Sidetracks

by Richard Holmes

  Nadar’s files in the atelier now contained over 800 studies, including even interview notes and daguerreotypes. From this massive repository of images, Nadar created – with Philipon’s aid and advice – his first distinctive masterpiece, in 1854. This was his celebrated ‘Pantheon Nadar’, a vast single-sheet lithograph cartoon, showing a spiral cortege of over 240 contemporary writers and journalists, each minutely transformed into a jostling gargoyle of the creative spirit. With a printing investment of 200,000 francs, Nadar sold out; the sensation of the season.

  Nadar was now thirty-four. He bought a house at 113 rue Saint-Lazare, married, and gave dinner parties for his Bohemian friends, many like him now distinguished. Meanwhile the decisive discovery of his ideal medium occurred almost unnoticed. A painter friend left a second-hand photographic apparatus in the corner of the atelier. Mais, quand même … With predestined ease, Nadar learnt to prepare the wet-collodion glass plates; and his friends, long accustomed to his vagaries, learned to sit unselfconsciously under the hard, searching exposures – between 30 and 120 seconds – in blazing sunlight. From the garden he moved to the attic, which was soon fitted with glass tiles. Nadar’s strange combination of artistic and commercial gifts, and his flair for the new craft of publicity, found its instant culmination. At last the image could be trapped. In the spring of 1855, with the ‘Pantheon’ still fresh from the lithographic stone, Nadar set up as a photographer.

  By 1856, with dazzling speed, he had temporarily transformed himself into ‘Nadar et Cie’ to capitalize the business, and he won the grande medaille d’or for photography at the Brussels Exhibition that summer. A legal battle with his younger brother, Adrien, finally won him, in 1857, exclusive right to the ‘marque de fabrication’ of Nadar. Significantly, it was the first time in France that an artistic pseudonym had been disputed as a commercial property. Felix Tournachon’s transformation was now complete: he was ‘Nadar Photographe’.

  Within the next fifteen years, the atelier Nadar produced one of the greatest sets of contemporary portraits ever made. From 500,000 or so remaining glass and emulsion negatives, perhaps some 300 prints compose the chef d’oeuvre of the collection. For the most part these are of writers. They cover the whole panorama of mid-nineteenth-century French literature: Baudelaire, Gautier, Nerval, de Banville, Lamartine, Hugo, Dumas père et fils, George Sand, Du Camp, Daudet, Verne, Scribe, Murger, Champfleury, the freères Goncourt, Sainte-Beuve, Michelet, Charles Philipon and Emile de Girardin, and literally scores and scores of others. But there are many musicians as well – Berlioz, Rossini, Offenbach; and painters – Delacroix, Corbet, Corot, Monet. There is also a set of Sarah Bernhardt, and a charming nude study of Henri Murger’s mistress, the original Musette of the Bohemian stories. It is, in effect, a second ‘Pantheon Nadar’, except of infinitely greater human penetration. The best photographic portraits should be, wrote Nadar, ‘ample like a Van Dyck, and elaborate like a Holbein’.

  Nadar’s portraits, in fact, owed much to painting, especially Ingres (who in turn used Nadar’s photographs for his own studio work). The monumental simplicity of their presentation, the subtle use of their advancing and retreating shadow, and the bold play with the texture of a jacket, blouse or cape, to offset the flesh of face or hands, all are constant marks of Nadar’s work. His best period, up to 1874, coincided with the use of the wet-plate collodion process: this rarely required poses of less than twenty seconds, and emphasized the sense of an intense, prolonged, revelatory gaze deep into the subject’s psyche. After 1872–73, gelatine emulsion brought exposure times down to less than a second, and the subject could be ‘snapped’ without his cooperative effort in the process of capturing and holding the fugitive image.

  Nadar defended the autonomy of his art, with force and pride.

  The theory of photography can be learnt in an hour, and the first practical steps in a day … But what can be learnt far less readily is the moral nature of your subject; it is the rapid reflex which puts you in touch with your model, makes you grasp and judge his habitual style and ideas, and allows you to produce – not some superficial or lucky shot, some indifferent and tasteful reproduction within the range of the meanest laboratory assistant – but the most familiar and the most favourable likeness: la resemblance intime.

  It was an assertion that expressed the effort and experience behind an entire career.

