The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre

by Dominic Smith

“I don’t think I can eat.” Baudelaire clasped his hands together and rested his chin for a moment on his fingertips. He looked out the window into the street, where a group of mourners was walking home from a funeral. “I would reconsider the apple on your list,” he said.

  “How so?”

  “The apple is not exotic enough. Apple is plain, like the English. The Frenchman wants something darker and juicier. The end of the world, it seems to me, is a peculiarly French idea.”

  Louis looked down at the list and tapped his lip with his index finger. “What would you think of a pear?”

  “You know I am a poet,” Baudelaire said, “and having said that, I should say that my sensibility is one of integration. I seek coherence in the cockerel cries and the street dung. I would choose your fruit the same way you choose your woman. Clearly, the queen of the fruit empire is the greengage plum—strange, juicy, sinister.”

  “But the apple represents the original sin, the fall from grace.”

  “Yes, and the plum represents seduction and lust,” said Baudelaire.

  “I knew you were the right person to consult.”

  “I have opinions about flowers, too.”

  “Tell me.”

  “‘Aroused flowers burn with the desire to outdo the sky’s azure by the energy of their colors, and the heat, turning scents visible, seems to make them rise to the stars like smoke.’”

  “Very nice.”

  “My point is, there needs to be some symmetry among your flower, your woman, and your fruit. I suggest wild roses. There it is, the divine trinity: wild roses, greengage plums, and green-eyed shopgirls.”

  A brief silence settled over the table.

  “The sun and moon were not my ideas,” Louis said. “François Arago, a friend at the observatory, has asked me to make some plates of them.” The fact that an esteemed man of science such as Arago wanted the sun and moon to be cataloged further suggested to Louis that human enterprise was winding down.

  “Seems fine. Everyone likes the sun and the moon.” Baudelaire took several mouthfuls of his bouillon. “And who is this Isobel Le Fournier?”

  “A woman from the past.”

  “Lost love and all that—how tiresome.”

  Louis took a bite of his egg and refused Baudelaire the eye contact he wanted. Isobel Le Fournier was his first and only substantial love; she had occupied his thoughts and longings for forty-four years, six months, and eleven days—ever since that day she had kissed him in a wine cave outside of Orléans.

  Baudelaire said, “Don’t look so glum. After we eat, we’ll go walking in the Latin Quarter in search of our Madonna. We’ll trawl the streets. And I’ll think of some names as well. I must know some nudes.”

  People stared at Baudelaire as he tapped out with a Malacca cane, his bald head tilted, shouldering into a headwind. Wooden barrels belched tar smoke, men shoveled horse manure into potholes, flanks of meat hung marbled and sinister in the darkened doorways of butcher shops. But what Louis noticed was a cabaret festooned in yellow paper lanterns and bunting, an outdoor bookstall towering with hundreds of green and vermilion clothbound volumes. The mercury poisoning was beginning to filter out the unsightly. He was growing blind to the squalor of the dying days of King Louis-Philippe’s reign. He didn’t see the plank-board alleys in the Carousel District, the dark rows of bird-seller shacks, the mud-daub shanties of the tooth pullers and the dog clippers. He saw only the markets full of honey and tulle, ladies in poplin sitting for open-air concerts under a Nile-blue sky. The world, it seemed to Louis Daguerre, was drowning in plenty.

  As they walked through the serpentine streets of Montmartre, Louis mentally auditioned the women as nudes—maidens in two-wheeled charabancs, ladies in bonnets and cashmere shawls, wives and daughters displaying the subtle inflections of the body beneath calico and merino.

  Baudelaire said, “See anything you like? How about that Botticelli in the blue brougham?”

  Louis reeled and looked at the compact carriage. Sitting high was a woman with pinned raven hair and the raised chin of nobility. She looked as if she were being borne aloft, floating above the hubbub of the street.

  “A little haughty,” said Louis.

  Baudelaire stopped beside a fruit and vegetable cart. “Do you have any plums?” he asked the vendor.

  “No plums yet this year,” replied the man. “But I have some oranges from Spain.”

