“Charles, the ladies,” said Louis in a curt tone.
Baudelaire looked up from the table, his eyes softened, and said, “I am sorry.”
“You should apologize to your guest,” said Louis.
Baudelaire nodded gravely and stood. He walked and sat next to the sulking astronomer on the divan. Eggshell rubbed a drop of wine into the side of her neck.
Pigeon leaned close to Louis and said, “His head is not so terribly large. I’ve seen bigger. Poor man.” He looked at her. The drug had flushed her cheeks and brought dimples into her smile, added conspiracy to her tone. She said, “Perhaps Baudelaire’s point is merely an aesthetic one.”
“You don’t sound like a cabaret dancer,” Louis said, regretting it instantly.
“Because I have opinions and speak proper French?”
“I meant no offense.”
Pigeon cut another sliver of sausage and put it in her mouth. Louis looked briefly at his fob watch: it was past eleven. Pigeon stood and crossed to a window in the rear of the room. He followed her. They came to a double window that overlooked the rooftop terrace and the Paris night. Great blue clouds plodded slowly over a silhouette of weather-vaned rooftops and church steeples. The stars and the gas lamps of theaterland pinholed the grayness.
“Those clouds are like the great thoughts of the century, waiting to be had,” said Louis. He heard his own voice from a distance.
Pigeon said, “My hands are humming.” She loosened the latches and opened the window. A light breeze, cut with almond blossom, came in. “It makes me want the countryside,” she said.
“I grew up in the country,” said Louis.
“Lovely, isn’t it?” It was a question that wanted no response. She closed her eyes as the light wind blew in over the terrace. There were a number of poets out there, sitting in Gothic armchairs, drinking from goblets. Louis could hear a sporadic conversation about Shelley and Keats. He looked out at the cindery darkness, at the array of chimney cowls and ivy-laden turrets. The scene was maritime, the mastheads and riggings of a flotilla. He was about to offer this insight to Pigeon—whose eyes were still closed—when he heard someone approach. He turned and saw the doctor walking towards them with his leather book.
Louis said, “Madame, I have some rather delicate business to discuss with you.”
Her head now swaying slightly from side to side, Pigeon said, “I’ll do it. Baudelaire told me. A hundred francs for an afternoon.”
Louis didn’t know what to say. Finally, he said, “I will be in communication.” Isobel was downstairs; he was certain of it.
“Baudelaire knows how to find me,” Pigeon said matter-offactly. “I’ve done it before. Modeling, that is.”
The doctor was upon them, leafing through pages, dipping the nib of his pen into a little ink bottle he carried in one hand. “How are things progressing over here?” he asked.
“I feel quite wonderful,” said Pigeon.
“And you, sir?”
Louis turned on one heel. “Doctor, I have to take my leave. I hate to mention this, should it invalidate your research, but the dosage seems to have had little effect on me. Perhaps there is a question of potency.” He liked the way potency sounded; it was the conferring tone of a fellow of science. Surely the doctor and he fished in the same waters, believed in the secret destinies of certain chemicals, in the ability of nature to provide poison, antidote, and cure. Louis pulled curtly at his waistcoat.
The doctor said plainly, “Sir, you have a soup spoon in your lapel.”
Louis looked down at the spoon, impeached. The doctor returned to his side cabinet.
“Good evening, Pigeon,” said Louis.
“Oh, yes, a delight,” she said, roused from the armada of rooftops. “By the way, my real name is Chloe. Chloe Le Fournier.”
Coincidence increases as the day grows near, the web tightening.
Then,
Isobel is not in this city. Perhaps she is dead.
Pigeon pushed off the sill and stood erect. “Do you take such offense at my real name? Chloe isn’t so bad, is it?”
“No, no. I’m sorry.” He would simply abandon the search. Foolishness had led him to imagine he still occupied a place in Isobel’s mind. There might be a hundred Le Fourniers in France and another thousand in heaven and hell. Reunions could wait until the afterlife.