  In 1860 Nadar moved to the address which he consecrated for French photography, on the boulevard des Capucines. He charged 50 francs for a half-plate portrait, and joyfully spread the old ‘bull’s blood’ insignia across his whole decor, even down to the wrapping paper. He always continued to scorn Emperor and Court, leaving royal clientele to the Mediterranean beach-photographer Disderi, in the suitable vulgarity of the boulevard des Italiens. At the grand piano under the open studio windows, Jacques Offenbach was encouraged to play variations on the revolutionary Marseillaise, while the Imperial Guard – martial but tone-deaf–trotted in glittering ranks towards the Place de l’Opéra.

  In 1862 Charles Philipon died, and thereafter Nadar’s energies were increasingly expended in madcap projects. He pioneered flash and aerial photography, and founded a Society for the Promulgation of Heavier Than Air Machines. It was now Daumier’s turn to caricature him, suspended in a balloon with his camera over the Arc de Triomphe, ‘at the height of his art’. He squandered his resources almost to bankruptcy in his own immense scarlet publicity balloon, Le Géant, which the Scientific American stonily reported as capable of carrying eighty persons, a printing press, beds and lavabos, and of course a photographic laboratory. But in a night crash-landing near Hanover, Le Géant nearly killed both him and his faithful, long-suffering wife, and Victor Hugo was moved to propose a relief fund. The Secretary of the Heavier Than Air Society, the young Jules Verne, canonized Nadar as the hero of De la Terre à la Lune – the astronaut Michel Ardan, a final anagrammatic transformation of the fiery nomenclature. ‘He was a dare-devil, a Phaeton driving the Sun’s chariot at break-neck speed, an Icarus with replaceable wings.’

  To the end of his life, Nadar always remained fascinated by the rapport between writers and the photographic image. In calm old age, in 1900, he recalled how Balzac refused to be photographed because he held a Lucretian theory of spectres (like the Sioux Indians), believing that each exposure dissolved some vital layer of life through the malign alchemy of the Dark Room. Nerval and Gautier had proposed a more gothic hypothesis, that each photograph somehow released a fiendish doppelgänger, who might pursue them across the ether until death. Nerval in fact was only ever photographed once, by Nadar in January 1855; it was about a fortnight before the poet committed suicide in the rue de la Vieille-Lanterne.

  But it was Baudelaire who had led the most sustained attack on early photography, in his scathing, salon review of 1859. Pressing home a diatribe against the vapid popular taste for ‘realism’ in art, he thundered prophetically: ‘A revengeful God has answered the supplications of the multitude. His Messiah was Monsieur Daguerre. And the multitude said: “… Art means Photography”. From this moment forth, our vile society, like some Narcissus, rushed to contemplate its own trivial image in the metal plate. A madness, an extraordinary zealotry seized these new worshippers of sunlight. And strange abominations were brought forth.’ It must have seemed ironic in retrospect. For Nadar’s photographic series of Baudelaire between 1854 and 1862 is one of the most expressive documents available about the self-destructive force of the poet’s own life. As it is also one of the triumphs of Nadar’s art.

  Before he died, Baudelaire in turn enshrined Nadar, the photographic witness of the doomed Empire, in one of his own superb images from the late prose poems.

  In a vast plain of glowing embers, he saw Nadar who was collecting salamanders.

  Salamanders: those darting legendary ephemerae, who feed upon a flash of light, and flourish in the fiery heart of destruction.

  GAUTIER IN LONDON

  AS HE WALKED DOWN the Strand one surpri
singly sunny morning in March, examining the patriotic engravings of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert smiling domestically from the royal tilbury, Théophile Gautier came upon a barrow boy selling waterproof mackintoshes. It was a matter of generally received knowledge that the imperméable, like those other viscous phenomena, the English glass of stout, the English fog, and the English phlegm, contained something of the philosophical essence of Britain. So Théophile Gautier, poet, litterateur, and – more practically – regular columnist for Paris’s leading daily newspaper La Presse, drew aside to observe.

  It was March 1842. Gautier’s first and most brilliant ballet Giselle had just opened to packed houses in Her Majesty’s Theatre. The manager, Mr Benjamin Lumley, had remarked that the piece was ‘admitted to be vastly pretty’, a judgement which Gautier, who spoke little or no English, received as a generous compliment.