  Baudelaire’s face filled with infinite regret. Louis looked down the street and noticed a woman stepping across the flagstone pavement in front of a restaurant. She was wearing a merino dress and carrying an apple-green parasol at her side. She sat on a wooden bench in front of a fountain, impatiently waiting for her driver to fetch her.

  “Why are there so many queens in the Latin Quarter today?” Louis asked.

  “The charm of the uncivilized,” said Baudelaire. He took Louis’s arm and led him towards the bench. “Good day, mademoiselle, may we impinge upon you for a moment? You see, my friend and I—surely you know him—the esteemed inventor of photography, Monsieur Louis Daguerre, well, he has been commissioned by the king to find a lady of refinement to pose for a new series of daguerreotypes.”

  “How splendid,” the lady said, her eyes darting over the approaching traffic for her man and carriage.

  “May we sit awhile?” Baudelaire asked.

  Louis bowed and said, “Madame, you must forgive my colleague’s conduct, he is a little brash in these matters. I’m sorry if we’ve troubled you.” The woman smiled curtly, then stood and walked down the street. Her green parasol flashed open and shielded the back of her neck. Louis watched her disappear into the throng of people, her parasol floating through the multitudes like an apple bobbing downstream.

  “Friendly,” said Baudelaire.

  “You lack all manners.”

  They sat on the bench and Baudelaire took out his pipe and lit it. He stared into the bowl of the pipe, at the pulsing orange eye of the tobacco plug. “Did you smell our mademoiselle?”

  “I certainly did not.”

  “A woodland herbage, I assure you.”

  “God help our country,” said Louis. He dusted his sleeves. “Come, we’re going to execute the science of this. We’ll walk the grid, down to Palais Bourbon and east to the Pont Neuf.”

  “Yes,” said Baudelaire, raising his malacca cane like a sword, “we will map the city in the name of nudity.”

  Louis stood and clicked his heels together in a sudden display of officiousness. There was something regimental about him—the groomed mustache, the pomade-heavy wedge of gray hair, the Napoleonic jacket with epaulets. At fifty-nine he looked and dressed like a retired admiral. But he had a painter’s eyes: Antwerp blue and prone to fits of moisture and reflection.

  They walked up a small hill, Baudelaire now in front, his amber-tipped pipe clenched between his teeth. He waved at a passerby and called, “We are on a mission of the apocalypse.”

  Louis caught his reflection in a bakery shopwindow and noticed that his mouth was ajar, as if in profound thirst. He pursed his lips, then settled his mouth as his figure floated across the aqueous frontage of glass. But the seizure was already coming. The sun flared and whitened. Rivulets of sweat formed along his spine. His cravat and neck cloth restricted his breathing, and the mercury cough ascended from his groin, producing silver flashes in his peripheral vision. The taste of green copper in his mouth. He leaned against the brickwork of a building and was aware of Baudelaire standing beside him. Then the noise of the street bounded towards him, the clop and clatter of the wagons, the shriek of the vendors’ cart horses. He doubled over, hands in spasm, and fell to the street. He felt the dankness of the macadam against his cheek. A small crowd ringed him in and he could see their glaucous faces, their eyes narrowed. In the midst of the seizure, a woman stood preening her gloves. He was aware of everything—his own pulse, his blood breaking its banks, the kettledrum of the street, this lady’s chamois gloves. He could feel his head banging
against the pavement, then Baudelaire’s hand and then the slowing, the release of pressure in his jaw and rib cage, his teeth coming apart, air being drawn back into his lungs. He lay there for some time, panting. The crowd dispersed.

  “Are you all right?” asked Baudelaire.

  “Yes,” said Louis, sitting up.

  A deep calm always followed the seizures. He felt hollowed out, capable of great insight. He took in the street again, became aware of the light. It was now dusk and the objects of the afternoon were slipping away; one would position the camera obscura from a loft window to catch the diffusion of day. Nearby, a woman’s face floated inside a window. Her skin a smoky pearl, jade-green eyes, lips that curved with the grace of violin hips. Louis stood in front of the deserted wineshop and looked within—a cavernous interior of empty shelves. A dusty crate stood in the middle of a floor covered with editions of La Gazette de France.

  “I saw her,” Louis said.

  “Where? In here?”

