The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre

by Dominic Smith

  When the fire burned low, they finished their brandy and retired. Louis accepted a place on the divan in front of the hearth. Chloe got him a twill blanket and a pillow.

  “You’re much too big to be tucked in,” she said. “But when I was standing in your old bedroom today, I could see you as a boy. I could see you in buckskins, pouting and sullen. It was sweet.” She leaned down and kissed him on the forehead.

  “I was a strange lad,” he said. “Good night, Chloe.” She walked down the hallway to her bedroom. Louis slumped back on the divan and closed his eyes. The day swelled behind his eyelids. There was a presence in the room, a slight shifting of air. He opened his eyes to see Isobel standing over him, a hand clasping the neckline of her nightdress. She held a shawl in her other hand, a look of consternation in her face.

  “I’m a bit short on extra blankets, but I thought you could use one of my shawls if you get cold in the night.” She ran her hand over the weave of the shawl.

  “Thank you. I think I’ll be fine. You or Chloe should use it.”

  “No, we’re fine.” She placed the shawl over him. “Good night.”

  “Good night, Isobel,” he said.

  He lay back down on the divan and stared up at the ceiling. The fire was all but dead, and he had a sense of the darkness pouring in through the windows. Although the storm had passed, it was still cold and blustery outside. He kept still and, above the wheezy draw of his lungs, listened to the sounds of the house—the coals giving off an occasional hiss and sputter, the wind blowing across the veranda, the small and precise movements of Isobel readying for bed. A human life is a series of preparations. Then there was another sound, of the house simply at rest, of the walls moving imperceptibly away from the foundation piers. A house is a feeble stand against weather and time. He listened to the wooden floor joists contract in the cold like the ribs of a ship. Suddenly, he could not sleep. Something was pressing down on him—a shunt of pain in his back, a burning dampness in his lungs. The air felt heavy and he suspected that he could be crushed by it; darkness, like water, had volume and weight.

  Twenty-Six

  Isobel did not come to breakfast. She lay in bed, asleep, chilled to the marrow. Chloe and Louis came to check on her. Chloe placed her hand on her mother’s shoulder.

  “Mother, are you all right?” she said.

  Isobel stirred and looked up at them, startled. “It’s so cold,” she said. She turned on her side. “Heavens, what time is it? I’ve slept half the day away.”

  “Stay in bed,” said Louis. “You’re not well.”

  “I just have a little cold. I’ll take some nettle tea first thing.”

  “I’ve just boiled the water. I’ll bring you some,” said Chloe. She left the room and went to the kitchen.

  “You don’t look well,” said Louis. Her hair was plastered down with night sweat.

  “Never tell a lady that,” she said, forcing a smile.

  “Will you let me fetch the doctor?”

  “He’s a horse physician at best. Diploma from a barnyard. I have all the medicines we need right here. I may need you or Chloe to prepare them.”

  “Of course,” said Louis. “I’ll delay my return until the afternoon.” He sat on the edge of the bed.

  “Oh, I forgot you were leaving.”

  “I’m in no hurry,” he said. “And the horses could use the rest.”

  “Thank you,” she said. There was something exposed in her voice. “How did you sleep?”

  “Not badly, I suppose,” he said, clearing his throat.

  Chloe came back in with the tea. “Here, Mother, sit up.”

  Isobel propped herself on the pillows, gave out a slight but asthmatic sigh, and received the mug of tea between both hands. She closed her eyes and let the nettle tea steam up into her face. “That’s just the thing,” she said. “I’ll stay in bed till lunchtime. Don’t let me oversleep, you two. Now go do something useful instead of ogling me.”

  “Call if you need anything,” said Chloe.

  “Would you like to use the little tin bell?” Louis asked.

  “That won’t be necessary. Now go.”

  Louis and Chloe left the room and closed the door behind them. Isobel immediately retrieved a clean bedpan from the floor and, upon coughing as silently as she could, spat into the copper bowl. It left her shivering and feverish. She opened the window by her bed for a brief moment, but it immediately filled her bones with ice. She got back under her blankets and pulled an extra pillow across her chest.

