Illumination

by Matthew Plampin

  The paintbrush clattered against the floorboards; Hannah swore, jerked from her daydream. This was the exact strategy her mother had proposed on the day of that march to the Strasbourg. Taking on this commission had evidently tainted her with Elizabeth’s reasoning. She stooped with a grimace, retrieved the thin, foot-long brush and snapped it in half, throwing the pieces across the room. She was not that desperate; she would never be that desperate. She wasn’t going to offer herself to Edouard Manet or anyone else.

  Hannah wiped the paint from her hands and looked again at the painting. More work was needed; whether it was a few small corrections or another task for the canvas knife she couldn’t tell. It felt as if she’d been driving in a nail that had gone fractionally off-centre with the hammer’s first stroke, every subsequent blow making things worse until all she’d got was a chipped wall, a bruised thumb and a bent, useless nail.

  It would have to wait. Hannah was due at her guardhouse in less than ten minutes. She located her vivandière’s satchel and ran for the door, leaving the portrait gazing out from its easel.

  III

  Clem was shaken awake, none too gently. He rolled over. It was still dark. There was snoring around him and the distant sound of cannon-fire. His throat was dry, his head swimming; he picked a speck of sleep from his eye with the tip of his forefinger.

  ‘Pardy,’ said Émile Besson, close to his ear. ‘Nous allons.’

  After a second’s blankness Clem remembered what they were to do that day. He bounded from his pallet, all thoughts of bed banished, wobbling only slightly as he pulled on his trousers and worked his feet into the heavy boots supplied by the Balloon Commission. A minute later he was fully dressed, his long navy-style coat buttoned and belted, striding from the sailors’ dormitory four paces behind Besson. He felt alert, immensely capable, powerful almost. For the first time in his life he was part of something righteous and important. The gold ‘AER’ embroidered on the front of his leather flying helmet seemed to glow like a miner’s lamp, guiding him across the cold tiles of the Gare du Nord. Thirty yards into the concourse they peeled apart, Besson heading straight to the balloon, while Clem went to where they’d stowed the borrowed Dallmeyer. Slinging a large canvas sack over his shoulder, he heaved up the camera, the plate-box and the doctor’s bag of photographic solutions, and edged out backwards through the main doors.

  The Aphrodite stood in the square before the station façade. Fully inflated and upright, it looked far larger than it had inside, easily five storeys tall. In the low light of early dawn the envelope was a flat grey; like a whale, Clem thought, or an outsized elephant. A breeze crept in from an intersecting boulevard, and the Aphrodite quivered and veered, straining against its cables. This was a rather different proposition to that fixed balloon he’d ridden in at the Crystal Palace: bigger, certainly, but also somehow fiercer. He’d always conceived of balloons, even free balloons, as essentially tranquil: soap bubbles, dandelion seeds, that sort of thing. The Aphrodite, however, verged on the monstrous. That bulging envelope had a pent-up energy that was completely its own, beyond all control, easily enough to tear down a house or capsize a boat – or dash the hapless idiots attached to it against a remote, airless mountaintop.

  ‘What the devil am I doing?’ he muttered under his breath, equally amused and apprehensive. ‘This is madness.’

  There were no lamps lit in the square, due to the danger of igniting the coal-gas. Everyone there was relying on their eyes and their extensive experience with the procedures underway. Sailors laboured in the murk around the basket, winding in the gas-pipe, attaching the ballast sacks and fighting to keep the whole contraption secured to the ground. No one paid Clem any notice; the arrival of the crew was routine, without interest. A handful of officials were huddled a few feet from the car, conferring with Besson as they partook of some light refreshments. The aérostier, standing there in his flying garb, was a reassuring sight. Their impending escapade did not appear to be bothering him in the least. His lean, precise face was composed; he actually seemed in significantly better spirits than usual. Anticipation, Clem supposed. He went over, set down the camera equipment and accepted a glass of what turned out to be brandy-and-water.

  One of the officials, still tending to fat despite the siege’s privations, was dressed in an unlikely mauve greatcoat and a broad-brimmed hat. It was the great Nadar himself, come to see off his protégé. Spotting the Dallmeyer, he swivelled his bulk towards Clem, took hold of his hand and pumped it up and down as if he was working an uncooperative machine.

