Praise for Dominic Smith’s lyrical debut
The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre
“[A] vibrant first novel… Smith has an artist’s eye and he gives Daguerre an artist’s heart.”
—Detroit Free Press
“Accomplished and impressive…Smith’s gifts as a storyteller and writer are obvious, sometimes overwhelming.”
—Baltimore Sun
“A striking meditation on memories and photography…You can read it and reread it…and still be struck, on every page, by an indelible detail or turn of phrase.”
— Austin American Statesman
“Beautifully written…A compelling psychological study, a thoughtful tracing of the birth of a new art form, and an atmospheric portrait of nineteenth-century France: impressive on all three counts.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred)
“A splendid novel. You don’t often see such a graceful command of historical detail in a first book. Or such striking and elegant prose. Dazzling and wondrous.”
—John Dalton,
author ofHeaven Lake
“What starts out as a feverish, dreamlike novel of lost love, apocalyptic visions, and the social upheaval of Napoleonic France turns into a quiet, remarkably moving study of how the human heart endures.”
—The Portsmouth Herald
“Smith writes with the fastidiousness of a miniaturist, even the smallest details are intricately painted…each page promises uncommon and beautiful words.”
—The Austin Chronicle
“[Dominic Smith] has conceived an engaging fictional account of Daguerre and his quest for lost love. He has the gift of acute characterization.”
—The Advocate
“Blazes equally with drama and emotion…Informative and provocative,The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre makes for lively reading.”
—The Roanoke Times
“An atmospheric journey through the city of light.”
—The Poughkeepsie Journal
“Bohemian Paris is resplendent in this kaleidoscopic work of historical fiction.”
—OK!magazine
“Entertaining.”
—Library Journal
“Evocative…Dominic Smith’s acute detail calls forth visions of a world and a man on the verge of transformation.”
—Ronlyn Domingue,
author of The Mercy of Thin Air
“Endlessly thought-provoking…As haunting as a daguerro-type: true in details, but pesteringly strange; and as beautiful as if it were written not in words but in light.”
—Stephen Harrigan,
author ofThe Gates of Alamo
“A lyrical journey into the world of a man lost to nostalgia and undone by beauty. Smith has generously rendered an artist in desperate pursuit of the sublime.”
—Paul Jaskunas, author of Hidden
“Dominic Smith writes with an authority very few first-time novelists possess. He wonderfully evokes nineteenth-century Paris through a chemically addled consciousness—a formidable achievement that he manages with humor and grace. A remarkable debut.”
—Mark Jude Poirier, author of Modern Ranch LivingandGoats
“By the time it reaches its final pages,The Mercury Visionshas become a genuinely moving experience.”
—Anthony Giardina, author of Recent History
“Smith renders a clear-eyed portrait of Daguerre and his thinking, against a backdrop of tumultuous times.”
—Publishers Weekly
Washington Square Press
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2006 by Dominic Smith
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
For information address Atria Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-5190-4
ISBN-10: 1-4165-5190-5
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For Mikaila and Gemma
Author’s Note
Although this is a work of fiction and the characters are inventions, I have borrowed details from the biographies of Charles Baudelaire, the poet, and Louis Daguerre, an early inventor of photography. Wherever possible (and expedient to the story) I have tried to capture the flavor of the real Daguerre’s life and the historical context in which he achieved his fame. There were several books that were invaluable for aiding this process: L.J.M. Daguerre: The History of the Diorama and the Daguerreotype(1968), by Helmut and Alison Gernsheim; An Historical and Descriptive Account of the Various Processes of the Daguerreotype and the Diorama(1839), by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre; Dickens’s Dictionary of Paris(1890), by Charles Dickens; The Poem of Hashish(1895), by Charles Baudelaire; and The Hashish Club (1971), by Théophile Gautier. I also found many of the articles and resources on the Daguerreian Society’s website (www.daguerre.org) to be useful.
Mercury vapors were used extensively by Louis Daguerre during his photographic career. His basic process was to expose a sensitized plate inside a camera obscura, take the plate into a darkened room, then pass it back and forth above a heated mercury bath. Millions of tiny mercury drops settled over the image, fixing it permanently. The presence of mercury gives metal-plate daguerreotypes their luster and minute level of detail, but it can also lend them a ghostly, holographic appearance. The image can appear to change based on the eye-level and perspective of the viewer. In later years, as Daguerre tried to minimize exposure times in an attempt to capture faster-paced movement (such as galloping horses and birds in flight) he experimented with increasingly deadly substances—cyanide of mercury, nitric acid, and gold chloride. Daguerre, who suffered from various physical complaints until he died of a heart attack in 1851, was probably unaware of how harmful such substances were.
