Eavesdropping (21 page)

For insight, let’s envisage a different situation. Suppose that middle-aged married women were stridently charging young mothers with child-rearing practices that fell below a culturally approved standard—not an unreasonable supposition given the high rate of infanticide in medieval days. Let us further imagine that young mothers were charged, more specifically, with spending too little time with the children, and failing to offer sufficiently strict discipline, or to impart solid moral values. Would the men of
the community, including the judges, police, lawyers, and other court officials, have rushed to silence the middle-aged women with a charge of scolding? Would they have towed them around town in a cart, taken them to the nearest body of deep water and repeatedly dunked them until they professed regret for their intemperate words? Would husbands and town mayors have clamped these advocates of more stringent child-rearing standards in iron bridles until their tongues bled?

If dunking and bridling were the punishment for scolding, a behavior frequently set in motion by eavesdropping, how did citizens respond when a citizen merely
reported
wrongful acts that were detected by eavesdropping?

Beginning at least seven hundred years ago, the French put on public “roasts” for ordinary people—none famous—who had committed various kinds of transgressions. Most of these misdeeds were legal, even if forbidden or frowned on by the church. Some merely involved lifestyle choices that were upsetting to community members. The roasts were called “charivaris”—the origin of American “shivarees.” The English had “skimmingtons,” and the Italians and Germans had
scampanate
and
katzenmusik
.

Skimmingtons have been lucidly described. After the original observation, information was then circulated among the remaining villagers by way of gossip. When some number were fed up enough to take action, a public ritual was scheduled. Typically, the “victim” was dragged from his or her house and made to sit backwards on a horse or donkey, less commonly a wooden ladder or pole (the “stang”) that was shouldered by brawny celebrants. If the victim could not be found, a neighbor might be substituted—and fairly so, in the eyes of the organizers, since he was in a position to witness the misdeed but had done nothing to prevent it.

The guilty party, often bearing a banner that identified the offence, was then led through the village in a lively procession. The procession was accompanied by a number of cacophonous townsmen—including boisterous children—who blew horns and whistles and clanged together all manner of things metallic, from pots and pans to skimming ladles (hence the name “skimmington”), which were used by wives, like the proverbial rolling pin, to punish husbands who came home drunk. Occasionally there were gunshots and fireworks. After a thorough shaming, victims were occasionally thrown into the town stocks or a local body of water.

What had the guilty parties done that merited the level of public humiliation involved in these spectacles? Clearly, the adults of the town, and their children, were being force-fed a list of things to avoid, or to do secretively, or advisedly, in the future. What was on the list?

The answer can be stated simply: sex and marriage. The leading cause of French charivaris, according to a tally by Violet Alford, was remarriage of a widow or widower, especially where there was a vast difference in age. The second most frequent cause was husband beating, followed by adultery by a married woman. The fourth cause of French charivaris was, simply, marriage.

Evaluation of a different sample indicated that over ninety percent of the charivaris were provoked by remarriage. In some cases the betrothing parties were of disparate age or wealth, or were simply old. In a charivari held in Aubais in February of 1745, a sixty-four-year-old tanner named Baudran married Thérèse Batifort, aged forty-four. The bride, it was claimed, had twenty-two teeth, including all canines and molars. Her sexagenarian groom had just fourteen, “age having claimed those that might have been serviceable.”
⁵⁶

In other cases the remarriage was preceded by a period of “improper conduct during widowhood.” Natalie Davis turned up a sixteenth-century charivari against a newly wed husband who failed to consummate his marriage until the third night (one
wonders how they knew).
⁵⁷
Other reasons included the rejection of a reputable male suitor in favor of one who was richer, much older, or foreign, and pregnant brides who marched down the aisle in white. Charivaris were also held when a young man married for money, or the bride and groom were literally kissing cousins. In some cases, fun was made of newly weds who had not produced a baby “soon enough.”

Just why the youths of the community cared about the marriage of a younger woman to a dentally challenged senior citizen was the subject of some speculation. “Men stimulated by the desire to bind their destiny to a woman,” wrote one Captain Deville in 1818, “must have found it difficult to watch one of their number, who had already claimed his tribute from the fairer sex, aspire to take another at the expense of those still animated by this fond hope.”
⁵⁸

Exhibit 18
La Croisée
(The casement window) I, Philibert-Louis Debucourt, 1791

In England, accounts of shaming spectacles mention husband-beating, marriage of a nagging wife and submissive husband, and marital quarrelsomeness. Most of the other “offences” were like those charivaried by the French … with one conspicuous exception. According to separate reports by Edward Thompson and Martin Ingram, cuckoldry was very frequent, perhaps even more frequent than adultery.
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The focus of these shaming rituals for cuckoldry was usually women’s defiance of male authority, but the typical charivari, according to Anthony Fletcher, “was always directed primarily, if only implicitly in some cases, against the husband and … its message was directed at other husbands. The crucial issue was his personal and sexual control over his wife.”
⁶⁰

