“STILL, STILL TO HEAR HER TENDER-TAKEN BREATH / And so live ever—or else swoon to death.” So ends English poet John Keats’s extraordinary “Bright Star,” which some believe was written for his love Fanny Brawne (1800–1865) in February 1819, shortly after their engagement. But February would soon prove an unlucky month for Keats (1795–1821). The next year, on February 3, he caught a chill and suffered a lung hemorrhage, the result of carelessness and the tuberculosis that would eventually kill him. He was prone to illness, which made his recklessness that much more dangerous. The doctor had ordered him to wear a heavy coat, as he explained that week to his sister, Fanny Keats, but he went without it anyway. “You must be careful always to wear warm clothing not only in frost but in a Thaw,” he cautioned her. Too late.

Keats’s most impassioned letters after that fateful date were written to his fiancée. Though the sentimentality of his late letters embarrasses modern academics, the letters paint a sad and vivid picture of his voracious love and his weighty melancholy. Fanny and her family lived next door at the time, making his rooms a “pleasant prison.” “I wish I had even a little hope,” he told her. “I cannot say forget me, but I would mention that there are impossibilities in the world.”

After becoming ill, he offered to break off their engagement on the day before Valentine’s Day, but in the end he realized he was “not strong enough to be weaned.” Instead, he lay in bed and bristled with jealousy, thinking about her living her life and moving through the world. “I wish you to see how unhappy I am for love of you, and endeavour as much as I can to entice you to give up your whole heart to me whose whole existence hangs upon you. You could not step or move an eyelid but it would shoot to my heart. I am greedy of you. Do not think of anything but me. Do not live as if I was not existing,” he wrote. “Do not forget me.” His illness lingered through the spring and summer, when his doctor ordered him to travel to Italy, with the hope that escaping the damp English countryside could save him still. The trip seemed impossible. His heart would break. In mid-September, he left for Rome, never to see Fanny or to write to her again.

He died in Rome on February 23, 1821, at the age of twenty-five. One of his great contributions to literary thought was the concept of negative capability—“that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason,” he explained. Fanny demonstrated her own faculty for negative capability by loving poor Keats through all the uncertainties. As she wrote to his sister after his death, “it is better for me that I do not forget him.”

There were no late sleepers on the “Jovial Campaign” of 1857. Just after 8:00 a.m., the English Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) yanked the bedclothes off his team of young recruits so they could resume their work of painting frescoes on the walls of Oxford University’s new debating hall. Instead of collecting pay that summer, the men were given room and board—which they took as a series of feasts—and were allowed a free hand with the murals. Rossetti chose the legends of King Arthur as their romantic theme, setting himself the task of painting the panel of Sir Lancelot dreaming of Guinevere. But aside from Rossetti, only one other member of the group, which included the then twenty-three-year-old William Morris (1834–1896) and the artist Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898), had ever tried his hand at painting.

Rossetti’s only requirement was a love of beauty and a shared sense of fun. Inexperienced undergraduates who joined in were given paints and brushes and sent up ladders. As the crew worked, they discovered that the hall’s whited-out windows made a perfect surface for Burne-Jones’s cartoon drawings of wombats, and on the walls high up near the roof beams, they drew caricatures of Morris, who was soon to become a design legend, but had never even met a painter before in his life. “By God,” one cartoon was captioned, “I’m getting a belly!” As they worked, they pelted one another with soda water corks and the sound of their laughter carried, so that students studying in the library next door could hardly concentrate. An annoyed scholar complained, “One can’t get them to be quiet at it—or resist a fancy if it strikes them over so little a stroke on the bells of their soul—away they go jingle-jangle without ever caring what o’clock it is.” Morris became so enraptured by the group’s medieval fantasy that he wore a made-to-order chain mail suit to dinner. The group ran up an enormous tab, consuming roast beef, plum puddings, and a good deal of ale.

