The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre

Praise for Dominic Smith’s lyrical debut

The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre

“[A] vibrant first novel… Smith has an artist’s eye and he gives Daguerre an artist’s heart.”

—Detroit Free Press

“Accomplished and impressive…Smith’s gifts as a storyteller and writer are obvious, sometimes overwhelming.”

—Baltimore Sun

“A striking meditation on memories and photography…You can read it and reread it…and still be struck, on every page, by an indelible detail or turn of phrase.”

—
Austin American Statesman

“Beautifully written…A compelling psychological study, a thoughtful tracing of the birth of a new art form, and an atmospheric portrait of nineteenth-century France: impressive on all three counts.”

—
Kirkus Reviews
(starred)

“A splendid novel. You don’t often see such a graceful command of historical detail in a first book. Or such striking and elegant prose. Dazzling and wondrous.”

—John Dalton,
author of
Heaven Lake

“What starts out as a feverish, dreamlike novel of lost love, apocalyptic visions, and the social upheaval of Napoleonic France turns into a quiet, remarkably moving study of how the human heart endures.”

—
The Portsmouth Herald

“Smith writes with the fastidiousness of a miniaturist, even the smallest details are intricately painted…each page promises uncommon and beautiful words.”

—
The Austin Chronicle

“[Dominic Smith] has conceived an engaging fictional account of Daguerre and his quest for lost love. He has the gift of acute characterization.”

—
The Advocate

“Blazes equally with drama and emotion…Informative and provocative,
The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre
makes for lively reading.”

—
The Roanoke Times

“An atmospheric journey through the city of light.”

—
The Poughkeepsie Journal

“Bohemian Paris is resplendent in this kaleidoscopic work of historical fiction.”

—
OK!
magazine

“Entertaining.”

—
Library Journal

“Evocative…Dominic Smith’s acute detail calls forth visions of a world and a man on the verge of transformation.”

—Ronlyn Domingue,
author of
The Mercy of Thin Air

“Endlessly thought-provoking…As haunting as a daguerro-type: true in details, but pesteringly strange; and as beautiful as if it were written not in words but in light.”

—Stephen Harrigan,
author of
The Gates of Alamo

“A lyrical journey into the world of a man lost to nostalgia and undone by beauty. Smith has generously rendered an artist in desperate pursuit of the sublime.”

—Paul Jaskunas, author of
Hidden

“Dominic Smith writes with an authority very few first-time novelists possess. He wonderfully evokes nineteenth-century Paris through a chemically addled consciousness—a formidable achievement that he manages with humor and grace. A remarkable debut.”

—Mark Jude Poirier, author of
Modern Ranch Living
and
Goats

“By the time it reaches its final pages,
The Mercury Visions
has become a genuinely moving experience.”

—Anthony Giardina, author of
Recent History

“Smith renders a clear-eyed portrait of Daguerre and his thinking, against a backdrop of tumultuous times.”

—
Publishers Weekly

Washington Square Press
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2006 by Dominic Smith

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

For information address Atria Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-5190-4
ISBN-10: 1-4165-5190-5

WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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For Mikaila and Gemma

Author’s Note

Although this is a work of fiction and the characters are inventions, I have borrowed details from the biographies of Charles Baudelaire, the poet, and Louis Daguerre, an early inventor of photography. Wherever possible (and expedient to the story) I have tried to capture the flavor of the real Daguerre’s life and the historical context in which he achieved his fame. There were several books that were invaluable for aiding this process:
L.J.M. Daguerre: The History of the Diorama and the Daguerreotype
(1968), by Helmut and Alison Gernsheim;
An Historical and Descriptive Account of the Various Processes of the Daguerreotype and the Diorama
(1839), by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre;
Dickens’s Dictionary of Paris
(1890), by Charles Dickens;
The Poem of Hashish
(1895), by Charles Baudelaire; and
The Hashish Club
(1971), by Théophile Gautier. I also found many of the articles and resources on the Daguerreian Society’s website (www.daguerre.org) to be useful.

Mercury vapors were used extensively by Louis Daguerre during his photographic career. His basic process was to expose a sensitized plate inside a camera obscura, take the plate into a darkened room, then pass it back and forth above a heated mercury bath. Millions of tiny mercury drops settled over the image, fixing it permanently. The presence of mercury gives metal-plate daguerreotypes their luster and minute level of detail, but it can also lend them a ghostly, holographic appearance. The image can appear to change based on the eye-level and perspective of the viewer. In later years, as Daguerre tried to minimize exposure times in an attempt to capture faster-paced movement (such as galloping horses and birds in flight) he experimented with increasingly deadly substances—cyanide of mercury, nitric acid, and gold chloride. Daguerre, who suffered from various physical complaints until he died of a heart attack in 1851, was probably unaware of how harmful such substances were.

Prologue

W
hen the vision came, he was in the bathtub. After a decade of using mercury vapors to cure his photographic images, Louis Daguerre’s mind had faltered—a pewter plate left too long in the sun. But during his final lucid minutes on this cold evening of 1846, he felt a strange calm. Outside, a light snow was falling and a vaporous blue dusk seemed to be rising out of the Seine. The squatters had set fire to the barrens behind the Left Bank and the air was full of smoke. Louis reclined in warm water perfumed with lemon skins, a tonic he believed to be good for his skin and nerves. The wind gusted under the eaves. He placed a hand against the adjacent window and from the bath, perched high in his rooftop belvedere, he felt the night pressing in against him. His head was partially submerged and he heard the metallic click of the tenant’s pipes below. It was a message; he was sure of it. The world was full of messages.

He sat up, wiped the steam off the window, and looked out. There was something ghostly about the boulevard in the wintry pall. The bare-limbed almond trees were flecked with snow. A nut vendor pushed his cart through the smoky twilight. A man stood before a storefront, staring at a pyramid of startling white eggs. Was he counting them? A man was counting eggs on a street at dusk while the peasants were trying to burn the city down. This pleased Louis, though he couldn’t think why. He leaned back in the bathtub again and heard, as if anew, the ticking of the pipes. He lay there, letting his mind go still, and became aware of his own heartbeat, the sound of a tin drum through water. This was the time of day he grew speculative or nostalgic, and he set to thinking that the pipes and his heart were talking to each other, exchanging notes in a secret, mechanical language. Then, as Louis watched the increments of darkness grow at the window, he heard his heart skip a beat. His chest tightened and he felt a dull, cold pain in his fingertips. This had happened before, a stutter in his pulse on account of the mercury in his blood. But he had never listened to it, and now his heart stopped for a full second. It was like a small death.

He felt something shift in the room. Holding on to the rim of the tub, he pulled himself to a standing position. He reached for a robe and put it around his shoulders but was unable to move farther. Looking around the washroom, he felt himself alien to his own life. Poison-blue bottles of iodine lined out the medicine shelf like Prussian soldiers; his straight razor stood agleam on the washstand; a flask of mercury shuddered on the sink. Everything seemed directed at
him.
He looked out the window and saw the moon rising behind a cloth of weather. An enormous albatross perched amid the stone gargoyles of Notre Dame. The peasants had looted the zoo, and all kinds of exotic animals had escaped. A Bengal tiger was said to be prowling the Latin Quarter. Louis saw that the barrens continued to burn, but now there was a barge loaded with firewood drifting down the river in flames. Night was everywhere. People had quit the streets except for the man counting the eggs. The man stood with his hands in his pockets, fingering his change.
The little life one leads.