The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre

by Dominic Smith

  “She seems to be the only dead girl in the room.” Louis folded the drawing and placed it in his coat packet. He turned for the hallway. From behind he heard the sound of Frederic wheeling a cart into the exhibition room. He kept walking, eyes down, because he did not want to see Frederic heft the girl’s body like an animal haunch. The night watchman was smoking out on the front stoop when Louis opened the main doors. They stood there for a moment, neither of them speaking. The sun was coming up behind the tenements. They watched a wine barge pull slowly up the river.

  Louis went down the stairs and made his way along the bank. The apprentices were nowhere to be found. He took the picture out one more time to look at it. Something in the defiant face and the upturned chin reminded him of Isobel. She was lost to him after all, as good as dead. He allowed her image to settle over him. He remembered her thin-boned feet and pictured them crushing grapes in some far-off vineyard. Her hands, her feet, these were objects in the world, no different than hinges on a door, but they seemed to him out of reach and utterly mysterious. He walked through the bustle of a Paris morning, imagining her feet stained muscatel. He watched the faces of passersby, looking for a smile to brim or a whistle to purse a set of lips, something to rally him back to the living.

  When Louis arrived back at the theater, the boys were lined up in front of the main stage. The venerable Ignace Degotti, who kept a small apartment above the apprentice dormitory, was pacing before them in a silk bathrobe, his hands butterflying behind his back. As Louis entered, Degotti and the boys turned to face him.

  “Ah, our illustrious rapin has returned for breakfast,” Degotti said. He continued to pad across the floor in his leather slippers, head down, his shock of white hair ablaze under the houselights. “Please line up with the rest of the boys, Monsieur Daguerre.”

  “Yes, sir,” Louis said, falling into line.

  Marius scowled down the row of boys, but Louis refused to make eye contact.

  Degotti folded his arms, addressing Louis but looking at the floor. “Our head apprentice has told me that you went out last night without permission and that the entire class of apprentices went out in search of you. Is that correct?”

  Louis hesitated. Marius and the other boys stared straight out at the balcony.

  “I had an appointment to take a portrait, and this was the only time it could be done.”

  “I see,” said Degotti. “You do realize, my country friend, that Paris is a city with millions of people and that half of those are pickpockets and murderers and the other half are whores and common thugs. Did it occur to you that going out in the small hours of the night might have been, what, a little unwise?”

  Louis shrugged.

  Degotti nodded slowly, his fingers forming a church steeple in front of his lips. “I’d like you boys to start your chores immediately. There will be no returning to bed, and if I catch any of you napping, you’ll scrub the pigeon shit off the rooftop.”

  The boys began to file out of the theater, Louis among them.

  “Monsieur Daguerre, you can come to my study,” Degotti said.

  Louis stopped. A few of the boys patted him on the back as they walked by. Whatever the test had been, Louis had passed it. Degotti went out into the hallway and Louis followed.

  Degotti’s study was a rummage of books and canvas at the top of a flight of stairs. It was filled with artifacts from a life of artistic pilgrimage—lapis lazuli and gold-leaf etchings from Spain, jade figurines from the Pacific, African tribal masks—but all these objects teetered against the walls or rose amid a pile of ink drawings splayed across his desk. Degotti sat in an ancient leather chair and gestured for Louis to sit down. The only other place to sit was an ottoman that was half concealed by scrolls of tracing paper. Louis perched on the edge of it.

  “I’d like to see the portrait so special that it brought all of our apprentices out into the Paris night,” Degotti said.

  Louis felt for the portrait in his coat pocket and slowly brought it out. He felt an odd and brief moment of betrayal, as if some secret he and the drowned girl had shared was about to be violated. He handed it to Degotti. The master painter took out his half-rim spectacles and held the portrait by the window. The sun had risen above the rooftops, and Louis could see the outline of the girl through the back of the paper. Degotti held the picture at different angles—flattened, then broadside—before resting it on his desk.

  “Who is this girl?” he asked, still looking at the drawing.

  “Dead, sir. A drowned girl at the morgue. She was quite beaten, but I didn’t want to show so many of the bruises. She had one gash, for example, on the side of her head.”

