SUMMER KICKS OFF THE JAM-MAKING SEASON, first with rhubarb and strawberry preserves, then cherry jam, elderberry conserves, and, finally, quince paste. Now it’s the stuff found in any grocery store, but in centuries past, as honey slowly gave way to pricy, imported sugar, which in 1353 Paris could be sold only to aristocrats by law, preserves took on an haute tone. It was said that France’s King François I (1494–1547) loved quince paste so much that it brought tears to his eyes. Once, he’d brought some to share with his mistress Madame d’Étampes, when he realized that she had another lover hidden under her bed. Instead of losing it, the king simply slid the sweet dish to his rival as he left, saying, “Here you are, Brissac, everyone has to live!” Clearly, his generosity knew no bounds.

The great Provençal apothecary and mystic Michel de Notredame, aka Nostradamus (1503–1566), loved preserves almost as much. He put out a small book of jam recipes—as well as his book of predictions—in 1555, offering his variations on Middle Eastern recipes that came via Italy and Moorish Spain to France. His own black cherry jelly was “as clear a vermillion as a fine ruby,” he bragged, declaring his candied orange peel “excellently tasty.” He also offered a Love Jam recipe, which he claimed was so potent that “if a man were to have a little of it in his mouth, and while having it in his mouth kissed a woman, or a woman him, and [he] expelled it with his saliva, putting some of it in the other’s mouth, it would suddenly cause … a burning of her heart to perform the love-act.” (For those inclined to try, the ingredients may prove a hurdle: mandrake apples picked at dawn, the blood of seven male sparrows, and octopus tentacles, combined with honey and various herbs and spices.)

Nostradamus wasn’t the only one who believed in the aphrodisiac power of jam, however. One writer of the day referred to a beauty’s “marmalade lips,” while the term “marmalade-madams” took on a more salacious connotation. English cookbooks offered sensuous jam formulas—which, for the most part, sound more appetizing than the one Nostradamus crafted—including a love potion that called for sugar, quinces, and orange peel scented with musk, ambergris, and spices.

In England, aristocratic devotion to jams and jellies in the seventeenth century brought noblewomen into the garden and kitchen. At a garden banquet, a lucky diner might find “tarts of divers hues and sundry denominations, conserves of old fruits, foreign and home-bred suckets [citrus peels in syrup], codinacs, marmalades, marchpane [marzipan], sugar-breads, gingerbread, florentines … and sundry outlandish confections altogether seasoned with sugar,” one connoisseur noted with glee. The most talented dilettantes allowed their recipes to be published: Lady Fettiplace was known for her rose petal jam. Lady Hoby distilled cordials and put up damson preserves. Elizabeth Gray, Countess of Kent, shared a recipe for candied flowers dotted with gold leaf. Lady Leicester did gumballs filled with lemon fondant. For his part, Sir Hugh Plat (1552–1608) compiled a cookbook brimming with confectionary recipes to please his genteel readers, dedicating his work to these “saints to whom I sacrifice perfumes and conserves both plum and pear.” Another writer explained: “For country Ladies it is a delightful amusement, both to make the sweetmeats and dress out a dessert, as it depends wholly on fancy, and is attended with but little expense.”

Meanwhile, in France, where violet marmalade and candied ribs of lettuce were popular, a Madame Héroard whipped up an excellent apricot syrup, while the Baronne de Montglat became known for her quince jelly. In that country, jam making had reached such heights by the 1640s that King Louis XIII (1601–1643) could often be found in the kitchen making fruity sweets for the royal party. According to legend, he candied a plate of sweetmeats for Anne of Austria after their wedding, and while making preserves one afternoon he learned of the betrayal of Cinq-Mars, his former best friend (and possible lover), who had joined in a plot to assassinate the king’s most important political adviser, hoping to take the post himself. “Cinq-Mars,” Louis proclaimed grandly, “has a soul as black as the bottom of this pan.”

Easiest Raspberry Jam

2 pints fresh raspberries (4 cups)

1⅓ cups sugar

Freshly squeezed juice from half a lime

Put a small saucer in the freezer. In a stainless-steel pot, mash together the berries, sugar, and juice and let the mash marinate for 10 minutes. Then heat it over a medium flame, stirring constantly. Once you’ve reached the boiling point, continue for 10–12 minutes more. Turn off the heat. Drizzle a few drops of jam onto the cold saucer and freeze it for one minute. If the texture of the jam is right when you pull the plate from the freezer, then spoon your jam into airtight jars, leaving ¼ inch of headroom at the top. If the jam’s too thin, reboil the mix for another minute, stirring constantly, and try the saucer test again. Once cooled, the jam will keep in the refrigerator for a month.