Rossetti was the magnetic epicenter of the artistic fray, “the planet around which we revolved,” one of the young collaborators remembered. “We copied his very way of speaking … we sank our own individuality in the strong personality of our beloved Gabriel.” Rossetti lent the neophytes confidence, but he wasn’t a great role model. The jovial artists shocked Oxford’s dons with their raucous behavior that summer. “We became so fierce that two respectable members of the University—entering to see the pictures—stood mute and looked at us,” one of them remembered, “and after listening five minutes to our language, they literally fled from the room! Conceive our mutual ecstasy of delight.” During another official visit, Rossetti accidentally dumped an entire bowl of precious lapis lazuli pigment from the top of his ladder. “Oh, that’s nothing,” he told the visitors. “We do that all the time.”

It didn’t matter that the young painters got out of bed so early. They failed to complete the murals. Rossetti left Oxford that fall with his panel unfinished, and as none of the artists had understood the techniques of fresco painting, all of their paintings faded and flaked off of the plaster walls almost immediately. Two years later they had deteriorated further and all but disappeared.

Still, while the Jovial Campaign was in full swing there was “no work like it for delightfulness in the doing,” Rossetti wrote to a friend, “& none I believe in which one might hope to delight others more according to his powers.”

At 8:59 the stationmaster at New York’s Grand Central Terminal announced the track number on which the 20th Century Limited would arrive from Chicago at 9:00 a.m., though regulars could guess it would be track 26 as usual. The 20th Century traveled between New York and Chicago in less than twenty hours, with much fanfare, ferrying glittering passengers such as Theodore Roosevelt, Lillian Russell, Mae West, Diamond Jim Brady, J. P. Morgan, Enrico Caruso, Gloria Swanson, Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich, Ginger Rogers, and Cary Grant. (Wall Street was assigned to one section of the train and Hollywood to another.)

All that star power lured the celebrity hounds, corralled behind ropes, “like duck hunters waiting in their blinds,” according to one witness. Some high school girls went every morning. Greta Garbo dodged the crowd by riding an elevator down to the baggage room, then slipping out a back door. Film star Clara Bow (1905–1965) worked the opposite tactic. In 1930, dressed in a fur and a modish hat, she was met trackside by her fiancé, and the two posed for cameramen as the flashbulbs “boomed and spurted a cloud into the rafters,” The New York Times reported. Her fiancé had hung out with the photographers all morning, but he now feigned surprise at their presence. “What’s all this?” he asked. “Indeed what is this about?” The two posed a little longer anyway, and Bow kissed her beau for posterity. “She kissed him, somewhat abashed,” the Times noted, “but without blushing.” She was America’s favorite It girl, and she didn’t blush easily.

With a dramatic flourish, porters in both cities unrolled a special crimson carpet on the platform before the 20th Century’s arrival and departure—the first “red carpet,” besides the one the Vanderbilts’ butler unfurled in front of the family’s Fifth Avenue mansion. The train’s every swank detail promoted a sense of luxe living. It was “not like an ordinary, human kind of train at all,” one writer proclaimed in 1906, four years after the maiden run. It boasted electric lights before most American homes did. Its restaurant compared with the best in each city. There were onboard tailors, valets, ladies’ maids, stenographers, manicurists, and a barber. Baths could be taken in either fresh or salt water. The first telephones, used trackside, were installed in the 1920s, and throughout the trip passengers were kept apprised of the latest news from the stock market. At the end of each run, the guests’ drawing rooms and sleeping compartments were rearranged so that their windows faced the Hudson River both coming and going. (The route from New York climbed north along the Hudson, then to Buffalo, and along the shores of Lake Erie before arriving in Chicago.) “No effort nor expense has been spared to provide the traveling public with all the comforts and conveniences that are afforded by the highest grade hotels,” a reporter raved, “the furnishings and fittings being complete in every detail.”

Beyond its cushy amenities, however, the 20th Century was known for its speed. During one stretch in 1905, the engine did 90 mph, sending one rail worker to “the verge of a nervous collapse,” the Times reported. The 20th Century ran on a split-second timetable, and handlers were devoted to keeping to it, going so far as to run a snowplow train in front of the engine during heavy weather. Locomotives stood by in case of engine failure. Over the course of its reign, which ended in 1967, the 20th Century’s traveling time was cut from twenty hours to sixteen and a half.