  ‘My friend,’ he said in an extravagant French accent. ‘My friend, so very good to meet you.’ He released the hand as suddenly as he’d seized it and turned to Besson. ‘Émile tells me that you are a genius with the camera – among the best of your nation. An apprentice of Mr Fenton, no less?’

  Clem turned to Besson as well; the aérostier was smiling thinly. ‘Ah, indeed. Mr Fenton, yes,’ he said. ‘A capital fellow. Taught me everything I know.’

  ‘Well, I certainly look forward to seeing what you can capture with that device there. You have not been in a free balloon before, I understand?’ Nadar tutted at Clem’s reply. ‘Then you have not flown, Monsieur. That is all I can say. It is like comparing a horse at a circus, on a—’ he made a circular motion, describing the path of a merry-go-round, ‘with being on a living animal, charging over the fields. And a lively animal at that!’ He let out a classic fat man’s laugh, throwing back his head with a fist on his hip. ‘C’est vrai, Émile, oui?’

  Besson agreed. ‘Speaking of which,’ he added, peering past the Aphrodite to the surrounding rooftops, ‘we must soon be off. The sun will be up in minutes, and we have a favourable wind.’

  Clem’s palms began to sweat inside his heavy gloves. He longed to request a brief postponement – a little more time to talk with the great Nadar (an encounter he could make much of in his book, he reckoned) and study their balloon. Instead he downed his drink, nodded in what he imagined was a suitably manly, no-nonsense manner and started to load up the Dallmeyer. A pigeon cage was strapped to the outside of the basket, the fifteen or so birds inside staying still and silent. This was surely an ill omen. Didn’t pigeons have some kind of instinct for disaster? Hadn’t he heard that somewhere?

  Besson exchanged a few final words with the assembled officials. A packet of documents was handed over and secured inside the aérostier’s coat – the orders and plans for Gambetta. As Clem tried to slot the plate-box beside the bulky mailbags that had already been piled into the basket, he noticed that the Frenchmen were saying ‘daguerre’ rather a lot: it seemed that they were presenting a concern to Besson that he was brushing off. Clem knew that a balloon of that name had been launched earlier in the month from the Gare d’Orléans. When Besson came to the car he asked what had been under discussion.

  ‘Nothing of importance,’ was the aérostier’s reply. ‘Come, let us get inside. It will be easier to pack if we are in our places.’

  They both climbed in, squeezing between the ropes. There was barely enough room; the valve-cord dangled in Clem’s face, through the reinforced wooden hoop that anchored the netting. The basket itself seemed appallingly flimsy, making a really quite loud noise every time he or Besson moved.

  ‘It can’t be done, old man,’ Clem said – hoping ashamedly that this would lead to the mission being cancelled, or at least delayed by a day or two whilst a larger car was weaved. ‘We’re not going to be able to do it.’

  Besson wasn’t deterred. ‘Move that bag there,’ he instructed, ‘the one in the corner. I will lift in the tripod.’

  Clem bent down; the bag was immoveable. ‘I’ll try, but—’

  ‘Vive la France,’ said the aérostier, out into the square.

  Many voices, Nadar’s among them, repeated the slogan back to him. ‘Bonne chance, Monsieur Besson,’ someone called.

  The weight in the basket increased – a rapid doubling of gravity. Clem lurched forward; beneath him the wic
kerwork squeaked and shifted. He stood with difficulty, his legs straining. A half-sized Nadar, standing at the front of a similarly diminished crowd of sailors and officials, was kissing his hands and throwing them open in an operatic gesture of farewell. The square around them was contracting, shrinking in on itself. The Aphrodite was off and climbing fast.

  ‘You demon, Besson!’ Clem cried, clutching for the basket’s rim – and realising for the first time how bloody low it was – just over waist height, for Christ’s sake. ‘You – you damned villain! You pulled the old dentist’s trick on me! We were to go on three – but you yanked the bloody tooth on two, didn’t you!’

