The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre

by Dominic Smith

  Louis said, “Imagine it: the alabaster nude in front of the snow-tinged battlements.”

  Baudelaire considered this and looked at Pigeon.

  She shrugged. “Makes no difference to me.”

  Baudelaire said, “And what about my portrait? When will I be commissioned for the list?”

  “Please leave us,” said Louis, spreading the legs of his tripod.

  “I wouldn’t mind watching, to be honest.”

  Pigeon bit at her nails and gave the poet a stage scowl.

  Louis said, “I need my model’s undivided attention.”

  “Yes, I’m sure you do.” He winked at Pigeon.

  “Goodbye,” said Louis, looking off at the Paris rooftops.

  Baudelaire stood and slouched across the terrace. He looked at Pigeon and said, “My balls are frozen. One by Poe, the other by the fucking cold.”

  Pigeon slapped Baudelaire on the shoulder before he disappeared inside.

  Louis pulled from a cloth sack a satchel of hothouse tuberoses. There was a Dutch woman who kept a glasshouse on the Left Bank and used a system of mirrors, lamps, and skylights to grow veronica, roses, and carnations all year long for aristocratic families. King Louis-Philippe had once commissioned her to grow orchids in February. Louis handed the tuberoses to Pigeon.

  “Where did you get these?” she asked.

  “You’d be surprised what people do in the winter to stay sane.”

  “I know what soldiers do to pass the time,” she said.

  “Yes,” Louis said gravely.

  She walked towards the stone wall. Louis stretched out a bolt of red satin on the snowy terra-cotta of the rooftop and placed a number of tuberoses on the ground. He handed Pigeon several of the flowers.

  “Do you know how to make a crown?” he asked.

  Pigeon took them and began to weave a chain of stem and socket. “Mother taught me.”

  “She had a way with plants, no?”

  Pigeon nodded. “Our house was filled with plants.”

  “Herbs?”

  “Everything. She’d send off to London for seeds that came from the West Indies. We had a rubber plant in our garden.”

  “In Lyons?”

  “It died. Lots of her plants died. She didn’t care. She’d grow anything once.”

  “I see.”

  Louis rubbed a plate with carded cotton and inserted it into the back of the camera. With the snow and the wintry sun, it would have to be a long exposure.

  “This may take quite some time to expose. I’m sorry if it will be very cold. As a result, I have decided to pay you an extra fifty francs.”

  “No, you can’t.”

  “It will be fifteen minutes.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “Just the same, I am paying you more. There is a guild, you know, for nude models. I intend to comply with all their stipulations. A nude portrait in snowy weather is an automatic fifty percent increase.”

  “Stop teasing me. What am I to do?” she asked.

  “I was thinking you might recline on your side, with one hand holding your head. I will have the camera tilted up so that you are in the foreground and the skyline is in the background. The turrets and steeples will be behind your head.”

  “And my expression should be happy or sad? Indifferent, perhaps?”

  “Let’s say beckoning. Not seduction, exactly, but a welcoming look.”

  “Louis?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you find me beautiful?”

  Louis fumbled with the tourniquet screws at the back of the camera. “Why do you ask?”

  “I’m merely curious. You must be the only man in Paris who hasn’t made eyes at me.”

  “Well, I’m sure that in your line of work, you are surrounded by men.”

  “I don’t mean my customers. Just men on the street. They all look at me.”

  “I see.”

  “What do you see?” She dashed her arms out to her side in a dancer’s final pose.

  Louis looked down at his hands; there was an opiate tremor in his fingers. She was a blond-haired emissary in the winding down of humanity. “I see a child of God,” he said.

  Pigeon hesitated to take his comment seriously. Then she saw his eyes, the unflinching gas blue she imagined burned in all artists, and she knew that he was earnest.

  “Would you mind taking your position, Chloe?” said Louis. He made her real name sound like a rare and exotic bird.

  She removed her boots and walked barefoot across the dusting of snow. She stepped gingerly onto the red satin and removed her coat and dress.