  Isobel did not rise at noon. She slept a long, feverish sleep, waking here and there to cough into the bedpan. The cough made her stomach convulse and her eyes water. In the aftermath, she lay back on her dampened pillow and stared up at the ceiling. She looked at a clock in the afternoon and discovered to her horror that it was almost four o’clock. She got out of bed and sat before her mirror and began brushing her hair. Her face had the pallor of oats. Her eyes were yellowed and bloodshot. She walked out into the hallway, wrapped in a shawl, and found Louis in front of the fire.

  He turned and stood. “How are you feeling?”

  “Terrible, actually. Where’s Chloe?”

  “Went for a walk.”

  “I’m going to show you how to prepare me some herbs.”

  “Of course,” Louis said.

  “Come with me, then,” Isobel said.

  They walked to the back of the house and she opened the door to the herbarium. A thick and humid air came over them as they stepped inside. “It’s almost time to open the windows,” she said.

  Isobel brightened slightly at the touch of her plants. She took out her pruning scissors. “I’m going to cut up some nettles and eucalyptus leaves, perhaps a few others as they come to me. We’re going to prepare a thick paste using menthol leaves and mix it with Jamaica ginger and Batavia nutmeg.”

  “Sounds like we’re making a dessert,” Louis said, trying to elicit a smile.

  “I’m going to put the paste across my chest,” Isobel said. “It should help alleviate the cough.” She cut a variety of leaves and placed them on a tin tray. “I’ll need you to grind them with a mortar and pestle. Can you do that?”

  “Of course.”

  She handed him the tray and showed him to the stone mortar and pestle. She took out some crystals of Jamaica ginger from one of the drawers and threw them, along with the leaves, into the grinding bowl.

  Suddenly, she felt exhausted. “I’m going to get back into bed,” she said. “Thank you for staying—that was very thoughtful of you.” She placed her hand on his shoulder for a moment and left the room.

  Louis ground the leaves. The eucalyptus oil made his eyes sting. He took great care to ensure an even pulp, picking out pieces of stem. The ginger and the nutmeg consumed the room and he felt himself on the verge of memory, of walking one of his serpentine routes in the Paris of 1804 and smelling the dusk come alive with roasted walnuts, supper fires from the garrets. When the leaves and spices were ground as finely as he knew how, he brought them to Isobel. She sat up and dipped her finger into the mixture.

  “Perfect,” she said. “We’ll make an apothecary of you yet. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to spread this across my thorny old lady’s chest.”

  “Stop,” said Louis.

  “Stop what?” she asked.

  “Don’t disparage your body. You have only increased in loveliness and grace all these years. But your pride is enough to poison us all.” He left and closed the bedroom door behind him.

  Several hours later, he went to check on her. It was nearly evening and the light was fading fast. Her room smelled like a spice market, and in the gloom, he felt he was stepping towards some exotic sleeping goddess. He stood by the window. He watched her until everything was drawn into the rind of dusk. The sun was gone very suddenly. The furniture, the bedspread, the tint of her skin, all of it surrendered its color. This was the transom into night, when the world became muslin-toned and amorphous, when it match
ed closely the vaporous quality of his daguerreotypes. He imagined he could see her breath passing in and out of her lips. The veins in her eyelids resembled bolts of delicate lightning. He hated himself for wanting to kiss them. He stood there, watching her. The amber world faded to black. He lit the carbide lamp.

  Twenty-Seven

  Isobel spread her chest with the pungent green paste and slept beneath a cloud of eucalyptus and ginger. Louis waited another day to return to Paris. He watched her give herself over to long hours of sleep.

