The Age of Comfort: When Paris Discovered Casual—and the Modern Home Began by Joan DeJean (review)

DEJEAN, JOAN. The Age of Comfort: When Paris Discovered Casual—and the Modern Home Began. New York: Bloomsbury, 2009. ISBN 978-1-59691-405-6. Pp. 304. $28. After analyzing how the French invented style under the influence of Louis XIV (The Essence of Style, 2005), Joan DeJean explores how the French discovered casual living around the same time, creating the “Age of Comfort” during the period from 1670 to 1765. DeJean demonstrates that the origins of the modern home and how we live in it can be traced back to the contributions of certain architects, interior decorators, and craftsmen during that time, as well as to two women with close ties to the royal court, the Marquise de Maintenon and the Marquise de Pompadour, who were the trendsetting mistresses of Louis XIV and Louis XV, respectively. The author shows how the innovations created during the Age of Comfort had a profound impact on such seemingly unrelated domains of early modern life as apparel, body language, literature, and the relations between the sexes. This book reads like a guided museum tour of an Age of Comfort home: over the course of fourteen chapters, readers move from its overall structure (architecture; chapter 2) via its more intimate rooms (bathroom, bedroom, and boudoir; chapters 3, 10, and 11) and their furniture (flush toilet, easy seats, and seating; chapters 4, 6, and 8) to the bodies that inhabit them (clothing, fabric, and body language; chapters 12–14). DeJean brings together the various tour elements in a coda where she also discusses the subsequent decline of the Age of Comfort. She is a likeable, knowledgeable tour guide with an eye for detail and a sense of humor, pointing out that the French and English used each other’s language for things they preferred not to speak of: “The French replaced ‘English places’ with ‘water closet’ or ‘WC’ [...] ‘Loo’ comes from lieu, ‘commode’ from commode, and ‘toilet’ from toilette” (92). DeJean further enlivens her tour by quoting such contemporary sources as Françoise de Graffigny. DeJean uses paintings from France and England to analyze and compare some of the changes occurring in fashion, décor, furniture, and interior life during the Age of Comfort. Given the visual nature of the topic, the book’s abundant images—forty-six black-and-white illustrations and fourteen color plates—allow readers to follow the author’s argument in detail. The illustrations from the Encyclopédie in particular elucidate how and why the Age of Comfort came about during the Enlightenment. The book’s annotation appears in the form of endnotes . Although the text is meticulously annotated, as we have come to expect from DeJean, this reader would have preferred to find note markers whenever annotation is present in order to know exactly when to refer to it. The absence of note markers gives the book a less scholarly, more “casual” appearance. The bibliography , though very extensive and useful, would have been user-friendlier if it had been divided into contemporary and modern sources. Due to its accessible language, anyone interested in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French literature , history, and culture will enjoy this consistently informative and often entertaining book. Scholars will find it an invaluable addition to their libraries. University of North Texas Marijn S. Kaplan Reviews 379 ...