  Besson was unrepentant. ‘You were losing your nerve, I think,’ he said. ‘It was for the best.’

  They were six storeys up, seven – catching the wind, clearing the rooftops, moving out over Paris. The sound of the guns, of the eastward forts firing ahead of the morning’s sortie, grew louder as they rose from among the buildings. Clem closed his eyes and tightened his grip. He had an acute, sickening sense of the space yawning above them, its absolute endlessness, and the yards of empty air opening up beneath.

  ‘The Daguerre,’ he said. ‘What happened to it?’

  ‘The Prussians shot it down near Ferrières,’ Besson replied, prepared to talk now that they were away. He made a contemptuous sound. ‘You know how they adore their heavy guns. The Balloon Commission has heard that Herr Krupp, the German cannon-maker, has made a gun especially for shooting at our balloons. A compliment of a kind, no? It pivots, you see, like a telescope, so it can track a balloon, and is mounted on its own special cart.’

  Clem swallowed hard. ‘And you aren’t at all concerned by this?’

  ‘I know the risks of what I am doing, but I do not think we need to fear Herr Krupp. Not today.’ Besson breathed a sigh of liberation – of a man returned to his element. ‘You should open your eyes, Pardy. It is an unbeatable sight.’

  Gingerly, Clem lifted his eyelids and came very close to a dead faint. His knees buckled; he stumbled to his haunches. Outside the Aphrodite, beneath a glassy, silver-blue sky, was Paris in miniature – a model rendered in squares of slate, copper and sandstone, glimmering points of gaslight edging the main thoroughfares. The effect was stately, supremely ordered, the grand blocks, boulevards and starburst intersections like symbols in some monumental formula. As Clem watched, the Seine caught the first of the day’s sun; the whole length of the river exploded with light, engulfing its islands and reducing its bridges to a series of thin black lines.

  Besson glanced at the valve. ‘We are not high enough.’

  Clem was incredulous. ‘Look over there! Look!’ About sixty yards to their left was a woolly, golden shape. ‘That, Besson, is a bloody cloud. If I had a cricket ball I could hit the damned thing from here. How can you possibly say we’re not bloody high enough?’

  Besson shook his head. Any pleasure he’d been taking in their flight was gone. The fellow cannot stay satisfied, Clem thought; there is nothing he cannot spoil. The aérostier placed a boot on the rim of the basket and hauled himself up, clasping the netting hoop as he checked the valve. Then, after wrapping a rope around his wrist, he hung over the side, leaning at a diagonal so he could examine the envelope. The basket tipped horribly: Clem grabbed at the doctor’s bag; his heart expanded in his chest, squashing his lungs, hindering his breathing with its thick thuds. He stared at his companion in amazement, framed there against the winter dawn. This was no sailor, clambering on the rigging of his ship. Beneath a sailor was only the ocean, in which you could bob quite merrily until someone fished you out. If Émile Besson happened to lose his hold on the Aphrodite he’d be smashed to paste against the stones of Paris.

  Clem turned back to the view. The solitary golden cloud had moved, drifting away to the west. It was impossible to say how fast they were travelling. He could almost believe that they were stationary, simply suspended two thousand feet above the city streets. The Gare du Nord was already remote, though, its tubular roof disappearing in the haze of distance; and now the Aphrodite was passing over a large cemetery, the tomb-rows rising and falling across the roll of a hill. They were drawing close to the fortifications, to the limits of the capital. From the air these appeared impregnable; the Prussian decision to stay back and not chance an all-out assault seemed a sensible one indeed. Huge numbers of people were swarming in the lanes between the embankment of the circular railway and inside the enceinte – well-wishers there to see off the troops and be the first to hear news arriving from the battlefield.

  Besson slipped inside the car. ‘I cannot see anything, not from here.’ He plucked something from his moustache: a pellet of ice. Clem’s own whiskers were similarly matted. His nose, cheeks and even his forehead were totally numb. He rubbed his hands together, thinking to generate a bit of heat between his gloves and then put them to his face. It did nothing.

  ‘Look.’ Besson was pointing east, past the wall. ‘The army of General Ducrot.’

