The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre

by Dominic Smith

  “I’m tremendously proud of you,” Isobel said. “You still seem like a boy to me but you’re not. Look at you.”

  “I’m nineteen,” Louis said. He felt a moment of condescension approaching. He warded it off by taking her hand and helping her across a loosened plank. “There’s so much to catch up on,” he said.

  “Tell me everything first. You must be outrageously talented. I saw the set. My God, Louis, people were mesmerized by the temples.”

  Louis found her speech affected. “People are easily mesmerized,” he said.

  “If you’re going to be falsely modest, I’ll leave right now. You must be very happy.”

  “Thrilled,” he admitted.

  They stood on the apex of the Pont Neuf and looked down at the Seine. It was dark with field runoff, and at the base of the bridge there were eddies of flotsam—twigs of straw and wine corks in a brownish foam. He would kiss her. That thought hummed at the base of his spine. These three years had led to this, to kissing Isobel by the Pont Neuf after midnight. She leaned against the railing of the bridge.

  “I’ve thought a great deal about you these last few years,” she said.

  “Me as well. I tried not to, but you’ve cursed my mind.”

  “That estate near Orléans was enchanted, even if he was enslaving us. Sometimes I think liberty is a waste of time.”

  “Is that why you’re getting married?”

  His question lived in the air for a long time. She pulled her shawl around her and turned her back on the river. “I met Gerard after working in a vineyard. They were horrible people, I can’t tell you. Mean-spirited. They made me scrub the vats until my hands bled. I went to Lyons penniless and tried to get employment as a governess. Gerard is a widower and his wife had died from consumption. He placed an advertisement looking for a maid to cook and clean.”

  Louis could not look at her. “And now you’re betrothed and attending the opera together. I suppose you found exactly what you always wanted. A man with more money than talent. Someone to let you dabble in plants and herbs. Voltaire said people do not change.”

  “Voltaire also said weakness on both sides is the motto of all quarrels.”

  “Good. We’ve both read Voltaire.” Louis began to walk towards Notre Dame and Isobel followed. He walked fast enough that she had to stride out to keep up.

  “Are you jealous?” she called from half a pace behind.

  Louis stopped dead and turned to her. “I have loved you since I was twelve.” He waited for a man with a cane to pass by. “These last three years you’ve walked the stage of my mind every night. Do we choose these things? Or do they choose us?”

  “Voltaire again?”

  “No, that was me.”

  She was softened now. Was she glad he was jealous? He walked on, holding this moment of power like a ball of wax in his pocket. A single kiss and then adieu to this boyhood fantasy; the kiss would be the bridge to his new life. They walked more or less side by side and found themselves in the forecourt of the grand cathedral.

  “Where were you the day Napoleon was crowned?” Louis asked.

  “I don’t know. Cleaning grape stains from my feet.”

  “I was right here, watching. On that very stone wall over there.”

  They walked towards the building. Louis looked directly up at the gallery and said, “Does the bell ringer live inside?”

  “Surely he must,” said Isobel.

  “Ringing the bell four times an hour—that must be quite a life. But in its own way, it has beauty. His tones are heard all over the city. He wakes a million men for work every morning. Yet none of us knows his name or what he looks like.”

  “You’re still prone to philosophy and grand ideas,” she said.

  “And you’re still prone to pragmatism and a lack of feeling.”

  She shrugged as if this had been expected. They stood in front of the main portal, where Louis had watched Napoleon linger in his honeybee-and-silver-starred cape. He had gone in a general and come out an emperor. In the precalculated seconds leading up to the kiss, Louis did nothing exceptional. There was no sweetness of words, because in fact this kiss would be a protest, a lament for everything past. He simply stared at her lips. He could see the porcelain edge of her teeth, the tumescent tremor in her lips that indicated either imminent tears or the contemplation of a new topic of conversation. Louis closed his eyes, thought of Napoleon crowning himself, and moved his mouth to hers. There was soft on softness. There was the slight wetness of her mouth and then the surprise of her hand on his neck cloth. They stood kissing in the mouth of the cathedral, inside a Gothic dragon’s open jaw. It was not one kiss but a multitude. A dozen repetitions, each slightly different. The corner of her mouth, the piece of flesh beneath her nose, the bottom lip in isolation. To Louis she tasted exactly the way he had sewn into fantasy—orange rinds and the saline of tears. Louis was the one to stop first, and he would remember this as one of his proudest moments, that he had the dignity to cease kissing a betrothed woman. He was entitled to this kiss. They looked at each other.