The gracious porticoes enjoyed by ancient Romans so impressed sixteenth-century Venetian architect Andrea Palladio (1508–1580) that he rarely designed a palazzo without one. When the English neoclassicists fell for his style two hundred years later, they wholeheartedly adopted Palladio’s signature touch—the porch, or “verandah,” as they liked to call it. The English climate didn’t encourage loads of lounging outdoors, of course, but in the sunny United States the front porch became a national touchstone.

The old Italian tradition and its English interpretation blended in eighteenth-century America with the influences of precolonial African architecture, and that of the Dutch, who had built porches since the medieval era and who introduced the stoep, or “stoop,” to New York. All at once in the 1740s, every proper American house had to have a sitting porch, also known as a “piazza,” a place to watch the world go by. Boston artist John Singelton Copley (1738–1815) discovered the “peazer,” or “peaza,” as he alternately called it, on a trip to New York, writing to his half brother, “Peazas are so cool in Summer and in Winter break off the storms so much that I think I should not be able to like a house without.” Pattern books, which helped carpenters and clients select building details, promoted the plan, and by the mid-nineteenth century the porch was ubiquitous.

The myth of the American porch gained traction, as celebrated by writers—including William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Edith Wharton, and Ernest Hemingway—who gave the porch a nostalgic, romantic aura. Washington Irving (1783–1859) loved to sit on the porch, as he wrote, “with a book in my hand, sometimes reading, sometimes musing on the landscape, and sometimes dozing and mixing all up in a pleasant dream.” On balmy evenings it offered refuge from the kitchen’s heat. But the porch was also the semiprivate, semidark spot where courting couples—including Zelda Sayre (1900–1948) and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)—sipped icy lemonade and made their whispered declarations.

Scott and Zelda met on the verandah of the Montgomery, Alabama, country club in the summer of 1918, when Scott, then a dashing twenty-two-year-old army lieutenant, cut in on a dance with the beautiful and audacious Zelda. She had a face like “a saint, a Viking Madonna,” Fitzgerald noted. They spent the rest of the summer on her parents’ porch, swinging in the evenings, discussing poetry, and drinking in the scent of honeysuckle that wafted from the garden. And falling in love. “Without you dearest dearest I couldn’t see or hear or feel or think—or live,” Zelda would later tell him. “I love you so and I’m never in all our lives going to let us be apart another night.”

After a tumultuous courtship, Scott and Zelda were married two years later in a quiet ceremony in New York. After not so quietly leaving a string of hotels—they were thrown out of the Waldorf for dancing on the tables—the Fitzgeralds rented a gray-shingled farmhouse in Westport, Connecticut, where Scott began his second semi-autobiographical novel, The Beautiful and the Damned.

In that book, a young couple rather like the Fitzgeralds rent a little gray house in Westport. Sitting close together on the porch in the evenings, they watch the light, Scott wrote. “They would wait for the moon to stream across the silver acres of farmland, jump a thick wood, and tumble waves of radiance at their feet.”

As early as 1415, London’s mayor ordered lanterns made of transparent horn to be hung in front of houses along the major roads, to light the way on winter evenings. Apart from similar efforts in other cities, the only other glow brightening dark European streets through the sixteenth century came from the occasional lantern carried by a night watchman or the fire burning outside his guardhouse. These civic efforts created a cozy feeling, sure, but could hardly be considered lighting.

Then, in the eighteenth century, the urban nightscape was transformed. In 1736, London’s administration paid for four thousand hours of night lighting, compared to only three hundred hours several decades before. Philadelphia lit up, and Boston too. New York City required every seventh house to display a candle, lit during the “Dark Time of the Moon.” When candles and oil lamps gave way to gaslight, the streets became ever brighter—and nowhere more so than in Paris, where the number of gaslights grew from 203 to 12,816 over a span of four years. “Right in the middle of the heart of the city there appears a golden dot, another one here, a third there, a fourth—one cannot say how quickly they follow one another, they can no longer be counted,” German poet Julius Rodenberg (1831–1914) wrote. “The whole of Paris is studded with golden dots, as closely as a velvet gown with gold glitter. Soon they wink and twinkle everywhere, and you cannot imagine anything more beautiful, and yet the most beautiful is still to come. Out of the dots emerge lines, and from the lines, figures, spark lining up with spark, and as far as the eye can see are endless avenues of light.”