All along the route, people out in the countryside made a hobby of watching the 20th Century go by, leaving a whiff of glamour in its wake. In the meantime, gilded passengers like Bow spent their hours on board simply making themselves comfortable. What did Bow do during her cross-country trip? reporters at Grand Central wanted to know. “Oh, nothing much,” her secretary said, “except play pinochle all day long.”

The earth was created “on October 23, 4004 BC at nine o’clock in the morning,” the English scholar Sir John Lightfoot (1602–1675) announced in 1644, having calculated the precise moment by adding together every time span mentioned in the Bible. Lightfoot’s endeavors were symptomatic of the seventeenth century’s mounting obsession with accuracy, dividing time into smaller and smaller increments. Still, for millennia, people had lived without clocks, and many of them liked it that way. As an ancient Roman poet wrote,

The gods confound the man who first found out

How to distinguish hours! Confound him, too,

Who in this place set up a sundial,

To cut and hack my days so wretchedly.…

An Egyptian specimen from around 1500 BCE is the earliest sundial on record. Similar devices were used alongside the sand- or water-filled hourglass until the fourteenth century, when creative metallurgy and clever springs powered the first mechanical clocks. Yet, throughout history, different societies cut and hacked time in different ways. Europe’s medieval monks lived in concert with bells that reminded them to pray, eat, and sleep. Seventeenth-century Parisian tanners worked from sunrise to sunset in the summertime, and in wintertime they worked until it was so dark they could no longer tell two similar coins apart. Similarly, a Parisian regulation stated that the workday should start as soon as it was light enough to easily recognize someone in the street.

Clocks fulfilled a yearning for something definite, and though expensive and easy to break, they were also impressive. A big clock mounted high on a tower lent a city a certain swagger. Such clocks did more than tell the time. In the mid-fifteenth century, a trumpeting angel, a fleet of saints, and a procession of magi paraded out of Bologna’s city clock. In Soleure, Switzerland, a warrior beat his chest every quarter hour, and a skeleton turned to stare at the man on the first stroke of every hour. In Ghent, Adam tolled the hours and Eve the half hours as a snake slithered between them. At noon in Strasbourg, while the bells of the carillon played, a wheel turned, bringing three mechanical magi circling around the enormous clock to bow before a statue of the Virgin. Then, with a final flourish, a giant mechanical bird perched on top of the apparatus opened its beak, extended its tongue, crowed, and flapped its wings.

For the town fathers of Lyons in 1481, telling time was not the only argument in favor of installing a grandiose clock. A petition justifying such an extravagance argued that not only would the sight bring more merchants to the city’s fair, but “the citizens would be very consoled, cheerful and happy and would live a more orderly life.”

In mid-eighteenth-century Spain, aristocratic ladies were worshipped like living goddesses, each served by her own cortejo, a well-bred male friend. He was an unmarried gentleman, not a servant, though he worked pretty hard, dedicating his days to making her happy. A decent cortejo kept his lady apprised of all the latest fashions from Madrid, and he would bring her beautiful flowers and pretty fans, escort her to church, and to the theater. He would dance with her at parties. She could take his hand when climbing down from her carriage. And, while the sixteenth-century Aztec ruler Montezuma might have drunk hot chocolate from a golden goblet served by naked virgins, the Spanish lady was awakened at 9:00 a.m. on the dot by her smiling cortejo bringing her hot chocolate in bed. (These women were passionate about cocoa spiced with cinnamon, and they sipped it even while in church.)

As a rule, ladies didn’t like their cortejos to speak with other women. “Even the slightest conversation with another woman is sometimes visited with her severe displeasure,” a visitor to Spain reported. Another noted how miserable the women were when their cortejos were out of sight. “He must be present every moment in the day, whether in private or public, in health or sickness, and must be every where invited to attend them.” Generally speaking, the relationship was assumed to be platonic, though French and English visitors found it peculiar that a woman’s cortejo was a man who was not her husband. When Queen Maria Luisa de Parma (1751–1819) went so far as to install her twenty-four-year-old cortejo in the post of prime minister, it caused a scandal even in Spain. But for the Spanish, any husband who was jealous of his wife’s cortejo was considered uncivilized.

