Isobel had made the cravat for Louis as a kind of dress-up, for when he was a duke out in the briar. Louis had spent the morning tying and untying the cravat. He found its style and color impossibly elegant. Louis stared at his father boldly and said, “Either that or he’ll give me your job.”
His father was riled by this comment. Rising from an ottoman, flushed with anger, Monsieur Daguerre said, “I will see you both this evening.” He pecked his prim wife—a woman of devout churchgoing and sunbonnets—and walked off through the glade. Louis ran up to his bedroom, ripped off the cravat, and watched his father from the window as he pinch-walked towards the mansion. Hope you step in cow shit.
There was also an attempt to rein in Louis’s artistic sensibility with catechism classes. This was not because his parents were called to God—his mother prayed with the same domestic vigilance she employed when baking bread, and his father held the matter of God to be a meddlesome affair—rather, it was because Catholicism was seen as a bridge back to a time of superior discipline and manners. Before the revolution had topsy-turvied the nation’s mind and soul, young men and women knew the sacraments, and church was a forum for vetting another family’s respectability. How much could be determined by the polish and gleam of a man’s Sunday shoes or the hem of a lady’s skirt! Now the country was awash in eclecticism and revolutionary zeal, and boys like Louis were becoming indolent and doe-eyed. So Louis began a weekly routine of catechism classes under the supervision of a seminary student from Orléans. Together they studied the lives of the saints, the stations of the cross, the cardinal sins, the infallibility of the pope, the nature of purgatory and limbo. But what Louis absorbed from the scriptures and the asides of the hair-collared seminarian only intensified his fascination with art. Louis remembered the Bible stories as panoramas—the exodus from Egypt a stretch of pumice-colored sand under a high-blue sky; the parting of the Red Sea like two walls of fire; the saints in the desert with their forlorn faces upturned, their eyes made luminous by faith. Catechism only convinced Louis that the world existed to be rendered.
Summer afternoons, whenever they could escape their respective households, Isobel and Louis played out their pantomime of love. Isobel, rose-crowned, pale against the heather, sat motionless for Louis as he sketched her with charcoal. She sat, a chain of poppies about her splayed skirt, and looked off at hills blued by distance. He studied the slope of her neck, the triangulation of chin, elbow, and ankle. When he felt bold, he put the flowers in her hair himself, tucking blossoms into the crossweave of brown and blond. They discovered new backdrops for his sketches—limestone ruins, the shell of an old carbine—each giving occasion for new intimacy in the portrait. Louis was riveted by the gentle line of her bared shoulders, by the sight of her thin-boned feet swaddled in rye grass.
Louis also served as a kind of model for Isobel. He was her patient. Under a hollowed-out den of willow boughs, Isobel kept her apothecary. She lined a rock shelf with tinctures and herbal remedies and sat Louis down on a tree stump to inquire of his health. He was instructed to invent various maladies for which Isobel would concoct medicinal blends. “Night sweats, followed by vomiting in the mornings,” he might say. Or “I have itchy eyes and feet.” Or “I dream about horses in the grove.” She would administer an examination that was based on various modalities she had studied: she’d learned how to take a pulse according to Vedic tradition; she ran her hand over his spine and felt for engorged glands; she asked homeopathic questions about whether his throat itched when he sneezed and if his morning urine burned on the way out. Louis lay on the ground, his shirt open to her organ probes, and lied with all the seriousness of art. “A little burning, but not too much. The most dreadful headache whenever Father enters a room.” She did not laugh, but sometimes her hands gave in to nondiagnostic touch. At first Louis thought he was imagining it—that slow, undulating finger at his spine, or the light caress following a circumnavigation of his stomach. He saw his own body, the sallow skin, the bony chest, in the broadness of daylight. He became self-conscious and she seemed to sense it, moving to the remedy shelf to take down a jar of pressed pomegranates or silica powder.