  In the peculiar absence of rain, the barrow boy was obviously anxious to demonstrate that his mackintoshes were genuinely waterproof. To Gautier’s perplexity, he proceeded to nail the circumference of one of the sacred garments to a horizontal wooden frame, suspended alongside the stall. Into the shallow canvas depression thus formed, he emptied a large enamel jug of water. Into the water he tipped a bowl-full of engaging goldfish. He then produced a handful of small fishing lines and, flourishing them, inquired whether any of his customers would care to go fishing.

  Gautier walked on towards Trafalgar Square, where Lord Nelson’s column was gradually arising from a primal chaos of scaffolding and publicity hoardings. He passed the Duke of Northumberland’s house, where a sculpted lion guarded the portal with its tail raised vertically in the air. ‘It is the lion of Percy’, Gautier noted with unaccountable irritation, ‘and never has heraldic lion so grossly abused its right to affect fabulous shapes and forms.’ The English were not only an unreliable and eccentric nation, they were positively bizarre.

  It was Gautier’s first visit to London. He was thirty-one, the esteemed author of an erotic novel Mademoiselle de Maupin, and an arbiter of French literary fashion. In the next twenty years he was to make some five more trips to the British capital, reporting for his newspaper, or simply for his friends, on a variety of national peculiarities, including the Ascot Races, methods of surviving ‘incendiary’ turtle soup, the paintings of Hogarth, the depressions of Sunday afternoon, the camels of Regent’s Park Zoo, Covent Garden, and the Great Apotheosis at the Crystal Palace. Gautier came both as a private citizen of Paris, and as a public representative of civilization, roles that were not easily to be distinguished. Though he could not therefore, on principle, admire – he found himself by rapid turns amused, charmed, distressed, perplexed, outraged. But he never lost that original sense of strangeness, of the obstinate shadows clinging to that metropolis of the northern isles, like the ubiquitous soot which, he recorded with gallic frankness, made one blow black into one’s handkerchief.

  It had struck him, in the larger perspective, even as his steamboat the Harlequin first swung west into the yellow waters of the Thames Estuary at sunset, and a forest of dark chimneys gathered along the low banks, sculpted like colossal towers and obelisks, ‘giving to the horizon an Egyptian air, a vague profile of Thebes or Babylon, of an antediluvian city, a capital of enormities and rebellious pride, something altogether extraordinary’. It was an impression that anticipated another European’s, Joseph Conrad’s in the opening pages of Heart of Darkness, by some fifty years.

  Gautier saw the evidence of Empire in the jostling host of merchant craft, running between the lightships with their great lamps and scarlet paintwork: ships from India, reeking of oriental perfumes and with Lascar crews crowding the rigging, ships from the Baltic and the North Sea with crusts of ice still frozen to their bulwarks, ships from China and America freighted down with tea and sugar cane. But among all that vast fleet, ‘you always recognise the English ships: their sails are black like those of Theseus’s galleon departing for the Isle of Crete, a sombre livery of funeral mourning, rigged by the sad climate of London’. Gautier caught at the dominant motif, hanging there, mute, unexplained. ‘London! –’ he exclaimed almost with enthusiasm, ‘– la ville natale du spleen’.

  Yet returning from that first brief encounter, he was nonchalant, even rather knowing. He recorded the following dialogue at a family dinner table in the rue la Boétie. ‘Did you see the Tunnel? – No, I didn’t see the Tunnel. – And Westminster? – No, indeed. – And St Paul’s? – Oh, no. – Then what on earth did you do in London? – I wandered about town observing Englishmen and, more particularly, observing English women. One cannot find their description in any guidebook, and they seemed to me quite as interesting as stones arranged one upon the other after a certain fashion.’ Gautier added with some pain: ‘since this occasion the good bourgeois have regarded me as somewhat mad, suspecting me vaguely of harbouring cannibalistic tendencies, and send their children up to bed when I come to call. I am seriously afraid that this will prejudice my marriage prospects.’

  The Tunnel in question was Monsieur Brunel’s tiled passageway between Wapping and Rotherhithe, and could not strictly be classed as a British marvel. Gautier later reported in La Presse that a friend, presumably English, was working on plans for a Tunnel beneath the entire Manche, connecting Folkestone with Calais, and containing railway carriages fired along by compressed air. He remarked that he had, as a conscientious journalist, already reserved his seat for the first crossing, scheduled to take place four years hence, in 1847.