Even those miraculous twinklings couldn’t compare with the effects of electrical lighting only a few decades later. “One could in fact have believed that the sun had risen,” a journalist wrote, reporting on scientific experiments with outdoor arc lighting in Lyon in 1855. “The light, which flooded a large area, was so strong that ladies opened up their umbrellas—not as a tribute to the inventors, but in order to protect themselves from the rays of this mysterious new sun.”

As demand for the technology grew, many resisted electricity’s brilliant new glow. It was just too bright. It lent a “corpse-like quality” to those subjected to its glare, one Londoner argued, and it could make a crowd look “almost dangerous and garish.” Robert Louis Stevenson penned “A Plea for Gas Lamps” in 1878, hoping to dissuade London’s authorities from installing obnoxious electric streetlamps like those in Paris. “A new sort of urban star now shines out nightly,” he wrote, “horrible, unearthly, obnoxious to the human eye; a lamp for a nightmare!”

Stevenson did not get his way. Electricity seduced the masses, especially those who had basked in the glow of Paris’s Avenue de l’Opéra, lit by giant arc lamps every 150 feet. “The effect is magnificent,” wrote a visitor, “and at this moment there exists nothing in this city of splendid effects to compare with this magical scene.” In 1885, the French architect Jules Bourdais (1835–1915) hoped to take France’s love of electrical lighting to its logical conclusion when he proposed a twelve-hundred-foot-high Sun Column to the Universal Exposition’s planning commission. His ornate granite tower, to be constructed near the Pont-Neuf, would house a museum of electricity at its base, and, topped with a giant, high-powered searchlight and parabolic mirrors, light up the entire city. Exhibition planners, perhaps wisely, decided to go with Gustave Eiffel’s tower instead.

Used in ancient Egypt as early as 1500 BCE, incense sanctified religious rites throughout Asia and the Middle East, but also presented an ingenious way to measure time. Chinese sailors burnt incense at sea, using the smoldering sticks as an indicator for when to change course. The Chinese phrase meaning “in the time it takes to burn an incense stick” became popular, and smart incense-makers marked sticks with graduated timelines, which meant that an alarm clock could be fashioned by tying a small bronze bell to either end of a short silk thread draped over a slow-burning stick. The ember end burnt down until it reached the thread, then sizzled through, letting the bells fall into a bronze bowl with a rousing clang. Another kind of incense, elaborately designed lozenges, emitted differently scented or colored smoke as the time passed.

But beyond its practical uses, the true allure of incense lies in its olfactory charms. Chinese courtiers of the T’ang era (618–907 CE) crumbled bits of incense into their love potions and perfumed their homes with incense fumes, favoring anise, basil, ambergris, civet, clove, frankincense, jasmine, and sandalwood. An old sage wrote: “The use of incense gives manifold benefits.… At the dead of night, when the morning moon is in the sky, [those of the] artistic and sad poetical fold burn incense, and their hearts are elated and they whistle carelessly. By the bright window copying old famous scrolls, or leisurely humming, fly-whisk in hand, or when reading at night under the lamp, incense is burned to drive away the demon of sleepiness. Therefore incense may be called the ‘Old Companion of the Moon.’ ”

In Heian era Japan (794–1185), courtiers crafted their own incense blends, competing to develop new scents. The diarist and poet Sei Shonagon (ca.966–1013) wrote: “To wash one’s hair, make one’s toilet, and put on scented robes; even if not a soul sees one, these preparations still produce an inner pleasure.” Those swooning in the smoke spoke of “listening” to incense, and some enjoyed the scents so deeply that sniffing the fumes became a pastime in itself.

Before long, sweet-smelling aristocrats played at identifying different types of incense from the odors alone, assigning them historically suggestive, lyrical new names. Their innocent delight became something of an obsession in the fifteenth century, when connoisseurs and collectors invented koh-do, the “Way of Incense,” a ritualistic game that had almost as many formal rules as a tea ceremony: no one could disturb the air by opening a door or a window, for example, and polite competitors kept unnecessary conversation to a minimum.

