History hasn't really had a great track record when it comes to treating the world's poorest people and littlest residents with any kind of respect — just look at jobs like the olde-timey chimney sweep. So, it's not entirely surprising to learn that National Geographic says that yes, Europe's poorest residents often died where they slept. Slightly more surprising is that the rich didn't seem to have it much better, for a strange reason.
Europe's elite had spent a good long time building massive, sprawling palaces for themselves, on huge estates that concentrated more on decoration than practicality — practicality was, after all, something that the servants needed to concern themselves with. Take Versailles. Louis XIV turned his father's hunting lodge into a palace in the 1670s, and when he did his upgrade, he added a lot of windows. Tall, wide, massive windows that were designed specifically to be impressive.
Anyone who's ever held their hand up to a modern window when it's cold outside knows how chilly it gets, and that was the problem. In the midst of the cold snap, the Duchess of Orleans was staying at Versailles, and wrote: "The cold here is so fierce that it fairly defies description. I am sitting by a roaring fire, have a screen before the door, which is closed, so that I can sit here with a fur around my neck ... and I am still shivering and can barely hold the pen. Never in my life have I seen a winter such as this one..."