Exhibit 19 “C’est ma femme parbleu! Pas-possible!” (“Damn! That’s my wife!), Edme-Jean Pigal, 1822

Charivaris demarcated moral property lines for anyone wishing to test the limits in their own lives or impose them on others. Charivaris also gave individuals a sense of their own power in relation to that of the community and, according to Martin Ingram, supplied villagers with a conceptual framework that could help them organize their experiences.
⁶¹

It is significant that in most accounts of these spectacles, there is frequent mention of mime and mockery, and especially derisive or explosive laughter. The events were thus, at the same time, punitive and festive, though there may have been a nervous quality to the laughter. Some historians, attempting to understand the nature of the laughter, referred to “cathartic release.”
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It’s as though the people were simultaneously trying to discourage what was going on in their community and reconcile themselves to it.

Concerns about the moral tidiness of small villages would continue, but people were streaming into cities. London and Paris were bursting at the seams. The world, if anyone cared to notice, was individuating rapidly. There were now many humans, and many different types of humans. It was time to take stock of who was out there. Fortunately, the human types were all too ready to help.

[In] Paris … one gladly exteriorizes one’s self. We find it tiresome to live and die at home… We require public display, big events, the street, the cabaret, to witness us for better or for worse … we like to pose, to put on a show, to have an audience, a gallery, witnesses to our life.

Alfred Delvau

I
N
the public spaces of nineteenth-century Paris there was a continuous parade of passionate exhibitors, ordinary people with an urge to “exteriorize” themselves, as writer and lexicographer Alfred Delvau said, to display the most compelling form of their public selves to an appreciative audience.

Fortunately for the exhibitors, the bleachers were filled with passionate spectators. “[P]aving-stones have ears,” wrote Balzac, “and doorways have tongues, the window-bars have eyes: there is no greater danger than gossiping at front entrances. The tail-end of a conversation, like the postscript of a letter, may be as dangerously indiscreet both for those who let themselves be overheard as for those who overhear it.”
¹

If every message on the cobbled streets of Paris was marked “To Whom It May Concer”, or at least interpreted that way, there
was one spectator who was unusually concerned. This individual navigated public space alone and was—or at least considered himself to be—superior to the crowd. Known as a
flâneur
, a stroller, he moved about with aristocratic bearing, in embroidered vest and velvet coat, and was studiously, almost scientifically, investigative.

Just as a feature of domestic architecture produced the “eavesdropper,” so did an adventure in urban architecture attract and mold this intensely empirical Parisian. Two centuries ago, the citizens of Paris had grown weary of the city’s dark and dirty streets, equally lacking in sewers and sidewalks. The streets, moreover, were clogged with several forms and species of traffic, offering “a frightful spectacle,” according to architect Johann Geist, with “constant pushing, shoving, crushing… as if one-half of the population were paid to gallop incessantly behind the other.”
²

Clearly, something had to be done. A solution appeared in the form of arcades—iron-framed, glass-domed, marble-paneled passageways lined with elegant shops.
³
Arcades, it was thought, would save pedestrians from getting run over by carriages and carts. Furthermore, these new venues were spacious, dry, and bright—features ensured by glass domes and gas lamps—and an agreeable temperature all year around.
⁴

The arcades had a variety of shops that specialized in linens, knitwear, silks, lace, glass, tapestries, furniture, and other goods, drawing a broad range of patrons, from the hoi polloi to the upper crust, and all were able, finally, to move about unpaced by the sights and sounds of city traffic. For a time, it was fashionable to take turtles for a walk in the arcades.
⁵

The human spectacle was absorbing. If someone wanted to study Parisians, there could not have been a better place to do so, and
flâneurs
did. Outside, one
scampered
along the narrow and
dangerous streets of Paris, ever alert to the encroachment of speeding cabriolets. Inside, this new and more leisurely way of ambulating, according to Walter Benjamin, a German literary critic and philosopher, “could hardly have assumed the importance it did without the arcades.”
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What was so interesting about these strollers?

Exhibit 20
Galerie Colbert, Rotunda
, lithograph by Billaud, 1828

Clues began to surface almost immediately. In 1806—several years after the first arcades were built—a pamphlet appeared under the title
Le Flâneur au salon ou M. Bon-Homme
. It called attention to the
flâneur’
s detachment from ordinary people, and his appreciation of all things visual.
⁷
In time, other characteristics became evident. An important one was the intensity of the
flâneur’s
desire
to inspect everyone
. In words that are now familiar, the poet
Charles Baudelaire wrote about this “‘I with an insatiable appetite for the’ non-I.”
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