  He said, “That first kiss in the wine cellar didn’t count. We were drunk.”

  “You’ve looked at me funny ever since I used to bathe you and put cold presses on your head. You were a sickly boy.”

  “You used to poison me so that you could be my sickmaid.”

  She laughed. She held her arm at that strange angle again. This time Louis thought of an injured bird.

  “We won’t talk about this kiss anymore,” she said.

  “No.”

  “We’ll walk some more, and then you’ll take me back to my hotel.”

  “And then you’ll get married to that old banker and have children and find excuses to come to my operas. I’ll leave signals in the sets for you. If you see a red lamp, that will mean I haven’t stopped loving you.”

  “Louis.”

  “I can’t help it.”

  “But look at us.”

  “I will never ask you if you love me, because somewhere you decided that you didn’t. I suggest somebody inform your mouth of that decision.”

  “You stole that kiss from me.”

  “Like you stole the first one. And if I did, the vault was wide open.”

  “Life is more complicated than you know.”

  “Life is more mysterious than you know.”

  She tightened her shawl and walked across the forecourt. A light rain had begun to fall and Isobel held her face up to it. Louis came beside her.

  “The pagan peasant girl is still in there,” Louis said.

  “I suppose you realize our country no longer believes in those divisions.”

  “Yes, and that’s why we see the beggars wearing purple capes.”

  “I suppose you believe in the monarchy,” she said.

  “I believe in the system that gets in the way the least. I want to paint and apply my art and be left alone.”

  “You will never be left alone.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because you’re going to be famous.”

  Louis knew this to be true; he saw it sometimes in the shop-windows when his reflection passed, the glimmer of who he was becoming.

  “So you could marry me and I’ll have enough money to keep you. I’ll build you a hothouse for your herbs.”

  “Is that a proposal?”

  “More of a prophecy.”

  “I could never marry you, Louis.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because I am carrying Gerard’s child.”

  Louis stopped walking. He looked at her stomach. He found himself squinting. Isobel put a thumb to his cheek and wiped away a tear. He felt a burning in his stomach. He looked down at the ground, then back at her stomach. There was no bulge yet, but he imagined a child burrowed within, perhaps no bigger or more elaborate than a walnut. He could not stand here any longer. His life was a lie.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I have to leave. Can you—A carriage.
Over there, they will take you.”

  She tried to grab his wrist, though this would come to him later, along with the kiss and the walk and the drizzle. What he wondered was how fast he could run. He took off running, thud-ding across the humpbacked bridges and bounding up the alleyways, striking his fists out at the air and allowing his breath to get loud, taking the steps between garrets two at a time. His chest heaved and a foot began to come through one of his shoes. He leaned against a railing and threw his shoes into the river and ran on barefoot, a part of his mind contemplating his shoes as two sloops making their way to the Mediterranean, another part feeling the macadam and gravel on his feet. He sprinted towards the theater and arrived in the dormitory to a pile of shoes on his bed—a farewell present from Marius.

  He walked, calmly now, to Marius’s suspended golden gondola. The head apprentice sat up, somehow waiting for what had been coming. Louis positioned himself beneath the gondola, a hand on each side, and lifted it free of the metal hooks. The other boys were awake now, sitting up in their beds, as Louis carried Marius in his boat around the room. The boys cheered, drowning out Marius’s demands and threats. They came alive, boys who were too young to fight and bear arms at the Bastille or in the battlements now had their moment; the revolution was here; it was everywhere; it arrived one morning at breakfast, it slipped into your room at night and asked you to pummel those in charge, to defy your station, to assert your will. Louis dropped the gondola. It splintered and buckled on the hard floor. Marius fell out and covered his head out of reflex. The boys descended, fists flying. Somebody covered Marius’s mouth to stop him from yelling. Louis punched through the darkness like the rest of them.