Needless to say, signing on as a cortejo wasn’t for everyone. “The sublime touch of the cortejo,” one Spaniard explained, “consists in carrying out amiable and frivolous tasks with a dignified and effortless air that shows a spirit exercised in these delicate maneuvers.”

Hot Chocolate Deluxe

This recipe makes a really rich European-style hot chocolate.

4 cups organic whole milk

½ cup water

½ cup sugar

Smallest pinch of cinnamon (optional)

Tiny pinch of sea salt

8 ounces nice bittersweet chocolate, or a mix of bittersweet and semisweet, or whatever you like

In a saucepan, heat over a low heat the milk, water, sugar, cinnamon, and salt (if you’re using it), stirring, until the mixture just reaches a boil. Off the heat, whisk in chocolate, broken into chunks, or use a handheld immersion blender, if you have one. Either way, aerate for about a minute. Serve while still hot and frothy. If your tastes run toward the decadent, try a Parisian variation, doubling the chocolate and replacing 1 cup of the milk with heavy cream.

“We rose before it was light, and dressed ourselves with freezing fingers,” a nineteenth-century Englishwoman recalled of her Parisian art student days. “We were out at ‘first breakfast’ in a humble crémerie, drinking our hot chocolate, in thick white bowls like mortars, crunching our crisp rolls with the worthy working folk of Paris in their blue blouses at the marble tables; then trudging bravely, for an hour, through the snowy streets of leafless Elysian Fields and boulevards … long before the majority of the Paris students had left their warm nests of homes.” The passionate women who studied at the city’s Académie Julian were serious about art.

Rodolphe Julian, a former wrestler (1839–1907), opened the coed school in Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris in 1868, and though women weren’t allowed at all at the École des Beaux-Arts, at his académie female students could learn all the classical techniques, including drawing and painting from the nude. The very idea caused an uproar. As an American guidebook for art students explained, it was “an impossibility that women should paint from the living nude models of both sexes, side by side with Frenchmen.” Open-minded artists felt otherwise. “Some of our countrymen find an impropriety in our working in a mixed atelier, and perhaps there is, according to society’s code, but if a woman wants to be a painter, she must get over her squeamishness,” an American woman wrote. “If she wants to paint strong and well like a man, she must go through the same training.” Monsieur Julian’s democratic solution: separate studios for male and for female students, and no male visitors in the ladies’ atelier.

The women joined a long tradition of artists studying the nude, a practice that had become increasingly important for artists during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By the eighteenth century, des Beaux-Arts employed a handful of male models, most wearing beards, ever ready to pose as biblical characters. The senior-most among them wore royal livery and, like other members of the academy, lived in the Louvre. Female nude models, on the other hand, worked only in private ateliers until the mid-nineteenth century, when they began to pose at the École des Beaux-Arts, and as images of female nudes came to dominate the art scene.

To be sure, the female model’s position was precarious. “In effect, for us the sight of a nude young woman on the model table, in full daylight, is so far removed from any sensuality,” the manager at Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s studio noted carefully, “that the model understands immediately that she is dealing only with a painter, not with a man.” Interlopers were not welcome. One afternoon, as Ingres worked with his students, the model leapt down and “threw herself beneath the model stand, taking all her clothes and hiding herself as best she could,” the manager remembered. A worker making repairs outside was caught with his nose pressed against the window.

Some female models became artists themselves. The curvaceous Victorine Meurent (1844–1927), who posed nude for Édouard Manet’s most provocative works—wearing a ribbon necklace in his Olympia and even less in Le déjèuner sur l’herbe—was later recognized as a fine painter in her own right. Painter Gwen John (1876–1939) moved from England to Paris in 1904 and modeled to support her artistic career. She found that working for other female artists was easier than working for men, except for one client who left her mid-pose while she retired to another room for a quick romp with her boyfriend. John eventually took up with Rodin, becoming his lover and his model. Occasionally she posed for herself, sketching nude self-portraits in her rooms on the rue du Cherche-Midi.

