The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre

by Dominic Smith

  “She is a remarkable woman. May she find peace.” The doctor gathered the reins and rode out into the road. Louis stood there and watched the doctor disappear into the chalky-white distance. An enormous weight gathered in his chest, but he could not bring himself to cry. He had wept like a stage actress at the sight of a well-made shoe just months before, and now he was losing the lamp of his life and he stood there stoic, tearless, unbelieving. Death seemed dismissive, an arrogance of a distant God. Why bother with this ritual of transfiguration? Then a horrifying thought came to him: that he might live to be ninety without Isobel and the world would continue to spin, unfettered by angels, forever. He stood there stricken by the thought of infinity. Finally, he went back inside and found Chloe and Isobel embracing on the bed. He closed the door and went to light the fire for evening.

  He felt her slipping beside him each night. Her lungs hooked on the out-breath. Her skin grew cold to the touch and her camphored fragrance turned to night sweat. It seemed to Louis that they were beginning their old age together, holding hands in the carbide quietude of Isobel’s bedroom. They allowed all the nuances of age to filter through the days. In half a week they lived out half a century. They talked of houses they might have owned in Marseille, of Louis’s studio in Paris where they might have stayed when they went to the opera.

  “I abhor the opera,” said Isobel.

  “It’s not possible.”

  “Bores me to the eyelids.”

  “Well, then, we’d better call the whole thing off.”

  “Is this really our fate?” she asked, almost in a whisper.

  He could not bring himself to answer.

  “Louis, we haven’t squandered our lives by not being together.”

  “Nothing is squandered,” he said.

  “Because I was never before ready. And this”—she paused for breath— “is perfection in its own way. I have given myself wholly to you these last few days.”

  “I know.”

  “We haven’t made love. Will you forgive me for that?”

  Louis leaned up in bed and took her face in his hands. “In my mind I have made love to you a thousand times.”

  “Better in the mind, then. Because it would kill me.”

  Louis looked away.

  “Allow me my gallows humor, even now.”

  “What is going to happen to us?” he asked.

  “This might be all there is. This bed. This room.”

  He looked at her. Somehow they had skipped the trials of nuptial life to arrive here. They had skipped the excitement of newlyweds, the tedium of middleweds, the rancor of old married couples with their ritual resentments kept aglow like rubbed bronze. What existed now was a love based not just on life but on the certainty of one’s end, the winnowing of all emotion down to the care of another.

  They slept, gripped by dreams. Isobel woke in the middle of the night to find Louis standing at the end of her bed. He appeared fully dressed—trousers, shirt, waistcoat—with a glazed look in his eyes.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  Louis made no reply. He looked slightly stunned. His eyes were on the luminous windows, the rectangles of wan moonlight. She realized he was sleepwalking. He began navigating the room, a hand touching the walls. “My shoes. Has anyone seen my shoes?”

  “Louis,” she called.

  He walked barefoot over to the closed door and stood there, waiting. “I need my shoes,” he said. “It’s very cold down in the mixing room.”

  Isobel got up slowly from the bed and crossed to him. His face was unblinking, the startled look of a dog roused from sleep.

  “Louis,” she said, “you’re having a dream. Come back to bed.”

  He did not respond. For a moment she was chilled by his countenance, by his dead-white stare. She took his hand and led him back to the bed. Without resistance, he lay down. She curled beside him and felt a terrible loneliness; she held his cold hand and cried. She understood these tears were for herself, not for Louis nor Chloe, but a kind of self-grief for the woman she had not become. She reached for the laudanum and took several swallows. The opium softened her remorse; it calmed her glands and swam up her spine. She doubted the existence of God, even now. Perhaps there was benevolence, sometimes an invisible kindness that intervened. She kissed Louis on the cheek. He saw who I could become. He loved what I wanted to love in myself—a woman of the earth, a healer, someone who carried passion, who yearned for grace but found pride instead. Pride is a house locked from within.