In preparation, participants bathed and dressed in unscented clothing and ate only light foods. Then, burning a series of sticks, the host tested their knowledge. Before hazarding a guess, true aesthetes took no less than three inhalations of an offered scent, and no more than five. Sometimes they came up with a new name altogether, flaunting their knowledge of ancient poetry. A particularly evocative scent might be called Moonlight on the Couch, echoing a few well-known lines of verse: “Dark shadows of the moonlight / Cast athwart my couch, / Sink deep into my being.” Evocative and sensuous, incense reached the height of its popularity in Japan in the eighteenth century, when courtesans traded incense sticks with their suitors at the end of the night.

It wasn’t chic to arrive on time, and it was unseemly to stay till the end, but attendance at the Paris Opéra was imperative for the city’s fashionable swans and gentlemen of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. During the season, patrons poured through the opera house doors in London and later New York, perhaps stopping briefly for a shoeshine before making their way to the luxe box seats. “Society goes to the opera to see and be seen,” an American proclaimed. “It goes to exchange gossip, to chatter about the things of the day, to criticise a fashion, or a book, or a new preacher.” Rarely, however, did the operagoers pay much attention to the action on the stage. As the ravishing eighteenth-century Venetian Giustiniana Wynne noted, she and her sisters were “the real show” at the opera in Turin. (Casanova, who visited her family’s opera box, confirmed as much.) And why not? During the course of the season in Italy, a dedicated attendee might watch the same opera for thirty consecutive performances.

In those days, a lady treated her theater box as an extension of her salon. Meanwhile, the men worked the crowd, coming and going, and, in London, dropping by “fop allies,” the aisles surrounding the orchestra section, or the “pit,” where they made romantic assignations. Sometimes, in their wandering, they even bumbled out onto the stage. “Some of our young Sprigs of Fashion made a point of sporting their persons so prominent on the Stage, as to spoil the effect of the representation,” an English critic huffed in 1794.

But London’s young sprigs had nothing on the Italian crowd. Italy’s theaters were known as the most ornate but also the rowdiest in Europe. Upper-crust patrons ate, drank, gambled, gossiped, read, and even brawled in their boxes. “The noise here during the performance was abominable,” wrote an English visitor to Milan, “except while two or three airs and a duet were singing, with which every one was in raptures.” Similar conditions were reported from Naples to Rome to Venice. German composer Richard Wagner (1813–1883) fretted over what he saw as the Italian audience’s indifference. “During the conversation and visits paid from box to box the music still went on, with the same office one assigns to table music at grand dinners, namely to encourage by its noise the otherwise timid talk,” he snipped. Likewise, French composer Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) was stunned to witness a Milanese audience “full of people talking in normal voices,” he wrote in 1832. “The singers, undeterred, gesticulated and yelled their lungs out in the strictest spirit of rivalry. At least I presumed they did, from their wide-open mouths; but the noise of the audience was such that no sound penetrated except the bass drum.” As decibel levels in the box seats hit their highest pitch, pit audiences liked to shout “Zitti, zitti”—“Be quiet”—to the rollicking crowd above.

When they deigned to listen, the Italians expressed their approval with uproarious applause. Sometimes, after an especially rousing phrase or high note, they’d interrupt the singers to demand that the choice bit be sung once again—or even twice. “In the second act the singers themselves wept and carried their audiences along with them so that in the happy days of carnival, tears were continually being wiped away in boxes and parquet alike,” an aficionado wrote of performances of La Sonnambula in Milan in 1830. “I, too, shed tears of emotion and ecstasy.” They could be just as ruthless when they didn’t like what they heard. They hissed. They whistled. They shouted. Composer Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847) watched horrified as the Roman crowd turned on his colleague Giovanni Pacini during an 1831 premiere. “Those in the pit stood up, began talking loudly and laughing, and turned their backs to the stage,” Mendelssohn wrote.

Usually the scene was statelier when a monarch was in the house, as when Ferdinand II, King of the Two Sicilies, visited Lecce in the mid-1850s. But even his august presence couldn’t guarantee decorum. “Ever and anon, as was his wont, he rose to pull up his breeches,” an observer remembered. “Each time this happened, presuming he was about to retire, the audience rose with him in unison.”