  Degotti squinted. “The place where the neck meets the shoulders is wrong. When a head is tilted back like that, the neck is broadened. Also, the feet look too small in proportion to the hands.”

  “I tried to draw what was before me.”

  “No, you drew what you wanted to see,” said Degotti. “You tried to make a dead girl appear beautiful.” He looked at his fingernails.

  “I thought she deserved to look beautiful,” Louis said.

  “Are you sure the dead want our flattery? Look at this.” Degotti picked up the portrait and pointed at it. “The cheeks, the eyes, the way her mouth is poised, the way you allowed a shadow across her stomach and breasts to give her some modesty…the angles and the light, although flattering, are not possible.”

  “I took some license,” Louis said.

  “However, I have to admit it’s fairly remarkable. You managed to find something that was still alive in her.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Who said that was a compliment?” Degotti put his hands into the pockets of his bathrobe. “Do you know what a scenic painter does?”

  “Paints the sets for dramas,” Louis said.

  “Sometimes what we paint is the last thing Paris sees before she goes to sleep for the night, before people go to their dreams. But we don’t paint just for the sake of an arresting image—we must serve the drama. We must be able to paint the sea exactly as it appears during a storm or as somebody who is dying might remember it. We follow a vision larger than our own. I was asked once to paint a portrait of the pope in the Vatican. My instruction was to capture only that which was godly and stern. The portrait looked nothing like the man, but the Vatican paid me twice what I asked for.”

  “I see.” But Louis had no idea what the point of the story was.

  “Every artist must have the technique to first capture what he sees, then the vision to capture what he doesn’t see. And you seem to want to skip the first stage.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Louis.

  “No, you’re not. There’s arrogance in this kind of technique, a hunger.” Degotti cut his pale eyes across the desk at Louis. The old Italian had a habit of avoiding eye contact; he spoke to an undefined and shifting space before him. “Now,” he continued, “as to your punishment. It’s clear you need to be reined in, or soon you’ll be painting angels and wood nymphs when we ask for villagers and peasants. Each morning you’ll get up at four and start your day in the mixing room. You’ll be our master paint mixer and brush washer. When you can mix anything that I ask for and its hue is perfect, then we’ll consider that part of your apprenticeship to be over. You won’t paint a single inch of a set until you can provide the most distinguished palette in all of Paris.”

  “I didn’t join the theater to mix paint,” Louis said, holding back the note of anger he felt gathering in his voice.

  Degotti shifted his hands in his lap. “Take your portrait and go join the other boys.”

  Louis stood and picked the portrait off the table. When he went out into the hallway, the apprentices were gathered at the foot of the stairs—all of them but Marius. Louis was holding the portrait in front of him, and one of the boys called for him to show it to them. Halfway down the stairs, Louis turned the picture to face them and they all looked at it in silence. When he reached the bottom, he d
elivered the portrait for closer inspection. The apprentices—teenagers from Provence and Burgundy, boys waiting to cross the threshold into manhood—stared at the delicately wrought flesh and bone of a drowned whore, and not one of them could think of anything funny or crude to say.

  Light was different in Paris. Around Orléans it was green-tinged and full of lucerne haze, or it was saffron-hued from the flower and spice harvests, and these had the effect of softening the edges of things. The hills near Orléans were washed out by crop shimmer and distance; they stood perennially out of focus. Farmers thought they had myopia. But here, in the city, the light was hard-edged; it refracted off a million windows, sharpened by glazier’s sand—a yellowy-white powder from the riverbanks of the North. It was absorbed by masonry and alleys of brickwork. Paris light was complex and variable; it traveled in vectors, condensing here, refracting there, whitened by the aqueous mirror of the Seine, taking on greens and blues and reds in summer. As Louis took his walks in the spring, he tried to memorize the light and the effect it had on color.

  At midday he saw the sunny splendor of the Tuileries Gardens, where men sat in lawn chairs, reading newspapers and magazines rented from a kiosk. He saw the diamond white of the glasshouses, where a three-hundred-year-old orange tree still hung with fruit. The shopwindows in this district were full of delftware—a cross between pewter and bone in broad daylight—and slabs of Belgian chocolate that stood as solid and brown as the earth itself.