They swam together in the cold spring behind the fields. She wore a petticoat and he a pair of cotton trousers. Isobel eased herself in among the lilies and floated on her back, her hair fanning out across the light-grained surface. She stared up through the branchwork of willow and elm, listening to her breath and taking her pulse from within. Louis dived for thrown coins and collected rocks. There were long stretches of silence. Isobel sloughed her skin with river sand and washed her hair with lilac. Louis came upon a monarch butterfly on a leaf platform and studied the geometry of its wings. Then something would quicken one to the other, a particularly fragile plant or insect, and they would find themselves squatting on the bank entranced by one of nature’s curios. Louis looked at her body when she wasn’t watching—the summered hairs on her arms, the whites of her fingernails, the wet-cloth rise of her chest. And Isobel looked at Louis when he dashed off in pursuit of a glistening pebble or when he shimmied up a tree trunk for wild apples. She looked at the mystery of a boy’s sinewy back and shoulders, at his knuckles and wrists, at the flats of his stomach. Then they returned to their dark houses and Louis wrote her love letters in which he compared her to a swan. She pretended she never read them and he never asked. She lay in her bed in the servant quarters and drank minted tea and laughed to herself that she had fallen for a fourteen-year-old boy when she needed to be finding a husband.
One day Louis took his father’s horse—an old gelding that came with an off-kilter trot and a hunting saddle—and he rode out into the countryside with Isobel snug behind him. Louis had been given a new set of watercolors from a bourgeois uncle and he wanted to make a portrait of Isobel in a new setting. It was mid-autumn; the sky was oyster, the fields straw. The leaves were turning from claret to gold. The gris meunier grapes had been harvested and the stems pruned, leaving long varicose lines of stem and stock. Louis knew from his father that the technique of pruning the miller’s gray vine had been discovered by the monks of Marmoutier centuries ago. It happened one season when their donkeys ate a harvest down to the ground. The next year the grapes rebounded to produce the best wine to date. Louis told this story as they rode, calling back to Isobel over his shoulder.
“So we owe the delicacy of our wine to an ass?” she said, laughing.
He could feel her laughter on his neck. He nudged the gelding into a loping trot. Isobel had no choice but to hold him tighter.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“To find the perfect place for a portrait.”
They trotted on. Louis had imagined they could ride out to one of the medieval castles or to an old abbey. He pictured Isobel on a rampart, her prone figure beside the mossy capstones. But they kept riding and it was getting late. They had to stop and water the horse where a vineyard led down to the Loire. There were cliffs adjacent to the river. They stood and waited for the horse to finish drinking. Isobel looked down at the river. They were abruptly at a loss for conversation. Louis noticed an opening in the chalk bluffs and realized that the vineyard kept a cellar in the cliff face.
“Look,” he said. “That’s where they mature the wine.”
“Let’s go see,” Isobel said.
“I don’t care to be shot by some drunken vintner.”
“Don’t be such a coward. Let’s go see,” she said.
Louis quietly tied his father’s horse to a fence paling and walked in front of her, leading the way. He began repeating wine lore he’d heard from his father—that if the weather was still hot in September, they had to harvest the grapes at night, that there were winepresses powered by windmills that could crush a man, that the Germans had discovered ice wine one year when the grapes froze. Isobel found this folk litany tiresome. She caught up to him just shy of the cellar entrance and said, “And tell me, Monsieur Vin, was this year a good vintage?”
“
The grapes this year are too sweet. They’re calling it a year for the ladies.”
“Well, not all ladies like their grapes sweet. I prefer mine bitter, wild, and still on the vine.” She pushed in front of him and went inside the cellar. Louis followed.
Inside was more a system of quarries and galleries than a cellar. There were skylights chiseled into the facade, and these gave enough illumination to make out the winemaking apparatus. They walked between several winepresses and into a racking area. Against one chalk wall were open barrels of residue, the excess pressings destined for pickling vinegar or the Loire. The smell was bitter and tannic; the vague scent of oak softened it as they walked into the fermenting area. Hundreds of green bottles were inserted into the augered wall.