Then she said, “I’m from Lyons.”
A silence uncoiled through the domed room.
Louis fiddled with the brim of his hat. “And your parents are—” The tremor in his voice was absurd.
“My father died about five years ago. And I don’t speak to my mother. She is dead to me.”
“How so?”
“That is a long and complicated story, monsieur.”
“I see.” There was no way of asking for the mother’s first name without prying. Daguerre put his hat on his head, then, a second later, removed it. “What profession did your father engage in? I am merely curious. As you know, I am somewhat of an artist, and family histories take their place in my portraits.”
“Suddenly you’re all questions.”
“Yes, I apologize.”
“He was a banker.” She turned towards the window. Louis thought of how he would find another model, how this moment existed only for him and that no one could ever pinpoint the intersection of their lives if he turned and went out into the night. Louis stood still, aware of his tight-fitting shoes and the seam of his pants, the neck cloth pressing against his artery. He saw himself the way God might, from above and with affection; here was a man prone to pride and vanity, but with a profound belief in good works and progress. Surely I will be shown compassion.
“Is your mother happy?” he blurted.
“What?” She wheeled around.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s come over me.”
Pigeon blinked slowly, another wave of cannabis on its way out. “I haven’t spoken to my mother in five years. But no, I don’t think she is happy. How could she be?”
“Good night, Chloe,” Louis said.
“Don’t forget to arrange my portrait. Truth be told, I need the money.”
Louis turned and left her by the window. He walked towards the crushed-velvet doors. Baudelaire and the astronomer were staring up at the domed allegory. Baudelaire had his hand cradled around his amber-tipped pipe as he spoke. “This is my favorite part. You are seated and you are smoking and you think that you are sitting in your pipe and it is you that your pipe is smoking; it is yourself you exhale in the form of blue clouds.” The astronomer had a hand extended towards the ceiling, a finger pointing lithely at some shadowy nuance. Eggshell was lying on the Persian carpet beside them, tracing her fingers across the arabesque of worn thread. Louis did not say goodbye. As he opened the velvet doors, he heard Baudelaire say, “…the world loosens and everything sings. You feel a part of other men.” He walked out into the long hallway and descended the stairs to the second floor. The two teams of men were still hurling young boys between the floors of the mansion.
Ten
The kiss on the stoop of Notre Dame unburdened Louis, at least for a time. The certainty of Isobel with another man’s child sealed things off, divided his life into eras. And this was the era of finding fame. His painting took a turn. The memory of life on the glade, of Isobel, had given his cloud work and trees an impressionistic shimmer; now, with her banished, there was a kind of indignation, a sharp-edged realism.
A dozen years after his apprenticeship, Louis was the head designer for the second-largest theater in Paris. He lived behind the flower markets, in a terrace apartment. At work in his rooftop garden, he stretched bolts of canvas from post to wall, preferring the noonday sun to the perennial twilight of the theater. Deliverymen took his rolled canvases back to the stage. From his rooftop, he watched flower women carrying baskets of dahlias on their heads, barges hauling Montreuil peaches up the Seine. He watched gentlemen play backgammon in shaded courtyards. The city inspired h
im—the bustle of the boulevards, the way a winter dusk seemed to rise up out of the river and settle all at once over the shopfronts.
At the end of each day, he brought his canvases inside. His apartment was well lit but disheveled. It smelled of whitewash and turpentine. Rustic furniture rose out of a sea of tracing paper and canvas. The copper pans in the kitchen ruminated with purple and orange paint. He rarely cooked. But sometimes, especially at the end of a performance run at the theater, he invited his colleagues to his rooftop for a late supper.
One night in the summer of 1821, a crowd of actors, poets, philosophers, and painters arrived at his apartment well after midnight. They had all come from the final performance of a play that featured Louis’s most accomplished set—a panorama of Paris as a Roman outpost, from hilltop to river. In the spirit of the play, Louis was hosting a Roman feast.