  The next morning Louis sat up in bed, baffled by his waistcoat and trousers. Isobel told him of his nightwalk.

  “You stood at the door, asking for your shoes.”

  “I see,” said Louis.

  “We had quite a conversation.”

  “Did we?”

  “No.”

  “What a relief.”

  “I have a favor to ask,” she said.

  “What is it?”

  “I’d like you to take a portrait of the two of us.”

  “Today?”

  “Yes.”

  “As strange as this might sound, I have never appeared in a photograph. It’s an old superstition, something about the conjurer looking back into the mirror.”

  “It’s time you changed your superstition. Is noon a good time for the light?”

  “Yes, of course,” said Louis. “Are you sure you are well enough?”

  “Quite certain.” But Isobel could feel her lungs sag like dampened cheesecloth. It hurt to breathe.

  At noon they dressed as if for a ball. Isobel wore her finest barege gown, her pearls and antique broach. Louis wore a top hat and a wool suit. Chloe had gone into town, but still they locked the door; this seemed like a private indulgence. Louis set up a timer on the camera obscura and took inventory in the dusty light of the room. He set the exposure for one minute because the yew branches outside the window filtered out much of the sun’s glare. They decided to recline on the bed, propped by pillows. This was partly because Isobel felt unable to stand, but partly for the strange appeal of a couple dressed to the hilt, recumbent on a bed in a country room.

  Isobel sat on the bed, her hands in her lap. Louis made a few final adjustments to the camera obscura and released the timer. He had five seconds to make it to the bed.

  “My hat on or off?” he asked, sitting beside her.

  “Off,” she said. “Let the camera see your face.”

  “We must stay very still for one minute,” he said. “Don’t move until I say.”

  They held their positions, hands intertwined. The metallic click of the timer measured the seconds. She wanted to move her face, to hold Louis to her chest. How would she appear in the photograph—upright and proud, or slumped and broken? She would be brave, she told herself. Wear it as an undergarment to pride. She had never given herself to excess; she had strived to help others. Wasn’t that admirable? A hollowness moved through her body. She continued staring into the camera, time unraveling. Death was everywhere now, in the tips of her hair, in her toenails. Horehound in honey for coughs, milk thistle for the liver, rosemary for shiny hair, the names of plants, the first kiss in the wine cave, the loveless marriage, the thwarted daughter looking for redemption, her wedding ring in the white envelope, the fragrance of gardenias from the window, the stupid surprise of death, all of it came to her during the exposure. An eternity of sitting still. Finally, she could bear the stillness no longer. She said to the camera, “I think I may have always loved you, Louis.” His hand tightened against hers, but he remained looking into the camera, into the future.

  The timer closed the eye of the camera. He turned to her.

  “I have loved you through kings and emperors…since before Paris had gas lamps.”

  He kissed her on the mouth. They took off their ballroom clothes and lay beneath the covers in their underwear, trembling, pressed together.

  Isobel woke to the crush of her own breathing. From outside came the minuscule screams of frogs in th
e marsh. Spring is here, full-blown, she thought. She sat up in bed and looked out the window at the crimson dawn. She wanted to die with grace, to be one of those matriarchs who gave counsel on their deathbeds—whom to marry, how to stave off loneliness, the virtue of prayer. But the truth was, she had no advice to give the living, and she could hear from the withheld rattle of her lungs that there would be an unsightly struggle at the very end. The blunt graspings of the body. She was too weary now for goodbyes and would die, as she had lived, with the door closed.

  She placed her head on Louis’s chest.

  “What is it? Are you all right?” he asked.

  “I think I need some tea. Would you fetch me some?”

  “Of course.” He sat up. “You know what I was dreaming?”

  “What?”

  “That you and I were riding in a hot-air balloon. It was a fête or something. We floated over the valley.”

  “That’s a wonderful image,” she said. “Louis?”

  “Yes?”

  “I want you to promise me that you’ll look after Chloe.”