  “I will take these from the frame,” said Louis, crossing to the pile of clothes without looking up. There was something doctor-and-patient about their portrait rituals. He did not look at her without the protection of the camera lens. She lay on her side and propped herself on one elbow. He stood behind the camera. The wind had subsided and the air glittered with snow.

  Louis craned up at the pale yellow sun, looked at his fob watch, then took a reading from a thermometer. Three degrees Celsius. “I will set the exposure for fifteen minutes. I will go inside and warm some coffee for after.”

  “I don’t mind if you stay.”

  “It will show in the portrait.”

  “How? You will be behind the camera.”

  “It will be there. Like the shadow of a hand on a marionette.” Louis held up his hand as a signal. “Are you ready?”

  “Yes. I think I’ll smile as a grimace from the cold.”

  He waited a moment, then opened the diaphragm. He imagined the meager sunrays burning into the plate, the falling snow reduced to a million droplets of iodine and mercury, the image unpeeling against the copper plate, the simultaneous bleaching and tanning that composed an image. Capturing beauty is more chemistry than art. He went inside and warmed the coffee.

  When they left Baudelaire’s mansion, Pigeon was shivering. Louis could hear the slight click of her teeth as they rode along in the carriage. He wrapped a blanket around her shoulders and apologized six times.

  She said, “I will jump from this carriage if you say sorry again.”

  “I think you mean that.”

  It had stopped snowing. Old ladies bundled out of doorways to make a dash for the bakeries.

  “May I take you somewhere to eat?” asked Louis.

  “You may. But I will buy my own dinner. With my artistic earnings, you understand?”

  “I support the rights of les citoyennes. You may buy my dinner, too, if you wish.”

  “I just might.”

  “Very good. I will eat nine courses and take brandy.”

  They pulled along the Montmartre streets, searching for a restaurant. A stream of carbines and carriages slowed up ahead, and they were forced to wait. From around the corner came a funeral procession, a frayed line of black coats and top hats. The casket rode on a wheeled flatbed, pallbearers trudging beside it. Pigeon stood on the box seat to get a better view. “I so love a funeral.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Come on, let’s join them.” She stepped down from the carriage into the slushy street.

  “It’s the most indecent thing I’ve ever heard of.”

  She looked up at him, riled by his indignation. “You don’t think the dead want a few extra admirers?”

  “I doubt they care.”

  “Trust me, they don’t mind. I have always loved a good funeral. Ever since I was a girl. By the look on your face, you must be very appalled.”

  “What about our dinner?”

  “A funeral parade is good for the appetite. We’ll follow them to the cemetery, then go eat.”

  “The devil himself.”

  “Perhaps the devil is a woman.”

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  She turned from him and said, “Bring your camera.”

  “Impossible.”

  “Bring it.”

  “Good God, lady. These people have lost a loved one.”

/>   She began walking in the direction of the procession. Louis could see the priest carrying a leather missal, a scarlet cloth around his neck. Only recently had the Catholics come back out of hiding after so many godless years under Napoleon. Louis tied his horses to a hitching post and covered his equipment with blankets. He stopped a few paces from the wagon, then returned and took out his small zinc camera obscura. It carried a prepared plate, and he sometimes used it as a study camera. He placed the camera under his coat and hurried to catch up to Pigeon.

  He fell in beside her, his eyes averting the huddle of family members at the rear of the procession.

  “What is it, precisely, that you like about a funeral march?” he asked in a low voice.

  “I feel an enormous peace settle over me.”

  “You are a very strange child.”

  “And you are a rather odd old man, if you must know. No one has worn a hat like that for fifty years.”

  Louis touched the rim of his hat.

  Pigeon said, “The trick is to look at the ground. That way they don’t notice you.”

  Louis looked down and assumed a dramatic bereft gait. “How is this?”

  Pigeon laughed. “Very good. You’re a natural showman.”

  “I’ve never been an actor, but when I was a young man, I threw elaborate dinner parties. I was the consummate host. I told stories and danced.”

  “You must have been quite a fellow.”