“Let’s drink a bottle,” Isobel said.
The light was fading and Louis couldn’t make out her face. “If we get caught, we’ll be done for.”
“So cautious,” she said. There was the hint of a test in her voice.
“Fine. Pick a bottle.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “The gentleman chooses the wine.”
“And what does the lady do? Get planked?”
Isobel walked up and down the aisle of wine bottles. Louis came behind her and pulled a bottle from above his head. He dusted it off and held it in front of a narrow band of light coming from above. It was from 1785, from before the revolution.
“Oh my Lord,” said Isobel, taking it in her hands.
“We can’t,” said Louis.
“I’ll kiss you if you open it,” she said.
He wanted to see her face, but all he could make out were the whites of her eyes. He felt his blood pushing into his temples and his mouth becoming briny. Clearing his throat, he reached into his back pocket and retrieved a cheese knife he carried for the purpose of sharpening his sketching charcoal. He dug around the cork and, after almost cutting his finger, managed to push it down into the bottle.
“Hardly the Right Bank,” said Isobel. She took the bottle from him and took a long drink. Louis did the same. The world had been reduced to the threat and promise of a tannic kiss—he imagined their mouths brimming and heavy with wine. They passed the bottle back and forth until it was half gone. Then Isobel said, “If you’re going to kiss me, then go ahead.”
An elaborate silence.
“I want to see you if I do,” he said.
“No,” she said. “Here or nowhere.”
“But we’re hiding in—”
She took his face, a face that was smaller than her own, and brought her mouth to his in the darkness. Here was the winey cup of his mouth, the feel of his jawbone set against her fingertips. She would regret this later, but only in the brassy aura of a twilight hangover. For now she took her fill of him, drank him down like spring water, and pictured, in the darkness, an older and stouter version of Louis. She pictured him with a mustache and brass buttons. She was kissing the man he would become and yet here were his hands all about her—pressing into her bodice, spanning the small of her back. Roused, Louis clamored for her in the dark. And Isobel felt her body undulate almost uncontrollably towards him; she was a virgin and this was a rehearsal for the wifely arts. This was practice, she told herself, a preparation for a future husband. She stopped kissing him when she inadvertently placed her hand behind his head and realized she was still several inches taller than he was. She took his hand and led him, stunned and silent, outside. It was now dusk; the river held a trace of daylight. Louis watched Isobel move towards the horse and thought abstractly about the portrait he’d wanted to paint of her. She stood waiting to hoist herself onto the saddle—her mouth slightly scalded by the kiss, her eyes darkened, her hair caught up in a halo of river light. Louis knew these to be effects of water and twilight, but he couldn’t help feeling he’d found a moment of perfection—Isobel captured in her sulky bloom.
They rode home in silence. Something was different now in Louis. An insistence flared up in his chest. He spotted, through the woods, the yellowed windows of hunting lodges and the candle lamp from a bridge keep. He heard the low, jovial chiding of Parisian horsemen paying a river toll. Men were out in the night, making their way amid the cry of night fowl. Today he’d kissed a woman. He wanted to yell that as he passed the men on the bridge. He was a part of them now.
Fourteen, beardless, acting on the basis of one inebriate kiss, Louis proposed marriage to Isobel not long after. He planned it down to the last detail, choosing an hour by the brook when the day-lilies turned west. He dressed in the topaz cravat and his church-suit herringbone and donned his beaver-skin hat for good measure, because several times Isobel had said the hat made him look like a shepherd of the Pyrénées. Louis mistook this for flattery. So there he stood, an hour before Isobel’s appointed time of arrival, rearranging the decorative aspects of their little den. He treated it like a drawing room, aligning willow branches as if they were drapes, laying out polished stones like Venetian chocolates, combing the sandy bank with a broom of sticks to ensure she would have a soft place to receive his proposal. He floated linden blossoms on the water and coaxed a turtle to stay on a particular rock by spreading out slices of apple. By the time Isobel arrived, the little alcove had a monastic fragrance and serenity.