  When she was alone, Isobel took inventory of her life. She could feel the frailty of her own existence; she was aware of her staccato lungs, the pulse of her blood. In the top of her armoire was a vintage leather suitcase that contained the artifacts of her youth. She took it down, locked her door, and sat back in bed. For four decades she had resisted nostalgia, hemmed in the past like a paddock, but now she felt the allure. Just as she had pondered the fatal turn in her daughter’s life, she now pondered her own. Several of Louis Daguerre’s portraits of her on the glade lay between sheets of fabric, brittled and yellowed with age. In one sketch she appeared as a Nubian queen—recumbent on a limestone ledge, crowned with a holly wreath, looking out towards a vanishing point of field and sky. In his drawings he had always tried to find her noblest aspect, but this continued in real life; she had always suspected that what he loved most about her was an illusion. He loved mystery, the withheld aspect in people and places. What he loved was love, she thought, the feeling of being pulled under, not this assemblage of pride and bones and dampness. And rather than his high-minded love making her want to be that mysterious person, it had made her want to correct his mistake. There was something damnable about being the love object, the capstone in some epic delusion. Still, she could not deny the comfort she felt when he was around. Life was more mysterious with Louis Daguerre in a room. When he looked at something closely—an arabesque in the rug, a polished beam of oak—she found herself following his gaze, expecting to be awed.

  There were theater ticket stubs from the night the mansion had burned down. There were poems that Chloe had written as a young girl, her late husband’s will, and some handwritten recipes she’d gotten from her mother’s kitchen. On the back of a recipe for potato and veal stew, her mother had written the date—January 20, 1815. The year countless men died at Waterloo, her mother—one of nine cooks for the duke of Orléans—painstakingly wrote down a lifetime’s worth of recipes. This was her opus, the fortitude of winter stews, the inherited ratios of meat and spice. Had her mother’s life amounted to three dozen recipes? Isobel put away the things and replaced the suitcase in the top of the armoire. She unlocked her door and climbed back in bed, riveted by the past.

  She slept through the afternoon, disturbed by dreams just beyond her recollection. She woke with cold feet and hands. Louis and Chloe came to her bedside. They looked at her with such tenderness that she knew she was getting worse.

  “Is the boy feeding the horses?” she asked.

  “Of course, Mother,” said Chloe.

  “You’ve barely eaten,” said Louis. “We’ve brought you some rabbit stew.”

  Isobel put her hand to her throat. “Some broth,” she said. “I could take some broth.”

  “I’ll go get some,” Chloe said. She went out to the kitchen.

  “How long have I been asleep?” asked Isobel.

  “All day. We’ve sent for a new doctor from Orléans.”

  “That will cost a fortune.”

  “I am paying for it. Money is pointless if it cannot serve our needs.”

  She nodded, absolved from argument.

  “He should be here before the end of the day.”

  She nodded again and turned her face from him.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What?”

  Her breaths were short and fitful. “What do I have when you and Chloe go back to Paris? Some herbs and a cure for ear-ache.”

  He looked at her. There was something bruised and defeated in her eyes. He recalled his own convalescence, looking down at his exiled toes in the wave of a fever. Everything came to the surface. He pulled up her quilt and tucked it under her chin.

  The doctor arrived before dinner. He was a slovenly man from Orléans. A cockscomb of white hair stuck up on his head. A pair of spectacles hung around his neck, and every time he inspected Isobel at close range, he squinted through two smudged ovals of glass. He was prone to incessant talking, perhaps as a mild sedative. Sitting on the edge of Isobel’s bed, taking her pulse, he began a litany of his last month’s house calls.

  “It’s been a regular factory of laments,” he said. “I’ve been running about on three hours of sleep thanks to this latest political mash. Bilious colic, quinsy, flux, summer complaint—turn on your side, madame—not to mention jail fever, hip gout, and lumbago. It’s been a veritable jumble sale of maladies.” He put his listening device to Isobel’s back. He moved it into several different positions and gave a gravelly humph each time.

  “What is it?” asked Louis.

  “Lung fever, serious at that,” said the doctor. He wrote down something in a black leather book.

  “What is to be done?” asked Chloe.

  “Absolute bed rest, and I will leave a phial of laudanum with you. It should ease the fever and the cough. Send for me if it gets worse. And please desist with that horrid paste spread across her chest.”

  “This paste has saved countless lives,” said Isobel.

  The man folded his spectacles and shrugged. “Yes, well, it might not save your life, dear lady. Please take a dose of laudanum in the morning and at night. Good day and good luck.” The doctor stood and Louis showed him out to his carriage. He paid the man his fee without speaking and went back to Isobel’s bedroom.