  “You know I will.”

  “Because my estate will not be much. Gerard was in debt near the end.”

  “Don’t think on it now. I’ll fetch your tea.”

  “Do you believe in God?” she asked, grabbing his hand.

  He sat back down. He thought of his false apocalypse, of the way God had tricked him into his prophecy. His image of God had changed from one of benevolence to one of calculation and reckoning. During those doomsday months, God had been a hooded falconer, his arm held aloft. Now God slept in the wheel-house of some colossal, ghostly ship. “I believe that the world is strung together by something. I believe that beauty is the stain of the cosmic mind. I believe that you and I will always be together.” He kissed her eyelids.

  “I want to believe that,” she said.

  “Belief is mostly a matter of the will.”

  “I love you, Louis. I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to say that.”

  “I’ve waited fifty years to hear those words, and I won’t tire of them easily.”

  He kissed her again and stood to fetch her tea. She watched him move across the floor, head down, a slight shuffle in his walk. She understood that his own death was not far off. He carried an illness—it was in his eyes, the mismatched shoes, the portent he found in a teacup.

  “Louis?”

  “Yes?”

  “Would you mind closing the door?”

  “Why?” he asked, turning.

  “There’s a terrible draft from the hallway,” she said.

  “I see.” He looked at her from the doorway, framed against the darkness in the hallway. She saw the beryl blue of his eyes, the look of knowing. He nodded and attempted to smile through a scrim of tears.

  “Kiss me again,” she said very suddenly.

  He came to the bedside and kissed her on the mouth. He heard the containment of her lungs. She took her thumb and collected a tear from his cheek. She brought it delicately to her lips. “There’s an old remedy that calls for the tear of a man in love.”

  “What does it cure?” he asked.

  “Nervous complaint in young girls.”

  “I see,” he said. “It opens them up to love and life.”

  “Fathers give it when they can’t marry their daughters off.”

  He smiled.

  She looked away and said, “Now, brew the nettles until they’re tender.”

  He collected himself and stood. “Use the bell if you need to.”

  “I think I’m capable of calling out your name, Louis Daguerre.”

  He nodded again and left the room without looking back. She lay staring at the white rectangle of the door for several moments. She would not cry. She gave it permission to come now, to seal her lungs and clench her throat. Leave me my doubts. She did not want a godly conversion. There was a recession of morning stars at the window. There was a bell at her side. There was a man—the man she should have married—making tea in her kitchen. There was the faint smell of lucerne, of the sun warming the paddocks. These things were somehow enough. She closed her eyes and tried to make Louis’s ballooning dream her own—the two of them passing through the ether, rising in an apparition of silk and fire.

  Louis waited to return with her tea. He knew she would be loosed from her body, but he’d made the tea anyway. He stood with the steaming mug, shaking by her bedside. Her head rested on the pillow, her eyes open, looking up. He would wait for Chloe before closing them. Outside there was activity, normalcy. A row of cypress bent along the hillside. A farmer was turning his fields. A nightjar perched in a tree. He thought of springtime brooks, of Isobel collecting wood-ear mushrooms. He sat on the bed, her dead foot resting lightly against his leg. He looked around the room. A carafe of water—half empty from their late-night talks—stood beside the bed. The phial of laudanum sat beneath the lamp. Objects seemed frail. The windows hung like portraits of a tin-white sky. The world has ended after all.

  Twenty Nine

  Spring had arrived, fully fledged. The doors and windows of the stone cottage were flung open. Spiders claimed the eaves and the sills. Dandelion spores floated through the hallway. The horses whinnied from the barn, neglected and unshod. Chloe and Louis buried Isobel beneath her herbarium plants, back behind the marsh, according to her wishes. She lay beneath rosemary and milkweed, beneath herbs for the blood.