  Nine

  At Louis’s insistence, Baudelaire sent a party invitation to a Le Fournier at 72 Rue de l’École. Louis had dispatched a messenger to the address in question, and the boy returned with two facts that seemed hopeful: the mailbox read Madame Le Fournier, and in the window of said dwelling sat all manner of strange-looking plants. Louis imagined valerian, pulsatilla, arnica. He added a single line at the end of the printed invitation:An old friend looks forward to your company. He wrote it in his monastic cursive, included several rose petals inside the envelope, and finished it with sealing wax. If this Le Fournier turned out to be a different person, there was still the possibility of finding his nude model in the party crowd. He had, by now, captured the relatively easy items on his doomsday list—a boulevard, a flower, the sun and moon—and was ready for the more challenging images. It was possible that the bohemian gathering would yield both an apocalyptic nude and Isobel Le Fournier.

  That the bohemians knew how to throw a party was widely known, and word of a night of excess had spread to the outer stands of the city, passing on the lips of cabdrivers and costumiers and tobacconists, all of whom stood to gain from the pomp of the dandies. A thousand people turned out this Saturday night in May 1847. For the previous three years, since his parents had cut him off from his capital, Baudelaire had lived in an abandoned mansion with a dozen other artists on the Boulevard de Budé. They had divided the house according to bohemian schools: Poet’s Corner on the top floor, complete with rooftop terrace; the Painters and Philosophers on the floor below, each with separate washrooms; and the Aesthetes on the ground floor, men who spent their last francs on musk perfume and Neapolitan shoes.

  The mansion stood at the end of a street built too close to the cabaret district. As the century wore on, the boulevard’s inhabitants—coffee importers, ship owners, the thin-boned relations of nobility—had sold their mansions on the cheap or abandoned them for their provincial châteaux. Baudelaire and his friends called this district the “graveyard of the ancien régime.” The houses were built in a high-Gothic style, hewn from stone, tre-foils over the lead-framed windows. A procession of gargoyles lined out the pointed gables and the ramparts. To Louis, the mansions looked like mausoleums, the mortuary houses of a people who worshipped conceited and spiteful gods—sinister half-men, crazed chimeras, griffins with one claw dipped over the roof ledges like cats drinking from an abyss.

  Louis walked through the urine stench and the gas-lit aura of the cabaret streets, then emerged into corridors of warehouses, and finally passed into the long row of squatter-mansions. He was thrust along by the sheer momentum of the crowd. There were so many people in front of Baudelaire’s mansion that Louis thought briefly about returning home. In his greatcoat and Louis XIII hat, he felt like an aging diplomat come to call on a man of the people. He looked into people’s faces, categorized them according to age and gender. When he entered the front gates, he felt a moment of pity. Here are the masses shuffling through one last hurrah. He looked at their feet and spotted a woman’s exquisite leather shoes, boneblack and glossed under a sconce. He felt a tear brim. Lately, he was easily brought to tears—a by-product of slow mercury poisoning. A country glee or a well-made shoe could set him off. It was a kind of nostalgia for everyday objects and sentiments.

  He collected himself. First thing was to find Isobel. She was in her early sixties, perhaps long-haired, grace-figured, and there would be a note of discord in her appearance, a subtle sign of rebellion. Perhaps a startling set of gloves, a mismatched stole. Since the passageways of the mansion were congested, and because Louis feared an eruption of his cough in close quarters, he set off through the side gardens. An old orangery had been plundered with rocks, and thistle crested through the shattered glass. Stone cherubs were poised to urinate into dry fountain beds. Some of them had been decapitated, perhaps a gesture of the 1793 revolutionaries when they had barricaded and looted these streets. Louis tried to appear friendly to passersby while scanning for an elderly woman. He walked towards a strange and lilting music. A band of mysterious figures went by: a man in a red Basque beret was walking a lobster with a piece of twine; a tall fellow dressed in a polar-bear costume carried his bear head by his side, its great maw agape at his armpit. They were talking about the animals of Asia, about birds with curved beaks and tigers that could outrun a steam locomotive. The strange ether of other people’s lives.