  “Indeed. The ladies swooned.” He felt windblown, light; the mercury was nowhere to be felt in his lungs.

  The procession ambled up a small hill. An old lady at the front lost her footing, and for a brief moment, everyone stopped and waited for her to regain composure. Her black veil blew a little in the breeze as she surveyed the short distance to the cemetery. Louis realized with a slight feeling of shame that she was the widow. She stood in front of the priest now at the vortex of a wide V and led the procession up the hill with a slow and careful plod.

  “Sometimes they have pastries afterward. Usually at the home of the widow or widower. Catholics send their dead off with butter cake.”

  “I see. You come for the cakes.”

  “Not entirely,” Pigeon said.

  “I imagine your father had a large funeral. A man of wide connection, was he not?”

  “My father went into a crypt with his grandfathers and uncles, all of them bankers. The family legend was that the crypt was full of Spanish gold. They buried themselves like pharaohs.”

  They passed onto the elm-lined gravel road of the cemetery. Louis looked around at the headstones and adjusted the zinc camera beneath his vest. “Were your parents happy in the beginning?”

  “I have always suspected that I was conceived by mistake. Later, when we moved and my mother started selling herbs and medicines, pregnant women would come to her in secret. They would stay in the carriage house, and she would slip out and take them dark green teas and broths. Sometimes, when Father was gone, I heard screams. She told me she helped women give their babies back to God. That’s how she spoke of it. We were very close, though. That was to our detriment in the end. She could not bear to let me marry the man I loved. Told me I should become a woman of substance and forget romance. He was a musician and a poet.”

  The funeral crowd now gathered around an open pit. The pallbearers lowered the coffin into the ground and the priest intoned Latin. Louis and Pigeon stood near the back, under an oak, and allowed the lilt of the priest’s words to rise without comment. A benediction, a scattering of dirt—to Louis a single death seemed such a trivial errand compared to what was coming. He pictured rivers spilling their banks, hillsides gouged and singed, horses and cattle dead in the fields. For now everything was stilled and waiting. It seemed possible to capture anything in the lens of the camera obscura, as if the world itself were frozen with a kind of mercury poise. Was the earth spinning slower, allowing time to slacken? He took the zinc camera from his coat. Without a tripod, he didn’t hold much hope for the clarity and brightness of the image, but he pressed the camera into his chest and steadied his arms. He braced with his elbows and quietly opened the diaphragm and let the funeral scene register for several minutes. The sky was cloudy, the light bleak. Everyone stood more or less motionless, hunched and cold around the grave pit. The widow wept into a damask cloth. A sturdy man, perhaps the brother of the dead, placed his greatcoat over her shoulders. Later, when Louis revealed this image, he would see the shimmer of these movements—the phantom traces of embraces and condolences—and, above the pit, a clear and luminous rectangle of space where nobody cried or otherwise moved and where, presumably, the dead man hovered to hear his own eulogy.

  The funeralgoers departed, and the gravediggers appeared in their dungarees and ale-colored hoods. Louis recalled that during the Reign of Terror, the executioners always received bread at their doors, but it had appeared upturned. He wondered if these men, clad in grime, their faces shadowy, did not receive some recognition from the living, perhaps a bowl of beef broth but with a crucifix of sorrel afloat. Louis, intrigued by the prospect of using a camera without a tripod, took Pigeon by the arm and walked towards the men.

  “You men want some wine?” Louis called. He prided himself on still being able to talk to stagehands and apprentices.

  “If you be that way inclined, we’ll take an entire barrel.” The two of them continued, shoveling the sodden earth as they guffawed.

  “I should be glad to bring you some wine and bread. But I have a small favor to ask.”

  They stopped and leaned against their shovels, waiting with glazed curiosity.

  “I would like to take a daguerreotype of you two.”

  “A what?” said the heavier man.

  Pigeon said, “He wants to make a picture of you.”

  “With paint, then?” said the thinner man.

  “No. I have an invention that will make the picture for me.”