  “He was an ass, just like every other doctor I’ve ever encountered,” said Isobel.

  “He may be right. Perhaps it is too late for the herbs,” said Chloe.

  “So now he wants me to take opium in alcohol solution. That sounds just the ticket.”

  “Please take it,” said Louis. “I have taken it myself and found it to be quite helpful.” This was not true, though he knew Baudelaire swore by the palliative effects of laudanum.

  “Leave it beside the bed,” Isobel said curtly. They complied and left the phial on her bedside table.

  Isobel lay in bed, aware of her limbs. So, here it is, the ridiculousness of illness, the thing I cure but also do not believe in. She could feel her body weaken, the thin line of nausea that extended from stomach to mouth. Convalescence required faith, a resoluteness she did not have. She feared the infections of nostalgia. No. There is only this room. That man outside my door. A man smitten with her but also with the countenance of a ripened pear, the ashen light of a dusky boulevard. She was nothing but an effigy, something raised above his solitude. In all likelihood he was quite mad—she saw something strange in the Antwerp blue of his eyes. But the question did not flinch, it only grew: Do I love him? Have I always? Several times she had looked at his stern jaw and imagined his mouth pressed to hers. There had always been an excitement about his dazed belief; it was like standing at the confluence of whitened rivers. I would allow him to kiss me, she thought, if he dared. And if the kiss lacked feeling, if it was worn and scuffed like her vintage suitcase of mementos, then that would be the end of it.

  Later that night Louis came back to her bedside. She was sitting up and doing needlework in the light of the carbide lamp.

  “Is it time for my opium?” she asked.

  “You sound in better spirits.”

  She looked down at the brocaded fabric. “This is the first productive thing I have done in days. It’s giving me hope that I won’t be bedridden the rest of my life.”

  “Do you want me or Chloe to give you the laudanum?”

  “You may administer the opium, sir,” she said.

  Louis took the phial from the bedside table and removed the cork. It
gave off an acrid smell. “Just a small nip,” he said. “This stuff can be very strong. In Paris you see drunken, deranged poets sitting with bottles of absinthe and laudanum.” He handed the phial to her. She took a swallow. Her mouth bittered.

  “It tastes like rancid almonds,” she said.

  She handed it back to him. They passed a moment of silence.

  “Well, I’ll come back in a while to check on you,” he said. He turned to leave.

  Something about his shoes on her floorboards, the walk of a man who had known an hour of fame, compelled her. She couldn’t abide the waiting.

  “Could you switch off my lamp and light a candle?” she said.

  Louis did so and stood stiffly by the bedside table, awaiting her next instruction.

  “Do you want to kiss me?” she asked in the half-light.

  “What?” He was all breath.

  “You heard me. If you want to kiss me on the mouth, then go ahead. But close the door first.” She said it flatly and pointed blithely to the door.

  “Isobel, you’re feverish and you’ve just taken laudanum,” Louis said quietly.

  “I may never ask again,” she said. “Later, I’ll deny it or blame it on the opium.”

  Louis crossed to the door and closed it. He walked back lightly and nervous, raised on the balls of his feet. He sat on the edge of her bed, not knowing what to do with his hands.

  “I apologize if I smell like an Indian bazaar,” she said.

  “Don’t speak just now,” he said.

  He leaned over her and placed his lips gently against hers. He opened his eyes at close range only to find the stunned jade of her eyes looking back at him. He closed his again and was surprised to find that beneath the bitter-almond taste of thelaudanum, she was familiar. For her part, Isobel tasted something woody and myrrh-like in Louis’s mouth, but far from finding this disturbing, she was reassured by it; she had feared all this time that he would taste mealy and decrepit, or worse, like a butter-mouthed shopboy. This mutual consent of taste and smell entered the kiss. He felt her body rise towards him, her mouth open slightly. He placed his hand at the back of her head, lightly, fingers intertwined with her hair. The kiss that had waited half a century lasted five seconds, and when it ended, because Isobel needed to draw an uninhibited breath, they looked at each other. Her cheeks had been left scalded by the kiss.