  Columns of soldiers and guns were forming up, preparing to launch their attack. For several minutes Clem watched them wheel about and march off through a bleak landscape of earthworks, swampy fields and decimated woods. It was a vast military diagram brought to life, a lesson in logistics and strategy played out before them. He honestly hadn’t expected to see everything so clearly. You could tell the line regiments from the militia; the field-guns from the mitrailleuses. He looked around, towards the centre of the city. That lone cloud was some distance back – and significantly higher up.

  Besson was at the valve again, standing on a mailbag this time. ‘I know,’ he said, guessing Clem’s question. ‘We are losing altitude. It should not be happening.’ He murmured something to himself in French. ‘We will be over the Prussians fairly soon, Pardy. You should get the camera ready.’

  Clem was aware that he was being given a job to stop him worrying, but found that he didn’t object to this at all. The two men worked silently on their different tasks until Besson jumped back to the floor of the basket. The wickerwork cracked loudly; Clem’s stomach flipped over like a performing dog.

  The aérostier was mystified. ‘I can find nothing wrong with this valve,’ he said. ‘Not even the smallest leak. The wind is good. We should be twice as high – twice as far. I do not understand it.’

  The two men looked at each other over the top of the Dallmeyer. They were going down over what would shortly be a full-blown battle. The descending balloon would be a magnet for Prussian fire. They were very probably going to die.

  ‘The ballast,’ Clem blurted.’ Surely we could jettison some bloody ballast.’

  Besson undid the buckle of his flying helmet, running through the possible causes of their predicament. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘not yet. Not until we are only fifty metres up. We might still rise. There may be some atmospheric explanation for this.’

  The Aphrodite crossed the wall, and a good portion of the French army. They seemed to be gaining speed as they got closer to the ground, whipping over a fort the shape of a Christmas star. All of its south- and east-facing guns were firing, the battlements lost beneath a white mantle of gunpowder smoke.

  Kneeling between two mailbags, Clem arranged a length of tarpaulin above him to create a cramped, improvised darkroom. They’d rehearsed this operation in the Gare du Nord and declared it viable. Now, though, in the sinking Aphrodite, it seemed positively ludicrous. At least twice the available room was required. It was too bloody cold to remove your gloves – and who could take a photograph in gloves? The silver nitrate, one of the hardiest stains there was, would spill over everything. And they were about to damn well crash, for God’s sake! What was the point of taking a photograph if the plate was to be destroyed along with the rest of the basket’s contents, the bloody photographer included?

  Clem stopped himself. He rested his hands on his thighs. This was not heroic thinking. Émile Besson, his companion and partner on this mission, was certainly not surrendering to despair. He ap
peared to be considering a leap up onto the netting, in fact, so he could climb around the side of the envelope. Clem thought of his mother, how she’d attempted to confine him to a hotel room to wait out the siege. If he was going to go down with the Aphrodite, he would take the best bloody aerial photographs in human history before he perished. He put in a focusing plate and dragged the Dallmeyer onto the edge of the basket.

  The photographer’s hood provided Clem with a momentary illusion of warmth and sanctuary; then he removed the lens cap and was presented with a crazy, plunging view of a battalion of French infantry, waving their kepis at the balloon as it glided overhead. He angled the camera up, towards the heights to the east. General Ducrot’s advance force was concentrating in a loop in the River Marne, beside an old stone bridge that linked the two halves of what had recently been a peaceful village. Three broad pontoon crossings were standing ready, a first wave of red-trousered Zoaves assembling before them.

  And up on the Villiers Plateau were the Prussians. Clem had been keen to set eyes on the besiegers after all these weeks, but actual sight of them brought only blackest foreboding. The view of their defences from the basket of the Aphrodite was startlingly clear: a loose system of earthworks, fortified farms, churches, and houses, populated by a serious amount of men and artillery. They knew what was coming from Paris and were fully prepared to deal with it. Clem perceived a number of traps – false outposts, hidden emplacements – designed to encourage the poor eager French to push forward and overextend themselves. Untouched by the bombardment from the forts, they were firing not a single shot in response. They were waiting, biding their time until their attackers had crossed an invisible line – a point of no return.