  He learned how to mix all these colors in the cold and damp of the theater basement. In the hours before dawn, he worked the vats of oils and tints, re-creating the strange metallic blue of the Seine in winter, or the umber of the tenements after rain. He learned to mix test swabs on the back of his hands, to spit in a batch of paint that was too clumpy, how to keep Degotti’s camelhair brushes in spirits for just the right amount of time. He did this for more than a year. When he took his walks after breakfast, his hands were calloused and there were specks of cobalt and sienna under his fingernails. He watched the day form in the shopfronts, in the avenues of glass and stone. Each day, between his paint-mixing duties and his house chores, he had several hours of leisure. He concealed this fact from the other boys and complained of his aching shoulders at breakfast. Marius—smelling of wood glue and tobacco—would nod smugly at these complaints and devise new chores for the rapin. Once a month Marius told the boys to line up their shoes around Louis’s bed and instructed Louis to clean them. Louis could imagine hurling the shoes out the window, but instead, he cleaned them each in turn, smearing a rag in shoeblack and buffing them to a shine. He wouldn’t let Marius unhinge him.

  Degotti allowed this to happen, partly out of a belief that one should conceal talent from the young. Although he knew that Louis could make a startling vermilion from mercuric sulfide, that he could probably make the finest Moroccan turquoise in all of Paris, he was waiting for the moment when the arrogance he’d seen in the portrait of the dead girl would bring Louis storming out of the basement. He would not allow the boy to paint a set until Louis demanded it.

  In his hours of leisure, Louis began preparing for life as a gentleman. He took dance lessons in a studio in Montmartre. He sat alone in the bohemian cafés where actors and poets gathered. He made lists of writers and philosophers as he followed the thread of an argument. On a hilltop behind the barrens, he read the letters of Saint Augustine, the allegories of Plato. On the last Sunday of each month, he wrote to his parents. These letters were full of long passages about the cafés and the river spilling light. He trained his handwriting to be beautiful—a convent nun’s hand, the hooped and fluid cursive of feminine devoutness. Louis’s father wrote back with an economy of style and ink, chronicling the weather in Orléans and speculating that Louis had fallen in with gypsies and vagabonds. No, Louis wrote back, I am preparing for a great and serious life in the theater.

  And he felt that life gathering in small gestures and moments. In the smile that rushed across a woman’s face as he bade her good morning, in the streets brimming with exotic fruits and flowers. One autumn evening, he spoke to a table of serious-minded poets at his regular café. They stared at him. He was seventeen, tall and lean, with a dozen specks of paint on his hands and clothes, and they took him for a seasoned artist from the neighborhood. They had been discussing the idea of absolute truth. Louis said, “There are infinite shades of blue, but there is only one that is the primary blue. Surely truth is no different.” At first several of the men scoffed and glowered at their mugs of beer, but later, Louis was brought a glass of wine compliments of the poets. He drank it and felt something light in his chest. He thanked them on the way out and they called him little brother. The rest of the day he dreamed of his future self—a young man in a vest, a painter and philosopher, someone who could dance a waltz and a jig, who could tell a joke and recommend a restaurant. But each time this excitement for a vibrant future ended with an ache for Isobel. He saw an image of Isobel on a daybed, curtains aflutter in a sun-dappled room. He saw a wooden house in the country, children playing in an orchard. And he wondered who had fathered these phantom children.

  More than anything, he wanted to be rid of the penance of these images. Midway through his apprenticeship, still mixing paint in the basement before dawn, Louis decided to seek out the company of women. He did not want love; he wanted distraction. Initially, he frequented venues where he was bound to find young women with lamentable scruples. He went to provincial hall gatherings and market soirees on the fringes of Paris, to cabarets in the Carousel District. He did not approach the most beautiful of the young women he encountered—that rare class of beauty which had found its way into a shopkeeper’s family like an embezzled diamond. Instead, he circumnavigated the venue and looked for a flaw that drew him in: a narrow gap between the teeth, a widow’s peak pointing down like an index finger, excessively thin lips, distended elbows, pigeon toes. These traits aroused his curiosity; he thought they might be signposts, as if a woman with gapped teeth might be prone to self-doubt and pity, as if thin lips might betray a poverty of the spirit. He wanted to solve the riddle of imperfection.