He had transformed his terrace with a perimeter of lit sconces and garlands of cut flowers. There was a large canvas concealed against the half-wall that faced the markets and the street. Reclining chairs and divans were scattered around a long wooden table piled with food: wild figs, whole fish in garum, perfect rosettes of field greens. He didn’t cook so much as assemble food based on symmetry, color, and texture. He moved among his guests in a white toga and a head wreath, pouring wine. All night they called him Senator. Everyone had come from the theater via the taverns, and the talk was animated and speculative. The men spoke of politics, of Napoleon, who had died the previous month on the island of Saint Helena. “The British murdered him,” a poet declared, “I’m sure of it.” A clutch of women stood in the kitchen, debating whether actors or directors made better lovers. Louis came towards them, a smile brimming.
“Ladies, I feel a little slighted by this conversation. What about the painters of this world? Don’t we even figure a mention?”
“A man in a toga can’t be taken seriously,” one of them said.
A young actress from Amsterdam took him by the hand.
“Painters fall in with philosophers and poets—you are all too much within yourselves.”
“Nonsense,” said Louis, clenching her wrist. He turned to the others. “I’m sorry, but this woman will have to leave unless she agrees to take me as her lover…just to prove my point.”
The women laughed at this, their cheeks pink from the wine. The Dutch woman—a pale-eyed blonde in her twenties—said, “I don’t think it’s that easy, but if you’d like to paint me sometime, I’d be honored. Your talent is wasted on those beautiful scenes of Italian seacoast and crumbling Greek ruins.” Her eyes floated slowly above her wineglass. Louis thought of two tropical blue fish.
He brought her hand up to his face. “You would like me to paint you?”
“Yes,” she said.
Louis wheeled around, took a camelhair brush from a copper pan of orange paint, and dashed a heart on the back of her hand. The women applauded and the Dutch actress, her cheeks ablaze, looked down at her hand.
“That was terrible of me,” Louis said. “But I couldn’t resist seeing you in bright orange.”
The woman, trying to recompose herself, held up her hand and said, “You can wash this off now.”
“That would require some turpentine, which, unfortunately, is in my studio at the back of the apartment.”
“That sounds like a ploy,” she said.
Louis took her by the hand, and they walked down the hallway. She looked back at the other women and called, “I’m being conquered by Rome.” The women raised their glasses and went out onto the terrace. Louis opened the door to his studio and brought her inside. They stood against his drafting table, kissing. She knocked over a bottle of India ink with her painted hand. These kinds of exchanges were the extent of Louis’s romantic life. In the years since Madame Treadwell, whose stone-walled mansion he still passed, he’d never taken a lover for more than a month. These were typically women in transition or jaded about love—actresses from Prague and Budapest, girls from the garrets who’d been left behind. This woman from Amsterdam was certainly not auditioning for a husband: she took his hand now and placed it inside her dress. Louis kissed her neck and felt her body rise towards him; he was sure that they were about to make love on his drafting table. Then, as a volley of drunken laughter lifted from the terrace, Louis remembered that she was a terrible actress—an affected speaking style and a mannered set of gestures plagued her performances. He took his hand from her breast. “I fear they’re going to ask me to make one of my toasts out on the terrace. I should probably get back to my guests.”
She waited a moment before speaking. “What they say about painters is true, then.”
“I’m afraid so. We’re terrible at love.”
“Who said anything about love?” she said, adjusting her dress. “Incidentally, the front of your toga is covered in orange paint.”
He smiled, looking down. “I’m a disgrace to my profession.” He took her hand and wiped it gently with a cloth dipped in spirits. “Shall we see what debauchery is going on out there?”
“We were promised an orgy,” she said indignantly. “A Roman feast has to have an orgy.”
“Your night has been ruined,” he said, laughing. He took her arm and led her out into the hallway.