  Louis nodded. He placed a hand against the windowpane and became aware of his own reflection looking back at him. The entire shopfront was a photographic plate, and here was his own specter trapped inside the waterfilm of glass.

  “I don’t feel very well,” Louis said.

  “Let’s get a cab. I’ll take you home.”

  “She’s out there somewhere,” Louis said. “The woman I once loved.”

  “Every woman we once loved is out there alongside the women we are yet to love. They exchange tips about how to ruin us.” Baudelaire stepped into the street and flagged down a cab. As he did so, he composed the first line of a new poem: “Twilight agitates madmen.”

  As they rode through the Paris dusk, Louis leaned his head against the leather seat back. Baudelaire was talking to the driver about socialist causes and the rumblings of insurrection in the garrets. The air was cut with the smell of paraffin and rotting oysters. Several times Louis had to cough and spit in the road, and he prayed that nobody would recognize him. When the cab pulled up in front of Louis’s apartment, Baudelaire told the driver to wait, and he helped his friend down from the carriage. Together they climbed the long flight of stairs that led to Louis’s rooftop studio. Louis gripped the railing, careful not to stumble. At the landing, he handed Baudelaire the key from his waistcoat and they went inside.

  “Let’s put you to bed,” Baudelaire said as they moved through the darkened interior. The main room was cluttered—tripods, zinc cameras, copper plates, tall glass jars filled with briny-looking solutions, salts heaped into earthenware bowls. Baudelaire found the air decidedly pickled. He helped Louis into the bedroom, where the walls were covered in daguerreotypes, portraits and landscapes framed under glass. Baudelaire set Louis back on the cotton mattress and removed his shoes. “We’re having a party at my house in a few weeks. It’s going to be very elaborate,” Baudelaire said. “There will be schools of minnow.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Louis, his eyes closed.

  “Women fluttering by the curtains. I’ve thought of some nudes for your project.”

  “Excellent.”

  Baudelaire patted Louis on the shoulder. “Should I pour you some brandy?”

  “No, thank you. I’ll be asleep by the time you get to the bottom of the stairs.”

  “The nervous attacks are getting worse,” Baudelaire said. “You should see a doctor.”

  “With their invoice pads and leeches—no, thank you.”

  “Take care of yourself,” said Baudelaire, turning to leave.

  Louis heard the door close at the bottom of the stairs. His chest was on fire, a tightness that made him pinch-eyed. He reached for the brandy decanter and drank a small swig straight from the glass lip, spilling some on his bedsheet. It loosened his breathing enough that he could relax and wait for sleep to settle over him. The bedroom window was open and he heard the noises of the street below—the submerged sounds of Paris descending into night, the shrill bell that announced showtime to the actors at a nearby theater, the street mongers calling their wares out against the brickwork alleys. Louis felt more of the deep calm. He took off his clothes and got under the swansdown quilt. He looked up at his daguerreotypes and saw that they were more eerie than beautiful. Portraits of bankers with waxed mustaches, their faces grim, old brasserie maids with henna cheeks, a sea merchant with sad tea-brown eyes, a riverside picnic where a wooden boat rippled in a wave of amber and the sun appeared as a pale ball of wax. The portraits appeared to him now as images of the dead—the shipwrecked, the drowned, the hangdog.

  Two

  Louis Daguerre fell in love with women and light on the same day. This was in 1800, when he was twelve and living outside of Orléans. His father was head clerk on an estate that belonged to a distant cousin of the now executed Louis XVI; the estate had somehow been spared from the purging of the Reign of Terror. The hundred hectares seemed immune to change, a protectorate of the old aristocracy. The père ruled with a benevolent hand; he gave out cloth bags of sugared almonds at Christmas and lent money to those in his employ when they were sick. And while Paris abolished, for a time, the use of monsieur and madame in place of citoyen and citoyenne; while it gave up the Christian calendar—making March Wind, May Flowers, July Heat, etc.—all in the name of Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality, the estate brimmed with antiquity and servitude. For the most part, the peasants and clerks here regarded the revolution as an excess of the city. They had never seen a bread riot or a barricade. They served the royal bloodline the same way their forebears had done for six generations—with that odd mixture of pride and complaint that is the hallmark of a career servant. Only they kept it secret from the revolution.