Isobel took in the arranged scene and her face grew white. She was immediately aware of the turn things had taken. The countless leaves of paper on which Louis compared her to doves and dahlias, swans and river idols, the hapless drunken kiss inside the wine quarry—these were so many articles of evidence in support of this terrifying and humiliating moment. She looked around for him in the ferny shadows. He stood, hands on hips, looking down from an island of granite in the brook with a glazed and maniacal love in his eyes.
“Isobel,” he said loudly, “I have something to ask you.”
“Please don’t, Louis.” She took off her shoes and came towards him, her bare feet pale in the chill water.
Louis hitched up his pants and ran his sweating hands down his rump. “I have made it known to you that I have every intention of fulfilling our destiny together. I don’t think I need to list my assets and talents. I come from an honest, clerkship family who will no doubt become property owners within the next generation. I am smart. I am also a good swimmer, which you know to be true.” He looked down at his hands. “Someday I will be a famous artist. I’d like you to be my wife. We’ll marry when I’m sixteen. If you say yes, I will write to your father.”
Isobel had moved out into deeper water, standing in front of his igneous pulpit drenched up to her thighs. Her maid’s skirt floated about her, raised and darkened by the water. The linden blossoms spun in small, tight circles and occasionally ran into her legs. Louis could see that she was crying, her face down, her fingertips gliding across the surface of the brook.
“You’re supposed to be sitting on the little beach,” he said.
She ignored him and came closer and wrapped her arms around his legs. She kept her face down but squeezed with a ferocity he would not forget. She thought of him as a doe she’d found out in the woods, an animal brought into her custody. She loved him fiercely and there was no denying that. But she wanted to lease the boy from the world as a friend and then buy him when he became a man. The kiss had confirmed that. Some time ago she had decided on the one unspoken rule of their ambiguous love—do not ask me to decide what you are to me, for that will ruin everything—and now he had violated it. Now he was a child in love with a woman, a boy trying to learn the anthems of men.
“Why did you have to do this to our friendship?” she said.
He looked at her with a dark and pure anger. “I do not wish to be friends,” he said.
“And I do not wish to be the wife of a child.”
The plainness of it struck him. He’d wanted to believe that those had been tears of surrender and that her embrace was an act of compliance. He looked over at the turtle sunning itself on the mossy rocks, idling its head from side to side. A long silence unfolded. The river
weeds bent with the pull of the brook.
“Say something, Louis, or we will both suffocate.”
Louis stood up from the rock and looked down at her. The rage pulled at his mouth, making it thin and tight. “I seem to have made a mistake,” he said. “I thought you could see it. But look at you, you’re just a maid standing in her uniform, drenched up to her cheap underwear.”
He turned and leaped off the rock and began wading through the stream. He dashed up the small bank and ran out into the open. Isobel watched him disappear across the glade.
The marriage proposal lived in the air between them; they kept the hurt rubbed and silent as polished brass. The weeks dragged on and the silence plagued them both. They lived, half dazed and preoccupied, in each other’s troubled thoughts. She dropped vases and dinner plates. He stubbed his toe on the stairs that led to his bedroom and misplaced his magnifying glasses every other day. Louis would retreat whenever he saw Isobel out on the grounds. He replayed those moments in the ferny den and saw himself as a fool, a circus dog groveling in the dirt. The images of that afternoon paralyzed him with bitterness; every detail was a humiliation. As for Isobel, the guilt and sorrow lingered in the months that followed—she felt it at the edges of everything she did. An accidental reminder could come in the form of a flower arrangement with linden blossoms or a glass of water resting on a table. All at once she would see that scalded look in his eyes and feel tears brimming.
The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre Page 4