Out on the terrace, the guests were slumped on divans and reclining chairs, eating with their hands. A cloud of cigar smoke hovered above their heads. The talk was wild and studded with moments of song and raucous laughter. The crowd turned to look at Louis, and his toga received fresh mockery and delight. Louis sat with the poets, and the Dutch woman went to find her fellow actresses. A veteran actor, a decade beyond his prime, stood in a dinner jacket with a glass of champagne and delivered a monologue to nobody in particular. The speech was full of wild flourish and rising pitch. Louis watched him, wondering if there was still a voice inside the man’s head, however faintly, that said, Nobody is listening to me. Louis feared becoming irrelevant, discovering that he was a boorish man standing at a party with war stories and specks of paint on his cheap shoes.
When the sun rose behind the river, the mood at the party shifted. The diatribes petered out; the veteran actor fell asleep on an ottoman. Louis tapped a spoon on a wineglass and stood before his guests. Someone called, “Quiet, the senator is making his toast.”
Louis walked in front of his covered canvas. “First,” he said, removing his head wreath, “I want to thank you all for coming. And I also want to thank you for eight wonderful years. I think we have changed the way Paris views theater. I’ve never worked with such dedicated artists. Here’s to the theater!”
They all raised their glasses and drank.
“What’s this?” a scenic painter called. “A farewell speech?”
“Actually,” Louis said, his eyes on the wreath of laurel, “it is. I’ve decided to leave the company.”
There was silence for a moment. “What will you do?” asked the woman from Amsterdam, still a little miffed.
Louis looked up. “These last few years I have been experimenting with a new kind of painting. I plan to open a gallery.”
The guests murmured. Louis turned and removed the cover from the canvas. It was a replica of the street and market scene in front of his terrace. The shadows and pools of light had been painted to match this exact time of a summer’s day. Every color—the cobalt of the river, the dun brown of the marketplace in the dawn—seemed to match perfectly. The crowd moved towards the painting, then stood comparing it to what they saw on the other side of the wall.
“It’s quite marvelous,” a theater patroness said. “How did you do it?”
“The canvas is transparent calico, and I paint the shadow and the light on two different sides. The light shining behind it gives the effect.”
A man’s voice rose above the crowd. “The angles are all wrong,” he joked.
It was Degotti, padding along in his leather slippers, a cane at his side. Louis hadn’t seen him in several years and was amazed by how old he looked. The tw
o men embraced. Louis stared at him, unable to speak.
“Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friends?” Degotti said.
Louis turned back to the crowd. “Friends, this is Ignace Degotti, the father of scenic painting. I apprenticed with him when I first came to Paris.”
The guests smiled and nodded; they knew the name.
Degotti, now in his eighties and a little stooped, said, “Old men get up at this hour, and you people haven’t gone to bed yet.”
The crowd laughed.
Degotti turned and looked at the painting behind him. He touched it gently with his hand. “I don’t think anyone has painted like this before. I think we can expect great things from Louis Daguerre.”
“To Daguerre!” a man called.
Everyone raised their glasses and drank.
Louis looked at the painting and felt, for the first time, an almost painful sense of pride. It had taken him a full year to paint. He had mixed the colors to match a June dawn, preserving the exact tints of the cornices and the facades and the sky on the backs of envelopes. Using a camera obscura, he had painstakingly copied the shadow lines and the trapezoids of sunshine. There were a hundred shades of yellow and blue trapped inside the painting, a thousand inflections of daylight and shadow. Without knowing it, Louis Daguerre had tried to paint a photograph.
People drained their glasses of wine and champagne. The sun was high enough to make them squint and, taking this as their cue, the guests readied to leave. Louis saw them out, shaking hands, kissing cheeks. He stood with Degotti on the front stoop. The Italian wore his age like a stylish but outmoded hat; there was something formidable and sad about it. “Let me know when your gallery opens and I’ll be sure to attend,” Degotti said. “I don’t get out much these days but will make exceptions.”
“I’d be honored. Thank you for coming.”
“I’ve been meaning to drop in for years, and when I heard you were retiring from the theater, I couldn’t resist.”
“You mean people already knew?”
The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre Page 12