  Some leaning on shovels, some gap-toothed skepticism. Louis realized these men had probably never read a newspaper in their lives. He produced the zinc camera and held it in front of him. The men visibly winced.

  “We won’t be captured with one of them things. Seen them out in the streets with what’s-all pride of rich folk so that they can look at dead people on their walls. Dead don’t want no pictures, no need for the living, neither. Take us in that contraption and we’ll be dead by morning. We be digging out our own graves.”

  Louis looked down at the men. Here we are in the Congo of Paris. In New York there were hundreds of portrait studios with his name embossed above the transom, yet here among some of his own countrymen, he was a heretic, his invention a thief of souls.

  “Good day, gentlemen,” said Louis.

  “Graveyard closes at dusk, and it’s a rule we intend to uphold. You and your daughter should on your way.”

  Pigeon smiled, took Louis by the arm, and led him towards the gravel road. “At least they didn’t say grandfather.”

  “They would have made quite a picture,” said Louis. “Gravediggers in the pit at dusk.”

  “I think you see things in a rather peculiar way.”

  “That has been the case since I was a boy. I loved a woman then and it changed the way I saw nature.”

  Louis could hear his feet on the gravel and looked out over the headstones. The dead shall know their number.

  Pigeon took his hand. “Come on, Grandfather, cemeteries do strange things to a man. Let’s find you a plate of mutton.” They walked back down to the snow and pewter bowl of Paris.

  Sixteen

  Christmas Day, 1847

  Dear Isobel,

  The last time you saw me, I was a child, barely hatched from nature’s wonderland in Orléans. That kiss in the mouth of Notre Dame has always stayed with me. I ran home in the rain, cursing your name and stubbing my feet. But that was not the last time I saw you. One time, many years ago, you came to see one of my dioramas, and I watched you and your family observe my spectacle. I could not br
ing myself to say hello. You appeared to have a daughter.

  Forgive my nostalgia for the past. I find these days I am somewhat infected with it. I pass washerwomen using a certain kind of soap, their hands deep in metal tubs of cold water, and I am transported to the days of my youth, to the smell of starched laundry on the breeze. You have been dredged up countless times in this mania for what I have already lived and seen.

  I remember a day on the estate. We sat among the brook weed, half exposed to sun and air, and we watched fishes swim staidly beneath the surface. There were shoals of golden and silver minnows and occasionally one broke the surface to observe the heavens. They seemed aware of their watery prison and longed for what we had, all that sun and air. Then one fish leapt so high and continuously that we figured him for dead. But the more we looked, the more it seemed to be a simple lust for what he could not have.

  Let me to the point. At the core of my life these past forty years has been a puzzle I cannot cipher. Even now it is difficult to say the broadside of what I intend…I loved you from the first. We played under the fronds of that love. And I always thought, suspected, hoped that you loved me in return. That day on Pont Neuf, you with child, began the rise of my career. I have often thought it ironic that losing you was what led me to fame. The grief that you would marry another and raise a child harnessed my deepest creativity. I wanted to singe life into the fabric of my canvases. At first from sorrow, then later in anger; I have tried to deny the power you have exerted on me countless times, but I cannot yield and now things have slipped…the flowering of our age is upon us, Isobel, but it is taking an unexpected turn.

  I have reason to believe that time is running out. Not because I am an old man with a cough and thinning hair, but because there is a great disaster coming. A mighty wind of change is preparing to blow across our pond and we must prepare. Few know of God’s conspiracy. Go out into a field at night and listen to the braying of horses and the lowing of cattle and look at the jaundiced tint of the moon and the recession of stars, bleached to a very empty white. Make friends with your enemies. Make peace with regret. This is my counsel.

  Before the end I would simply like the chance to spend an afternoon with you. Is it possible that for a spill of hours we could be friends? I cannot yet tell you how I found you. There are things to unfold. Please know that I carry this mission with much humility and forgiveness. You were, it seems, my best friend; somehow I lost you to the revolution and life and regret. I hope you find it possible to receive me as a visitor.