  But Gautier was in no sense, as he frequently pretended, and as Henry James later brashly assumed (‘the broad-eyed gaze of a rustic at a fair’), an innocent abroad. As drama critic for La Presse, whose feuilletons ran on the front page beneath the political and business leaders of his exacting editor, the publishing magnate Émile de Girardin, he was normally tied to his regular evening descents upon the Paris boulevards. But in the formula of his lifelong friend and collaborator on La Presse, Gérard de Nerval, he was ‘a traveller by instinct, a critic by circumstance’.

  Almost every spring or summer for thirty years, Gautier made good his escape from Paris, usually in a retrospective flurry of apologies, forwarding addresses, and promises of exotic copy. These flights of the swallow, as they became in one of his most famous poems, ‘Ce que disent les Hirondelles’, were made to Germany, Italy, Spain, North Africa, Egypt, Turkey, even eventually to Russia, and he subsequently published brilliantly coloured imagist accounts of all of them.

  Even his apartment, in an italianate hotel particulier at 14 rue Navarin, off the place Pigalle on Montmartre’s lower side, expressed his search for spiritual displacement. Indeed, it was almost a caricature of French Romantic aspirations, furnished as it was with Turkish carpets, Siamese cats, and Italian theatrical ladies, and perfumed with Spanish cooking, Cuban cigars and Algerian hashish. There was, finally, to be an English element, but that was to prove part of the more intimate moeurs.

  Moreover, Gautier was acutely conscious of the curiously modern desperation, almost the death-wish, implicit in this passionate longing for other shores, other climes, the other itself. Many of his springtime feuilletons each year played upon this theme with deliberate irony, heralding the age of mass tourism in a distinctly minor key:

  ‘Nowadays the dream of the masses is – Speed. By iron or steam they seek to conquer that “ancient weight upon all things suspended”. It would seem that their sole concern is to devour Space. Do they do 12 or 15 leagues an hour simply to flee from ennui? If so, the enemy awaits them at the farther platform. Yet how strange is this wild urge for rapid locomotion, seizing people of all nations at the same instant. “The dead go swiftly”, says the ballad. Are we dead then? Or could this be some presentiment of the approaching doom of our planet, possessing us to multiply the means of communication so we may travel over its entire surface in the little time left to us?’ It feels odd to read this paragraph on the faint, blue microfilms for La Presse of 1843.

  Yet Gautier’s journeys
to London, while part of this lifelong centrifugal urge, seem to have been of a different order. His notes have remained scattered through a score of essays, letters, articles, poems and reviews. London was less a place to visit, than a state of mind to ponder upon. It was a dark mirror, a smoky crystal ball. You could turn it in your hand. Gautier remained profoundly uninterested in its institutions, its monuments, even its literary associations. Rather, it was its atmosphere, its tone, its iridescent qualities, its curious undercurrent of black comedy, which continually drew him back.

  On his second visit he summoned an English barber to his rooms at the Hotel Sablonniere, in Leicester Square. His ballet La Péri, with his untouchable amour Carlotta Grisi dancing the title role, was playing at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. He was due at the Lord Mayor’s procession and banquet. He needed a shave. The barber knocked, entered, bowed: a thin man with the English whiteness of jowl, dressed entirely in black. In complete silence, with the flowing rapidity of a phantom, he shook out a crisp, white apron, adjusted a chair, and stropped a long razor. Gautier grew increasingly uneasy at each stroke, a victim of those unspeakable suspicions that separate native from foreigner, living from dead.

  ‘Seeing him so chill, so pale, so mournful, I asked myself if he were not some ill-provisioned resurrectionist who wished to acquire a new subject. At the same time, I instinctively cast my eyes upon that part of the floorboards where my chair rested, anxious to ascertain whether or no there was a hidden trap door through which I should plunge into the cellar bearing a large slit in my throat.’ On the point of calling off the whole operation, Gautier was saved by the inherited logic of Pascal and Voltaire. ‘I made the calming reflexion that, since I was lodged upon the second floor of the hotel, there could hardly be a cellarage beneath my parquet, and that a trap door in opening would make me fall to the first floor, depositing me exactly on top of the pianoforte of an extremely pretty young opera-singer.’ The jolie cantatrice was Ernesta, who subsequently bore Gautier twin daughters. So the English barber was possibly a better Figaro than Gautier concluded at the time.