Only opera’s true connoisseurs kept above the fray, “several clerics, several shopkeepers, several schoolboys, sucklings of the muses and soldiers just returning from or about to leave for a tour of duty,” as a nineteenth-century Parisian described this rare breed. But then, even most rulers and regents were no more absorbed by the opera than their subjects. Sighed Louis XIV (1638–1715), “I do not know how opera, with such perfect music and an altogether regal expenditure, has succeeded in boring me.”

Long before the invention of the movie camera, French-born painter Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg (1740–1812) created a spectacle that took London by storm. Hired at the Drury Lane Theatre in the 1770s, de Loutherbourg used silk screens, transparencies, sophisticated lighting techniques, and mechanical models to create elaborate sets and a depth of perspective never seen before. Model ships were perfectly rigged. Lighting effects caused the sun and the moon to rise. “The eye of the spectator might be so effectually deceived in a playhouse as to be induced to take the produce of art for real nature,” wrote one critic.

But in the winter of 1781, de Loutherbourg’s light-and-pictures production, “Eidophusikon”—an “imitation of Natural Phenomena, represented by Moving Pictures”—caused a sensation of a different order. Staged in a small red-velvet-lined theater in his home, the story was told without actors, only a synthesis of moving lights, transparent panels of stained glass or painted gauze, and pasteboard scenery, embellished with cork, mosses, and lichens, that served as a backdrop for intricately crafted mechanical figurines. Captivated audiences watched an artificial dawn rise over London. They traveled by noon to Tangier, and continued on to Niagara Falls. Picturesque clouds fluttered by on an invisible cloth panel pulled across the top of the stage. One theatergoer recalled a shipwreck scene containing “horrors of wind, hail, thunder, lightning, and the roaring of the waves, with such marvelous imitation of nature, that mariners have declared, whilst viewing the scene, that it amounted to reality.” Toward the end of the show, the moon set over Japan’s rocky shores, and in the finale Satan massed his troops on the banks of a fiery lake, a scene in homage to Paradise Lost. A critic considered de Loutherbourg’s efforts a “new species of painting … one of the most remarkable inventions in the art, and one of the most valuable, that ever was made.”

Inspired by the production, painter Thomas Gainsborough made a small wooden peep show to display landscapes he’d painted on glass, lit from behind by a candle. Other artists thought bigger, hanging larger-than-life-size transparencies of temples and other follies painted on thin canvas in London’s Vauxhall Gardens, turning the place into a nightly wonderland. One artsy entrepreneur took out a patent on a technique for painting a panorama on a 360-degree surface, opening a show in Leicester Square. “I was so captivated by the sight that I held my breath, the better to take in the wonder, the sublimity of it all,” raved a viewer. There were cityscapes, naval battles, and natural marvels to see.

In the same spirit in the mid-nineteenth century, American showman John Banvard (1815–1891) traveled the world with a 1,320-foot-long painting of the Mississippi River rolled onto two spindles. Over the course of two hours, he unfurled the mural and spun tales about riverboat pirates while his wife played waltzes on the piano. “You flit by a rice swamp, catch a glimpse of a jungle, dwell for an instant on a prairie,” a viewer wrote, “and are lost in admiration at the varied dress, in which, in the Western world, Nature delights to attire herself.” Likewise, the Mareorama, erected near the Paris Exposition in 1900, titillated visitors, who watched painted views of the Mediterranean roll past while standing on the deck of an enormous, pitching model steamship. Sure, it was fun, but such spectacles provided “solid intellectual entertainment instead of light frivolous buffoonery,” an ad promised, “something that when you shall have returned home you can say, I have added a great deal to my stock of information, I have a better idea of certain things—I am more qualified than before to give an opinion on that subject.”

This was all mild amusement, however, compared to the over-the-top, three-day masquerade party—the “voluptuous festival”—that English novelist William Beckford (1760–1844) threw to celebrate his twenty-first birthday. Beckford hired de Loutherbourg to transform his family’s country estate into a fantasyland, a series of grottoes and temples with an ancient Middle Eastern–cum–Egyptian bent—dim, hung with gauzy cloth, and exotically perfumed. “I still feel warmed and irradiated by the recollections of that strange, necromantic light which de Loutherbourg had thrown over what absolutely appeared a realm of Fairy or rather, perhaps, a Deamon Temple deep beneath the earth set apart from tremendous mysteries,” Beckford remembered years later. That shadowy realm perfectly suited de Loutherbourg’s tastes: he would eventually achieve infamy as the charlatan occultist Count Cagliostro’s right-hand man, and later, after the count swindled him, too, set off on his own as a mystical healer and pharmacist until a mob shut him down.