Prologue
When the vision came, he was in the bathtub. After a decade of using mercury vapors to cure his photographic images, Louis Daguerre’s mind had faltered—a pewter plate left too long in the sun. But during his final lucid minutes on this cold evening of 1846, he felt a strange calm. Outside, a light snow was falling and a vaporous blue dusk seemed to be rising out of the Seine. The squatters had set fire to the barrens behind the Left Bank and the air was full of smoke. Louis reclined in warm water perfumed with lemon skins, a tonic he believed to be good for his skin and nerves. The wind gusted under the eaves. He placed a hand against the adjacent window and from the bath, perched high in his rooftop belvedere, he felt the night pressing in against him. His head was partially submerged and he heard the metallic click of the tenant’s pipes below. It was a message; he was sure of it. The world was full of messages.
He sat up, wiped the steam off the window, and looked out. There was something ghostly about the boulevard in the wintry pall. The bare-limbed almond trees were flecked with snow. A nut vendor pushed his cart through the smoky twilight. A man stood before a storefront, staring at a pyramid of startling white eggs. Was he counting them? A man was counting eggs on a street at dusk while the peasants were trying to burn the city down. This pleased Louis, though he couldn’t think why. He leaned back in the bathtub again and heard, as if anew, the ticking of the pipes. He lay there, letting his mind go still, and became aware of his own heartbeat, the sound of a tin drum thro
ugh water. This was the time of day he grew speculative or nostalgic, and he set to thinking that the pipes and his heart were talking to each other, exchanging notes in a secret, mechanical language. Then, as Louis watched the increments of darkness grow at the window, he heard his heart skip a beat. His chest tightened and he felt a dull, cold pain in his fingertips. This had happened before, a stutter in his pulse on account of the mercury in his blood. But he had never listened to it, and now his heart stopped for a full second. It was like a small death.
He felt something shift in the room. Holding on to the rim of the tub, he pulled himself to a standing position. He reached for a robe and put it around his shoulders but was unable to move farther. Looking around the washroom, he felt himself alien to his own life. Poison-blue bottles of iodine lined out the medicine shelf like Prussian soldiers; his straight razor stood agleam on the washstand; a flask of mercury shuddered on the sink. Everything seemed directed at him. He looked out the window and saw the moon rising behind a cloth of weather. An enormous albatross perched amid the stone gargoyles of Notre Dame. The peasants had looted the zoo, and all kinds of exotic animals had escaped. A Bengal tiger was said to be prowling the Latin Quarter. Louis saw that the barrens continued to burn, but now there was a barge loaded with firewood drifting down the river in flames. Night was everywhere. People had quit the streets except for the man counting the eggs. The man stood with his hands in his pockets, fingering his change. The little life one leads.
Louis threw open the window and felt an inrush of cold on his face. There was a moment of tremendous clarity, as if a scrim had lifted. The vision, now that it came, was really a series of insights and hallucinations, a feeling of things coming into focus. The egg-man looked up at him, startled, and Louis understood that he was returning from a funeral, perhaps his father’s, and that he’d stopped to observe the precariousness of life in the pyramid of white eggs. Louis looked down to the river and saw that the burning barge was not carrying firewood at all but the bones of the dead. At the street corner, the hands on the neighborhood clock had slowed to half time. Everything is a portent. A low, rushing noise rose from the heath—men’s voices on the edge of panic. They were going to burn the city down. Not now, not tonight, but eventually. The lootings and the fires, Louis understood now, were acts of fear, not rebellion. Men could sense oblivion coming, feel it in their knuckles and teeth. Then Louis saw that it was not an albatross on the rooftop of Notre Dame but a young girl in a white dress, her hands laced behind her back. She had felt wings pinned to her dress and she was going to jump from the ledge. She didn’t jump; she leaned into the air in front of her and shot straight down. All the way down, she refused to unlace her hands from behind her back. A burgundy ribbon streamed out from her long dark hair, and Louis watched it until she disappeared into the smoke. The egg-man looked on with his hands in his pockets. The end of the world is contained in a man’s pockets.
Louis closed the window, stepped onto the rug, and dried himself thoroughly with a towel. There was a kind of relief in knowing about the end, a kind of symmetry and beauty. For years he had felt a strange sense of foreboding in the smallest detail—a tarnished coin, a glossed pear—and now, he saw, these had been a thousand small proofs. He looked at himself in the mirror and noticed beads of spilt mercury on the medicine shelf. They resembled tiny planets of glass. He stood there staring at them, his head cocked as if listening to a distant voice. Each bead captured his reflection and the light from the window.
One
The following spring, in April 1847, Louis Daguerre stopped by the brasserie where he knew Charles Baudelaire took his meals. It was a single long room inset like a cave, wedged between a tobacconist and a haberdasher. The poet sat in the corner, brooding behind a bottle of absinthe and a demitasse of coffee. His hair had been shaved off several weeks earlier in celebration of his new prose poem— “The Fool and the Venus”—and his ponderous head seemed to gather the room’s light to a focal point. On the table in front of him smoldered a wooden pipe with an amber mouthpiece. Baudelaire looked up as Louis approached and saluted. “Mind your manners, gentlemen, here comes a member of the Legion of Honor.” A few of the drunken poets nearby raised their glasses to Louis, then returned to their brandied rants.