  He kissed a girl named Matilde—a sea merchant’s daughter with a mealy mouth—in the halo of a gas lamp outside the Institute for Deaf-Mutes in the second arrondissement. In the cheery lantern light of a dance hall, he held hands with Claire, a nut vendor’s daughter. The girl would not kiss him and talked incessantly about the wood pigeons she fed slivered almonds each morning. Then came Rose and Audrey, two English cousins visiting their spinster great-aunt on the Right Bank.

  Degotti, in an attempt to jump-start Louis’s ascent, had arranged for him to give drawing lessons to the girls. Louis was delighted to augment his apprenticeship with a few extra francs. He borrowed better clothes and showed up at the spinster’s mansion with his camelhair brushes and inks and charcoals, a purple cravat ablaze around his neck like some tropical bird. He was shown into the large drawing room, where a white spitz slept on a large divan. The walls were mounted with bear heads and oil paintings of British admiralty. Madame Treadwell, the spinster aunt, came into the room a short time later.

  “I imagine you are the art tutor,” she said in superb French. She was tall for a woman and still rather young to live under the weight of the title spinster. She sat opposite Louis, petting the white dog on the divan. She spoke with her eyes down, as if to the cur. “There will be no drawing of nudes, do you hear me? I am rather interested in perspective and should like my nieces to learn the structural aspects of drawing. I assume you are versed in all the foundations?” She looked over at Louis as if in afterthought.

  “Yes,” said Louis, “all the basic principles.” The truth was he drew and painted mostly on instinct.

  Madame Treadwell allowed herself a smile. She took out a cigarette and smoked it while divulging stories of her childhood days in Africa, mentioning three times that her father hunted leopards and bushmen in the same afternoon. Louis realized, after an hour, that he was
being held captive in the room. Several times she got up and took a drink of brandy at the side cabinet. She stood at the window, waving smoke from her hand as she gestured. There was something sibylline in her carriage and bearing, a glazed and diaphanous look to her eyes, as if she might be plagued by communiqués from the dead. After some time she leaned close to Louis and said, “You may go and conduct your first lesson, monsieur.”

  The butler—undoubtedly British, to judge from his jowls and melancholic eyes—reappeared and showed Louis out into a courtyard where two girls sat before easels like repairing aristocrats in a Swiss valley.

  “We’d all but given up on you,” said the shorter one. Her French was atrocious; she sounded nauseated.

  “I was being interviewed,” said Louis.

  “Seduced, more like it, if I know anything about my aunt,” said the taller girl. She placed her accents on the wrong vowels.

  They introduced themselves. The taller one—a seventeen-year-old girl with a mole on the side of her neck—was Audrey. The shorter girl was Rose, a pale-faced delight, the skin around her neck and shoulders so white it was luminous. She sat beneath an epic sunhat.

  “What are you going to teach us?” asked Audrey.

  “Perspective,” said Louis.

  “I should think the French know very little about that subject,” said Rose. Audrey offered a well-timed giggle.

  Louis wanted the fifteen francs he’d been promised and refused to be baited. “Well, ladies, let us draw the confines of this courtyard, using all the rules of proportion. First we will draw a grid on our blank paper,” he said flatly. The young ladies reluctantly turned to their easels.

  This appointment continued for the better part of six months and led to a three-part addition to Louis’s romantic experience. Audrey told him to kiss her one day when Rose had taken ill with a cough. Audrey said she was going to kiss a Frenchman before she went back to England, and it might as well be him. Louis complied. It was a dry-mouthed, brief affair that sent Audrey into the house chuffed. Two weeks later, Rose said she knew of the illicit kiss and threatened to tell the aunt if he did not repeat the favor with her. Louis obliged with a kiss, and he would have gladly unfolded many more across the veiny riverbed of her neck. But she stopped him, walked towards the house, then returned and put her hand inside his trousers to the count of ten.