At the Beckford fête, the artist rigged things so that not a single ray of natural light intruded on guests, who knew not the time of day, nor what day it was, for that matter. “Delightful indeed were these romantic wanderings—delightful the straying about this little interior world of exclusive happiness,” Beckford recalled. “The glowing haze investing every object, the mystic look, the vastness, the intricacy of this vaulted labyrinth occasioned so bewildering an effect that it became impossible for anyone to define—at the moment—where he stood, where he had been, or to whither he was wandering.”

When the English king Charles II ended a ban that kept women from the stage in the seventeenth century, he certainly didn’t imagine that they’d soon take on men’s parts—“breeches roles”—too. After the actress Fanny Furnival appeared as Hamlet in 1741, in Dublin, a flurry of imitators followed, with more than a hundred European and American actresses playing Shakespeare’s Prince of Denmark in the nineteenth century. Such roles offered a challenge, but also an opportunity to show a little leg. “Next to wearing trousers themselves, women dote upon seeing the actresses who look well in these forbidden treasures,” a writer explained, musing on the allure of a cross-dressing star. “With eagerness painful in its intensity they watch her or him light the inevitable cigarette and strut across the stage. They turn to each other and say ‘How awfully cute!’ or ‘Did you ever see anything so cunning?’ with a fervency of admiration never bestowed upon a male favorite.” The gender reversal could also affect artistic interpretation. Victorian stagings played up Hamlet’s alleged feminine side, his introspectiveness, indecisiveness, and melancholy. Taking a gutsier approach, actress Charlotte Cushman (1816–1876) borrowed the costume from her chief male rival in 1861 and played Hamlet not as a sensitive, brooding romantic, but as a feisty, full-blooded male.

And yet, none made as strong an impression as French actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923), who suited up in tights and a doublet to play Hamlet in 1899. “No female character has opened up a field so large for the exploration of sensations and human sorrows,” Bernhardt claimed. To her mind, she was perfectly cast. “A boy of twenty cannot understand the philosophy of Hamlet,” the fifty-five-year-old actress huffed. An older male actor “does not look the boy, nor has he the ready adaptability of the woman, who can combine the light carriage of youth with … mature thought.”

Despite her daring career choices, Bernhardt, who kept exotic pets, posed nude for photographer Nadar, befriended famous lesbians, and liked to sleep in a coffin, could be quite conservative in her views. She wore pants while working in her sculpture studio, but scoffed at the idea of sporting fashionable pantaloons or riding a bicycle. “All my feminine instincts plead for the dress, the long dress,” she told a reporter. She hardly needed to convince anyone that she was all woman, la grande séductrice. Artists, poets, feminists, and stuffy politicians alike worshipped her. Once, seeing her act in Sacramento, admiring cowboys went outside during the intermission to shoot off their guns. She was, as a critic explained, “a woman although she has the energy and courage of a man. And it is precisely in this that she is truly unique and incomparable.”

Bernhardt’s performance in Hamlet, in an adaptation that premiered in Paris, was a five-hour marathon that went on past midnight and was controversial from the start. Instead of reprising Cushman’s swagger, Bernhardt’s Hamlet was energetic and boyish. “No male actor ever came near Sarah in this part,” The New York Times raved. “There is precisely a point of femininity in the character which the male full-grown artist has invariably missed, and which is part and parcel of its youthfulness.” Not everyone agreed. Poet Catulle Mendès (1841–1909), for example, told journalist Georges Vanor that Bernhardt, with her whippet-thin figure, was the ideal Hamlet. Vanor, however, countered that the perfect Hamlet was a portly one. Their discussion grew intense. Each man stood his ground. Finally, Mendès slapped Vanor. The two dueled, with Mendès taking a serious hit to the stomach. While he recovered, Bernhardt visited to offer comfort. “Fat!” Mendès cried, still agitated. “What heresy!”

