of piety [i.e., Pietist conventicles], even when they take place in broad daylight are in most places entirely forbidden.107
Moralists like Rohr and Sinold decried the “everyday” nature of aristocratic night life, which went far beyond the occasional use of the night at festivals or celebrations. In a tension typical of the baroque, the exclusivity and prestige of nocturnal sociability immediately evoked warnings about the illusions and deceit the night fostered.
The melancholy warnings of Rohr and Sinold about the moral dangers of “night life” contrast with the more sanguine comments of Johann Michael von Loen in his essay on The Court at Dresden in the Year 1718 (Der Hof zu Dresden, Im Jahr 1718, 1749). Loen, drawing on his experiences at the opulent court of Augustus II in 1718 and 1723, describes a series of nocturnal festivities and celebrations, culminating in the Carnival season of 1723. During Carnival “every evening the so-called Redutten or public dances were [held]” in a “hall illuminated with countless lights.” Despite the unrestrained nightly festivities, Loen points out that in Dresden “business went on uninterrupted”:
Though a part of the night was spent with all manner of festivities, on the next morning one saw that every man was back at his post: the merchant in his stall, the soldier on guard, the clerks in the chancellery, the councilors in their meetings and the jurists in their chambers.108
The duties of daily life had come to accommodate nocturnal revelry: “only certain beauties and wandering cavaliers who had no service” stayed in bed until noon.109 Writing in the 1730s, the courtier-author Karl Ludwig Freiherr von Pöllnitz (1692–1775) considered the late hours described here to be the norm. Pöllnitz was a vagabond courtier who visited every major court in Europe, supporting himself by gambling and publishing gossipy accounts of court romances and intrigues. At the modest court of Modena in the early 1720s he was received with all due respect by the ruling duke (Rinaldo D’Este, 1695–1737) but the “quiet” court life there drew his ridicule. He described it as nearly monastic and “inspiring melancholy”: “one rises there early in the morning, goes to mass, and dines promptly at a good hour; afternoons, one takes a stroll. In the evening one plays a few games; dinner is at eight o’clock, and around ten o’clock one goes to sleep.” Pöllnitz decried “this miserable way to live in monotony … which is simply not appropriate for a ruler’s court.”110 These early hours were the antithesis of the nocturnal display of aristocratic style and royal majesty essential to the life of the court.