Wednesday, March 3, 2010

15 Famous People Who Worked in Bed

1. KING LOUIS XI (1423-1483)

This French king was ugly, fat, and sickly but also ruthless and clever, earning the title of the "universal spider". He introduced the custom of the lit de justice (bed in justice), a ceremonial appearance of the monarch, in bed, before le parlement with the princess of the realm on stools, the greater officials standing, and the lesser ones kneeling. No one is ure exactly why he began the practice, but it caught on and lasted until the French Revolution. Fontanelle, a critic of Louis XV, was asked on the eve of the Revolution, "What, sir, is a 'bed of justice'?" He replied, "It is the place where justice lies asleep."

2. LEONARDO DA VINCI (1452-1519)

Leonardo earned a unique fame as an artist and scientist, and according to his Notebooks, he spent some time each night "...in bed in the dark to go over again in imagination the main outllines of the forms previously studied... it is useful in fixing things in the memory."

3. CARDINAL DE RICHELEU (1585-1642)

In the last year of his life the diabolically clever and scheming cardinal took to his bed and sstayed there because of his rapidly deteriorating efficient secret police in exposing the treasonous machination of the youthful royal favorite Cinq-Mars. Nor dit it hinder the peripatetic cardinal from traveling -- his servants carried him about his bed, and if the door of a house he wanted to stay in was too narrow, they would break open the walls.

4. THOMAS HOBBES (1588-1579)

Hobbes, the great Brithish political philosopher, was renowned for his mathematical approach to natural philosophy and found bed a comfortable and handy place place to work on his formulas. He wrote the numbers on the sheets and , when he ran out of room, on his thighs. He wrote his 1661 Dialogue on Physics, or On the Nature of Air entirely in bed. Hobbes also sand in bede because (according to Aubreyis Brief Lives) "... he did beleev [sic] it did his lungs good, and conduced much to prolong his life."

5. HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW (1807-1882)

Throughout his life Longfellow suffered from periodic bouts of severe insomnia. Out of desperation he decided to put his sleepless nights to some good use, and he began to write poetry in bed -- including his 1842 classic "The Wreck of the Hesperus."

6. MARK TWAIN (1835-1910)

He loved the luxurious comfort of writing in bed and these composed large portions of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. He seems to have been the only person ever to point out that working in bed must be a very dangerous occupation, since so many deaths occur there.

7. IGNACE FANTIN-LATOUR (1836-1904)

Best known for his protrait groups, especially Homage a Delacroix , this French painter worked in bed out of necessity when he could not afford wood for a fire. William Gaunt, in The Aesthetic Adventure, describes him propped up in bed, "Shivering, mournful, persistent... in a threadbare overcoat, a top hat over his eyes and a scarf round his mouth, balancing a candle on the edge of his drawing board and sketching with numbed, gloved hand."


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