When she took her act on the road, the critics in London were just as divided. Some cheered Bernhardt’s efforts, and just as many dismissed the performance, with one claiming, “There was no more poetry in her Hamlet than there is milk in a male tiger.” Another remarked that “no amount of make-believe will persuade you that Mme. Bernhardt’s Hamlet is any one but Mme. Bernhardt, disguised in flaxen wig and inky cloak and customary suit of solemn black.” A third spent his long hours in the theater desperately holding back his laughter. “One laugh in that dangerous atmosphere, and the whole structure of polite solemnity would have toppled down, burying beneath its ruins the national reputation for good manners. I therefore, like every one else, kept an iron control upon the corners of my lips.”

For Bernhardt, of course, Hamlet was no joke. The next year, the actress sculpted her hair into a pseudo-pompadour to play Napoleon’s nephew in Rostand’s L’Aiglon. She took the male lead in Goethe’s Werther in 1903, and played the Prince in Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande the year after. “It is not sufficient to look the man, to move like a man, and to speak like a man,” she told a reporter. “The actress must think and feel like a man, to receive impressions as a man, and to exert that innate something which, for want of a better word, we call magnetism, just as a man unconsciously exerts it.”

Ancient Egypt’s magicians were notoriously crafty, known for their ability to conjure spirits, or at least their ability to project mirrored images onto incense smoke. During the early Christian era, jugglers and sleight-of-hand magicians suffered a bad reputation as quick-handed gamblers and pickpockets. By the reign of England’s Queen Elizabeth I, they were classified officially alongside “ruffians, blasphemers, thieves, vagabonds.” However, writers such as Reginald Scot (1538–1599), author of The Discovery of Witchcraft, attempted to disassociate the unholy supernatural from sleight-of-hand magic, describing various tricks in print. Of secreting a ball in the palm of the hand Scot wrote: “You must take heed that you be close and sly: or else you discredit the art.… These feats are nimbly, cleanly, & swiftly to be concealed, so as the eyes of the beholders may not discern or perceive the drift.” His description evoked the pleasures of what was then known as “hanky-panky,” a phrase some etymologists believe was borrowed from the Romany hakkni panki, for “sleight of hand” or “trickery.”

In the next century, as reason trounced superstition, conjurors entered Europe’s royal courts, wooing the curious at theaters, taverns, and fairs with magic lantern shows, juggling, ventriloquism, automata, and good old hanky-panky. One of the most popular tricks was to make an object appear to leap with the aid of a hidden string. “This feat is the stranger if it be done by night,” suggested the English magician William Vincent, aka Hocus Pocus, “a candle placed between the lookers on & the juggler for by that means their eyesight is hindered from discerning the conceit.”

In the eighteenth century, the gentlemanly English conjuror Isaac Fawkes (ca.1675–1732) performed for the royal family. With his well-loved Egg-Bag trick, he showed his audience an apparently empty sack that, when turned inside out, spat forth eggs, silver, gold, and even live hens. “He was so great a Magician, that either by the Force of his Hocus-Pocus Power, or by the Influence of his Conjuring Wand, he could presently assemble a multitude of People together, to admire the Phantoms he raised before them, viz. Trees to bear Fruit in an instant, Fowls of all sorts, change Cards into Birds, give us Prospects of fine Places out of nothing, and a merry jig without either a Fiddler or a Piper,” an admirer wrote.

The next great conjuror, the Tuscan Giuseppe Pinetti de Wildale, known as Pinetti (1750–1800), afforded magic its fashionable pizzazz. Pinetti crisscrossed Europe in a carriage drawn by four white horses and wore lavish gold-trimmed suits, which he changed several times during his show. He had some talent, too, once causing the shirt of one of the men in his audience to disappear. He was a little clumsy, however, and his tricks didn’t always succeed.