Louis sat opposite Baudelaire and took a kerchief from his pocket to wipe his forehead.
“How’s the end of the world coming?” asked Baudelaire, eyes scanning his twin drinks.
Louis examined the kerchief—a bloom of sweat. “Fine. Good of you to ask.” So far he’d mentioned his prophecy only to Baudelaire. He needed to be careful; The End was a delicate matter and he didn’t want to find himself in a straight waistcoat at one of the meetings of the Institute.
Baudelaire looked up. “I was about to order food. Will you join me?”
“I’d be delighted,” said Louis.
“I was thinking about some bouillon and bread for me. But that’s hardly your pleasure. We must keep our national dignitaries well fed. The true artists, on the other hand, produce better when they’re emaciated.”
“I’d be glad of some herring and eggs,” said Louis.
Baudelaire picked up his pipe and went to the counter to order. He was dressed in his customary English black, from lacquered shoes to satin cravat.
Louis looked around the brasserie. It was the kind of smoky venue where painters, philosophers, and poets huddled in a din of verbiage, where the dandies and the rag-cloth romantics argued about the sheen of a winter apple, the role of virtue, the beauty of the comma. Men with pipes and chapbooks sat around the scuffed oak tables or reclined on the threadbare rose-print divans. A grave-looking man in a woolen jacket, a fez, and Cossack boots nodded repeatedly and said, “Yes, we all knew him. He was a ladies’ poet—moonlight and taffeta and all the rest of it.” Whenever Louis had come in here before, he couldn’t help feeling hated. Now he found himself avoiding eye contact with the fieriest of the fellows—the particularly rabid poets, the sullen painters in Basque berets—who might attack his bourgeois attitudes, the national pension he’d been awarded for his daguerreotype invention.
Louis watched Baudelaire return from the counter with another demitasse of coffee. “Voltaire drank seventy-two cups of coffee a day,” Baudelaire said. “He must have had to shit between paragraphs. Where would the Enlightenment be without the brown goddess?”
“Indeed.”
Baudelaire plunked down and said, “And what’s Armageddon without a good cup of Costa Rican?”
“I have serious business to transact.” Louis took out a piece of paper and placed it on the table. It was a list of all the things he wanted to daguerreotype before the end of the world.
Baudelaire picked it up and scrutinized it as if it were an insurance contract waiting to be signed.
a beautiful woman (naked)
the sun
the moon
the perfect Paris boulevard
a pastoral scene
galloping horses
a perfect apple
a flower (type to be determined)
the king of France
Isobel Le Fournier
Baudelaire moved his lips as he read the list several times, then placed it back on the table, facedown. He looked appalled. “The end amounts to this?” he said, his nose at the rim of his porcelain cup.
“I’d like to find a woman to pose naked for a daguerreotype. Can you help me find one?” It was not easy to find nude models, though Louis had heard that artists in the studios around the Luxembourg Gardens were convincing street waifs to pose for a bowl of soup and a pinch of snuff. But he needed something more than the bared frame of a rag-and-match seller; he needed a high-blown frailty, something worthy of oblivion.
Baudelaire relit his pipe and puffed on it meditatively. It was this posture and his ethereal poetry that had earned him the nickname the Prince of Clouds. He removed a speck of tobacco from his tongue and prepared to speak with some gravity. He believed in Louis Dagu
erre’s apocalypse as an invention of the artistic mind, no different than a belief in God or Beauty or Piety. He enjoyed watching Louis, the pensioned scientist and artist, hatch and unfold inside this epic delusion, seeing his mind clamor at the fidget wheels of madness.
Baudelaire said, “You know how I feel about this photography. Let the tourists use it to ogle the pyramids or the Louvre, let the geologists capture fossils, the excrement of the ancients; but don’t touch art. Leave that to the painters.”
Louis said, “I won’t have this argument again. I’m willing to pay you a finder’s fee. A hundred francs if you find me the right woman.”
Baudelaire looked down at the list, then chased a sip of coffee with a swig of absinthe. He said, “Have you established some criteria? The world’s last naked woman captured with a camera—that’s quite momentous.”
“Yes, I’m aware.” Louis ran his hands along the edge of the table.
The young counter-girl arrived with a plate of hard-boiled eggs and herring, and a bowl of bouillon. They watched her as she laid out cutlery, a wisp of tawny hair hanging down from her bonnet.
“What is it you want in a nude?” Baudelaire said loudly. The counter-girl smiled, then blushed and wiped her hands down her apron. She fled to a nearby table. “She’s new here,” Baudelaire added.
Louis cracked an egg on the side of the plate and began to unpeel it. “She must have grace and youth.”
“Yes.”
“The curvature of the neck must be gentle, perhaps a slight sway in her back.”
“I concur.”
“A vitality in her cheeks.”
“You’ve done some work in this area,” Baudelaire said, suddenly delighted.
“Neither too noble nor too common-looking. She must carry herself between airs and humility.”
“A shopgirl with fiery green eyes.”
“Full and crimson lips.”
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