  Behind the mansion, under trees on the verge of blossom, was a makeshift carnival. Musclemen lifted stone garden angels above their heads. Acrobats climbed ropes tethered to tree branches. Stunt-makers in tights juggled fire sticks. Rockets exploded from an unknown source. People cheered and hooted from the balconies of the decaying house. Louis looked through the crowd. He felt old and dull. He was sure the crowd saw him as a costumeless old sod, somebody’s father or flatulent uncle, a man who wandered into other people’s parties for the brandy and the company, with scraps of paper in his pockets. A skinny man on wooden stilts towered over him. Louis moved close to a stone pillar for safety. He watched a blind man dressed as a clown play a street organ, its hurdy-gurdy drone like some heretical witch call. Are we already dead and these are hell’s prefects?

  He wanted to go home, take a glass of rum and seltzer before bed, and dream of that day in 1802 when he kissed Isobel amid the tannic air of the wine quarry. Perhaps the memory was better than meeting the woman transposed four decades. Just as he thought this, he saw Baudelaire, dressed in a silk frock coat, running across the lawn towards him. The poet was holding a ball of nougat in his outstretched hand as if the fate of the Christian world lay in its circumference. Here comes hell’s warden with the latchkeys.

  “The thief of light himself,” said Baudelaire, bending into a regency bow.

  “Hello.”

  “What do you think of the party?”

  “You’ve outdone yourselves,” said Louis, attempting levity.

  “Our function is to tickle the boundaries of taste. I have a surprise for you.” Baudelaire nibbled at the nougat.

  “Dare I ask?” asked Louis.

  “I think I may have found her.”

  “Madame Le Fournier?”

  “No. Your nude. She claims to be a cabaret dancer, but I have a feeling she’s a lioness, if you receive my implication.”

&n
bsp; “What? Is she a prostitute?” Louis could feel his head perspiring under his hat.

  “Don’t be so vulgar. She’s an aspiring consort.”

  Louis heard the high whistle of a launched rocket and instinctively ducked. He raised his voice. “I didn’t bring my camera, and nighttime is not so suitable, so we best leave it for now.”

  “I don’t imagine she’ll undress for you in my garden. But I can introduce you. She’s at the back, in the garden pavilion. We agreed on a hundred francs, correct?”

  “If she’s the one,” said Louis. He fought a very real desire to flee. He couldn’t focus on the idea of the nude portrait with the possibility of Isobel at the party. “But I need to find my friend,” he said, gesturing towards the teeming crowd.

  “Come meet the nude and have a drink. I’ll send word around with the Aesthetes to find Le Fournier. You must press on with your portrait list. France needs you, Louis.” Baudelaire looked at his friend and smiled. He took a strange pride in knowing that he was the only one privy to Daguerre the national hero and Daguerre the doomsday oracle.

  Baudelaire took Louis by the coat sleeve and led him out towards the darkened corners of the garden. The garden pavilion was an apparition of glass and sandstone. Two jasper columns guarded the entranceway. Above the half-walls were sheets of glass fitted between sections of welded iron, and these sheets formed a transparent peaked roof. As Louis entered behind Baudelaire, he smelled something earthy and fungal. It reminded him of when he was a boy on the estate and he had sometimes watched the farmhands rooting for truffles with sack-bellied sows, the pink and bristling necks of the pigs bulging from short catches of rope. That smell, something like dead leaves, was enough to make the pigs bite and shriek. Louis followed Baudelaire down a passageway containing espaliers of miniature fruit trees, and up ahead there came murmuring voices, lost and speculative in a meandering conversation. A series of candles was alight in various positions around the open area. Two women and a gentleman sat in armchairs, watching a small fire pit. A noxious ribbon of smoke spiraled up towards an open glass ceiling panel.