  Louis Daguerre’s family lived, at this time, in a cottage that stood at the edge of a glade, surrounded on three sides by fields and with a view to the château. Louis had a bedroom in the attic, and from his window he spent hours watching teams of horses plow the fields back to russet, or the gardeners prune the apricot trees, or the maids go out with their woven baskets to pick gillyflowers and foxgloves. From this vantage point he imagined he was the duke of this estate, and when he was sick, which was often as a child, he stood in his bedclothes and quietly directed the bucolic scene: Now, plowman, turn your gig to the west; maiden, pick those flowers at the end of the rhododendron tunnel. If the gardeners came into the orchard to remove a dead apricot tree with handsaws and axes, as they sometimes did, Louis closed his curtains and refused to watch.

  One day in August, after being sick for a week with a fever, Louis was convalescing in his rooftop bedroom. A maid who had a way with herbs had been sent over from the main house as a goodwill gesture on the part of the old aristocrat. The girl was all of fifteen, though her servant’s papers declared her two years older. Louis thought her pretty in a defiant sort of way. Her caramel hair spilled loosely from a bow, and her eyes—a vivid green—seemed to suggest scrutiny, even scorn. She came into Louis’s room with head presses and broth, and each time she closed the window and drew the curtains. As she did so, she spoke to Louis about her belief in the healing properties of camphor baths, valerian teas, brown sugar dissolved in warm water. Then she paused at the end of his bed and said, with complete authority, that those with fevers should not endure sunlight.

  “Best keep the window and curtains closed,” she added gravely. Her voice was nasal, from the South, an accent Louis already knew to be several stations beneath him.

  Louis waited for her to leave the room, then crossed to the window and opened the curtains. They continued this shuttlecock match of wills until his fever broke and Louis demanded that she leave the curtains open. “I’m better now. Stop closing the curtains or I’ll tell my father that you’ve disobeyed my instructions.”

  She cinched her hands behind her back, crossed to the window, and pulled the curtains shut in one swift movement. The room dimmed and Louis noticed a small tear in the middle of one of the calico curtains. A cone of August light came through the tear and cast a series of
shapes onto the ceiling. Louis felt he was at the bottom of a pond looking up at the brocaded surface. The maid walked slowly through the half-light and sat down beside Louis. She took up a piece of torn fabric and dipped it into a metal bowl filled with lavender-scented water. Louis closed his eyes, trying to indicate that he wanted to be rid of her, that he no longer needed a nurse, but she simply placed the head press over his eyelids. The water dripped down into his ears, his mouth, and the blossomy smell was drawn into his lungs. He was rendered complaintless.

  “What if I don’t want you to get well?” she said. “When the fever goes, I’ll be back in the laundry room and at table.”

  Her voice floated through the lavender darkness.

  “Nobody can be sick forever,” Louis said.

  “A little longer. Wednesday is bed linens.”

  “Fine, Isobel. I will get better on Thursday.”

  Louis felt her cheek against his forehead as she checked his temperature. For a moment the sound of her breathing was indistinguishable from his own; he could feel a strand of her hair grazing his neck. After a while, she quickly kissed him on the forehead, mumbled a merci bien, and was gone. Louis took off the head press and sat up in bed. The light was still dancing on the ceiling. He lay back down to watch it. Then, slowly, he took the soaked cloth and put it beneath his eiderdown, under his nightclothes. He wanted to cool his blood, an effect he knew from swimming in springtime brooks when the chilled water would banish his testicles like mussels to their shells. But the blossomed water energized his skin, and soon he was recalling Isobel at the window, the sunlight silhouetting her thighs, her breasts through the gossamer of her tunic…or her face in the blue aura of the spirit lamp when she came to tend him in the middle of the night. Louis looked up at the ceiling, at the flickering of dusk, and let out a truncated sigh. He felt the fever come back in a burst and shot a hand under the bedsheet. His hand emerged drenched and salty to the smell. He began a prayer to Saint Ouen, the patron of his father’s dinnertime toasts, guardian of hallowed vineyards, in hopes of a celestial blessing. Bless the soil with your goodwill. Give me the patience of a grape ripening on the vine. But it was soon interrupted by Isobel coming back into the room.