The queen of bohemia in fin-de-siècle Paris, however, was the artist’s model supreme, Sarah Brown (1869–?), a favorite at the École des Beaux-Arts and at Académie Julian. “She has the virginal features of the Middle Ages,” an admirer wrote, “hair the colour of fire, and she is built like a statue.” The former circus rider also knew how to stir things up. When a student flirted with her while she posed at the Académie, she hurled paint at him and sparked a full-studio brawl. “She would desert an artist in the middle of his masterpiece and come down to the studio to pose for the students at thirty francs a week,” one writer sighed. “Gorgeously dressed, she would glide into a studio, overturn all the easels that she could reach, and then shriek with laughter over the havoc and consternation that she had created.”

She topped that by appearing as Cleopatra in a tableau vivant styled as “The Last Days of Babylon,” arranged on a parade float during the Bal des Quat’z-Arts in 1893. Her costume consisted of a few strands of pearls, several gold bracelets, some well-placed baubles, and black net stockings. She was arrested for public nudity and the uproar over her trial erupted into a full-scale riot, with enraged students laying siege to the police headquarters and rampaging through the Latin Quarter for a week. She would have had a better legal argument if she’d posed in the thick flesh-colored tights of the sort an acrobat might wear. “She only saw the artistic side of things,” a journalist reporting on the proceedings explained, “and she adds that everybody thought she had tights on.”

When laying the royal table during the Elizabethan era, those entrusted with the task left nothing to chance. Preparing the banquet hall, a pair of servants—one carrying a rod, the other the tablecloth—entered the room as if the queen herself were present. After kneeling three times with “the utmost veneration,” they spread the cloth with the rod, and then proceeded to kneel again. Sometimes, before the cloth was laid, the chief table setter kissed his hand and placed it on the center of the table, showing his sidekick where to put the damask. By William and Mary’s reign, table-setting maneuvers might begin at ten o’clock in the morning and go on until dinnertime. The setters were like priests preparing the altar. It was a solemn business freighted with symbolism. To “share the cloth” with a nobleman meant to be treated as his equal, while one might say of an unworthy man, “He and I are not of the same cloth.” It was meant literally. If an aristocrat ate at a table with his servants, for example, everyone’s plate sat on the bare tabletop except for that of the great man himself.

During the seventeenth century, the French made an art of cleverly creasing their tablecloths, pressing a latticework pattern of folds that looked like waves into the fabric. An accidental wrinkle was called a “coffin,” and the superstitious believed that if seen on the table it predicted death for one of the guests. Napkins held a similar fascination. Wealthy hosts hired professional napkin folders for big events, as on one afternoon in 1668 when English diarist Samuel Pepys came home to find his napkins sculpted into “figures of all sorts, which is mighty pretty.” He was so “mightily pleased with the fellow that came to lay the cloth and fold the napkins” that he considered hiring him to teach Mrs. Pepys the trick. Napkins were coaxed into the shapes of frogs, fish, boats, chickens, peacocks, and swans. And they were supposed to be kept very clean, a difficult task as forks came into vogue very slowly, “to the saving of napkins,” the playwright Ben Jonson (1572–1637) had noted. (The British navy forbade forks at the dinner table as late as 1897, as they were considered pretentious.)

Such was the case not only in Western Europe but in Constantinople, as English writer Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762) discovered when visiting the Sultana Hafiten in the early eighteenth century. “The magnificence of her table answered very well to that of her dress,” Lady Mary wrote home to a friend—a lofty comparison, considering that the sultana’s tunic was decorated with diamond fringe and pearls as large as peas. But while the sultana’s knives were gold, studded with diamonds, “the piece of luxury that gripped my eyes was the tablecloth and napkins,” Lady Mary noted. They were of the lightest silk and each was finely embroidered with silk-and-gold flowers. “It was with the utmost regret that I made use of these costly napkins,” she added. “You may be sure that they were entirely spoiled before dinner was over.”