  Louis stayed on to help settle Isobel’s small estate. She’d left him a phial of lavender-scented water that he could not bring himself to open. Chloe inherited the house, the old bay horse, a few of her father’s maritime stocks. Louis did not develop the copper plate of him and Isobel reclined on the bed. The camera stood on the tripod with the exposed plate inside, sealed as a mortuary house. In preparation to leave, he used his other cameras to catalog her acreage—a goldfinch on the camber of an oak branch, a wallflower aflame on the barn wall, the bone-gray spines of the rosemary on her grave. It was impossible to cure nostalgia, he thought. Briefly, with the audacity of being still alive, he had tried to find nature’s hidden mechanics, her subtle architecture woven into leaf and stem, seed and taproot. But every time he chose an object to photograph, he captured its luster, not its form.

  He slept in Isobel’s bed each night. The sheets had not been washed since her passing, and they retained a hint of her smell. This was the closest he came to being maudlin. He seemed unable to cry, and this unsettled him. His emotions felt trapped in a single memory—the quiet formality of the afternoon portrait, the timer gears clicking, a minute wound tight inside the camera, their images burning into the copper plate, then her words, “I think I may have always loved you,” and the sound of deflation, of a small surrender.

  There was this memory and there was the world, spread beyond its edges. Nature was corpulent and overripe, as if to accentuate his loss. Wild grapes draped the trellises; the marsh danced with battalions of mating dragonflies. There was a smell in the air as of salted meat. The windowpanes swelled inside their sills, bloated by so much spectacle.

  The world felt poised. He walked through the house and felt a quiet allegiance with glasses of water, fluttering curtains, things waiting to be called upon to act their little part. Outside, the sky and hills rocked past. The sun flared. Planets made apogee turns in their orbits. He had the sense that he was merely pacing inside a curved chamber, scenery scrolling past, the star dome spinning slowly, while somewhere a man in overalls bent over the day’s crankshaft.

  Chloe took refuge in sleep. In Paris she had been famous for her noon risings. Here, she had briefly opened herself to mornings, to her mother’s schedule. Now she lay in bed past lunch-time, hemmed in by pillows. She ate oranges in bed, dropping the peels on the floor. She heard Louis move about the house, his walk of shuffling distraction. They were fugitives; she knew that. Neither could comfort the other. She wanted to be held, to have her hair stroked. Meanwhile, Louis blundered about in gingham-patched trousers, muttering t
o sparrows and door hinges.

  The day Louis was due to return to Paris, a knock came at Chloe’s door. He appeared in the doorway, hat in hand. She suddenly felt guilty that she had not prepared him some food for his trip. Her mother would have done that. The thought of cooking made her ill.

  “I want to buy this house,” he said.

  She sat up, rubbed her face. “What?”

  “You said you’d sell it and move on, and I can’t bear the thought of somebody else living here.” He blinked rapidly, looking down at his feet.

  “You would live here?”

  “No. I’m still leaving for Paris.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Where will you go, Chloe?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The South is pretty. And slow, of course.”

  “I could go to the South,” she said.

  “Yes. You could go to the South,” he said distantly. He raised his eyebrows and blew some air through his lips. “I will give you twenty thousand francs for it and not a sou more.”

  She stared at him, waiting for a grin. “Don’t be ridiculous, Louis. It’s worth nowhere near that.”

  “The money’s already arranged,” he said, addressing the windows.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Come out here.”

  She followed him into the living room. Francs bundled with ribbon stood in neat inch-high stacks by the hearth.

  “My God,” she said quietly.

  “You’ll need to sign a deed. I’ll send it when I’m settled.”

  “Louis, why are you doing this? I can’t accept.”

  He touched the rim of his hat. “Doing what? It’s quite simple. You now own a piece of property I wish to acquire. There is no place for sentiment in business.”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “How about ‘Thank you and good luck.’ I earned this money by capturing light and selling it to people. It’s a scandal, really.”

  She turned and brimmed, suddenly, with tears. “Could you hold me, Louis?”

  He swallowed, eyes down. “I could do that.”