On the other hand, Frenchman Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin (1805–1871), one of the most convincing magicians of all time, was both stylish and suave, drawing large crowds to his Soirées Fantastiques in Paris in 1845. Robert-Houdin’s stage was decorated like a smart, Louis XV salon, and the magician, born into a family of clock makers, wore elegant evening dress and carried an ivory-tipped ebony wand, which soon became the staple prop of magicians everywhere. His show included a child-size mechanical acrobat that dangled from a trapeze, did the splits, and danced, and a mechanical pastry chef that passed out treats. Using an elaborate linguistic code and plants in the audience, as well as a secreted telegraphing apparatus, Robert-Houdin performed impressive “mind-reading” tricks, but his most spectacular stunt involved an artificial orange tree. Among its branches pistons turned to reveal real oranges hidden behind faux foliage. Flowers bloomed. Butterflies flitted to the heights. And then, from a fruit that had miraculously split itself into sections, he withdrew a handkerchief borrowed earlier from the audience. It was incredible.

Still, even the magical genius Robert-Houdin had the occasional off day. Once he had borrowed a top hat from an audience member and set out to do his old Omlet-in-the-Hat trick—breaking and beating the eggs into the hat, sprinkling them with salt and pepper—when he found himself in a jam. “I placed a candle on the ground, then, holding the hat sufficiently high above it to escape the flame, I began turning it gently round,” he wrote in his memoirs. The audience roared with laughter. The candle was snuffed—the hat was smoldering. The show went on, the great magician producing with a flourish the “splendidly cooked omelet,” which, he wrote, “I had enough courage left to season with a few jokes.”

THE MAGIC APPLE

Master conjurer Harry Houdini (1874–1926) wrote about this trick in 1861, instructing readers to pass a needle and thread under the skin of an apple, carefully stitching all the way around the circumference of the fruit in a line, and cleverly hiding each stitch by reentering the exit holes. “Then take both ends of the thread in your hands,” he continued, “and carefully pull them, so as to draw the middle portion of the thread through the apple, which will then divide into two parts.” The skin remains intact as the taut thread splits the apple’s flesh underneath. When an unsuspecting friend peels the fruit or takes a bite, he or she will find that the apple has been mysteriously pre-sliced. Magic.

The “gong-man” in any proper English country estate of the nineteenth century sounded the dressing bell at seven o’clock, signaling guests that they had an hour to dress before dinner. But during the Gilded Age, even middle-class Americans took up the habit of changing clothes before sitting down for their evening meal. The women wore low-cut gowns, and the men wore tails. “No one need deprive themselves under any conditions of the pleasure of dressing for dinner,” an American etiquette writer of the era noted. “It is a mistake to think that it is a custom only meant for the wealthy, it is within the reach of all. Let people try it who are not rich. There are all ways of dressing for dinner, and the more elaborate styles can be kept for the more state occasions.” She went on to note the hygienic benefits of changing out of street clothes before a meal, “even if accomplished with tired hands and irritable nerves,” and touted the overall healthful effects of dressing well. “Can it be disputed that nice surroundings keep the temper cool and smooth, calm the dreadfully-strung nerves, and hence help the digestion?”

While women seemed, for the most part, happy enough to do their duty, men questioned the practice. “It does seem rather absurd to compel a man, as at least two wives of hard-working businessmen have compelled their husbands for years, to renew his entire apparel in order to partake of a simple dinner of soup, joint, and dessert (probably pie), and served, as it is in one of these instances, by the cook,” a New York Times writer huffed in 1893, calling those men either idiots or saints. And yet the same writer concluded that ultimately, “it is certainly desirable to make as much of the daily festival of dinner as possible.”

Maneuvering in that strict milieu, it was easy enough for partygoer Griswold Lorillard to stun New Yorkers at 1886’s Autumn Ball in Tuxedo Park by sporting a semiformal scarlet short jacket, like those he’d seen worn by British clubmen. He looked “for all the world like a royal footman,” a gossip columnist hissed, suggesting that perhaps Lorillard should try a straitjacket next time. The trend had been inspired by the casual smoking jackets worn by the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII (1841–1910), but, when worn to dinner, until 1920 similar jackets were deemed too casual by most. When ladies were present at the dinner table, a tailcoat and white tie were the uniform for the upper echelons. Black tie was acceptable when dining in all-male company.

Between the wars, things got loose, but it was only during World War II that haute New York began dressing down in earnest. “Dressing for dinner has reached its lowest ebb in years among New Yorkers, according to the dry cleaners, who say it must be because of the war,” the Times reported in 1943. “People used to dress for dinner,” sighed Joel Blau, owner of twelve Manhattan dry-cleaning establishments. “We used to get big loads of evening wear in our shops on Mondays. There’s hardly any of that now.”