The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre (10 page)

“No more candles,” Louis said. “I can see her as well as I need to.”

“As you wish.”

Louis took out his paper and charcoal. He sat on the floor and spread the paper out on the footstool. He looked over at the windows where he and the dead girl swam in a reflection of candlelight. Outside, the river flowed dark and wide, and he wondered how many dead bodies were lying at the bottom of the Seine.

He put his first line on the paper, a curve that would become her hip and leg. He would leave her face until last and transpose the gash to the shadowy side of her face. The feeling in the pit of his stomach began to recede, and soon he lost himself to the problem of composition, to the trade-off between suggestion and clarity. Her hands were curled and he found the courage to touch her and straighten her fingers. There was a stiffness in her joints, but he managed to flatten the palms of her hands and lay them across her thighs. Her fingernails held river silt. Louis saw a flash of her in the murky Seine, an image of her climbing and raking through the brackish cold water.

By the time he was ready to sketch her face, two hours had gone by and Frederic had come in several times to inform him that he was free to leave whenever he wanted.

“I get the five francs from Marius after you’ve been here an hour,” Frederic said.

“I’m almost done,” Louis said absently. Without looking up, he reached into his pocket and held out a few coins.

Frederic took them and said, “Well, I’ve got to put her back in the cool room before long. I can’t have her sitting out here all night.”

Louis handed him the rest of the coins in his pocket. “Leave me alone and I’ll be done shortly.”

Frederic left the room. Louis reached up and moved a strand of hair from her cheek. She’d bitten her lip badly, and there was a speck of dried, russet-colored blood in the corner of her mouth. Louis would omit this detail from the portrait. The proof of her murder would not be in her gashes and bruises, but in the startled aspect of her face, in the martyred angle of her chin as it tilted towards heaven. Louis took his time with her eyes, sharpening his charcoal with his knife to ensure a good edge. Her features did not possess a deathly peace; her eyes suggested a lapse into troubled dreams, and her mouth was poised as if she might call out. Her lips were parted a fraction, just enough so that Louis could make out an edge of white tooth. That millimeter of space was the only suggestion that she had been alive, that her mouth had once moved—laughed, pouted, sung—because now it was a thing unhinged, a door that stood ajar between the living and the dead. Frederic came back a while later and stood insistently beside Louis.

“Outside it’s morning,” Frederic said. “I’m going home to sleep, and you have to leave.”

Louis looked down at the portrait. The lines and shadings depicted as much as they concealed. The girl was both solid and ethereal, both beautiful and terrible.

“Very well,” Louis said, standing.

Frederic looked down at the portrait. “That’s not her,” he said.

“She seems to be the only dead girl in the room.” Louis folded the drawing and placed it in his coat packet. He turned for the hallway. From behind he heard the sound of Frederic wheeling a cart into the exhibition room. He kept walking, eyes down, because he did not want to see Frederic heft the girl’s body like an animal haunch. The night watchman was smoking out on the front stoop when Louis opened the main doors. They stood there for a moment, neither of them speaking. The sun was coming up behind the tenements. They watched a wine barge pull slowly up the river.

Louis went down the stairs and made his way along the bank. The apprentices were nowhere to be found. He took the picture out one more time to look at it. Something in the defiant face and the upturned chin reminded him of Isobel. She was lost to him after all, as good as dead. He allowed her image to settle over him. He remembered her thin-boned feet and pictured them crushing grapes in some far-off vineyard. Her hands, her feet, these were objects in the world, no different than hinges on a door, but they seemed to him out of reach and utterly mysterious. He walked through the bustle of a Paris morning, imagining her feet stained muscatel. He watched the faces of passersby, looking for a smile to brim or a whistle to purse a set of lips, something to rally him back to the living.

When Louis arrived back at the theater, the boys were lined up in front of the main stage. The venerable Ignace Degotti, who kept a small apartment above the apprentice dormitory, was pacing before them in a silk bathrobe, his hands butterflying behind his back. As Louis entered, Degotti and the boys turned to face him.

“Ah, our illustrious
rapin
has returned for breakfast,” Degotti said. He continued to pad across the floor in his leather slippers, head down, his shock of white hair ablaze under the houselights. “Please line up with the rest of the boys, Monsieur Daguerre.”

“Yes, sir,” Louis said, falling into line.

Marius scowled down the row of boys, but Louis refused to make eye contact.

Degotti folded his arms, addressing Louis but looking at the floor. “Our head apprentice has told me that you went out last night without permission and that the entire class of apprentices went out in search of you. Is that correct?”

Louis hesitated. Marius and the other boys stared straight out at the balcony.

“I had an appointment to take a portrait, and this was the only time it could be done.”

“I see,” said Degotti. “You do realize, my country friend, that Paris is a city with millions of people and that half of those are pickpockets and murderers and the other half are whores and common thugs. Did it occur to you that going out in the small hours of the night might have been, what, a little unwise?”

Louis shrugged.

Degotti nodded slowly, his fingers forming a church steeple in front of his lips. “I’d like you boys to start your chores immediately. There will be no returning to bed, and if I catch any of you napping, you’ll scrub the pigeon shit off the rooftop.”

The boys began to file out of the theater, Louis among them.

“Monsieur Daguerre, you can come to my study,” Degotti said.

Louis stopped. A few of the boys patted him on the back as they walked by. Whatever the test had been, Louis had passed it. Degotti went out into the hallway and Louis followed.

Degotti’s study was a rummage of books and canvas at the top of a flight of stairs. It was filled with artifacts from a life of artistic pilgrimage—lapis lazuli and gold-leaf etchings from Spain, jade figurines from the Pacific, African tribal masks—but all these objects teetered against the walls or rose amid a pile of ink drawings splayed across his desk. Degotti sat in an ancient leather chair and gestured for Louis to sit down. The only other place to sit was an ottoman that was half concealed by scrolls of tracing paper. Louis perched on the edge of it.

“I’d like to see the portrait so special that it brought all of our apprentices out into the Paris night,” Degotti said.

Louis felt for the portrait in his coat pocket and slowly brought it out. He felt an odd and brief moment of betrayal, as if some secret he and the drowned girl had shared was about to be violated. He handed it to Degotti. The master painter took out his half-rim spectacles and held the portrait by the window. The sun had risen above the rooftops, and Louis could see the outline of the girl through the back of the paper. Degotti held the picture at different angles—flattened, then broadside—before resting it on his desk.

“Who is this girl?” he asked, still looking at the drawing.

“Dead, sir. A drowned girl at the morgue. She was quite beaten, but I didn’t want to show so many of the bruises. She had one gash, for example, on the side of her head.”

Degotti squinted. “The place where the neck meets the shoulders is wrong. When a head is tilted back like that, the neck is broadened. Also, the feet look too small in proportion to the hands.”

“I tried to draw what was before me.”

“No, you drew what you wanted to see,” said Degotti. “You tried to make a dead girl appear beautiful.” He looked at his fingernails.

“I thought she deserved to look beautiful,” Louis said.

“Are you sure the dead want our flattery? Look at this.” Degotti picked up the portrait and pointed at it. “The cheeks, the eyes, the way her mouth is poised, the way you allowed a shadow across her stomach and breasts to give her some modesty…the angles and the light, although flattering, are not possible.”

“I took some license,” Louis said.

“However, I have to admit it’s fairly remarkable. You managed to find something that was still alive in her.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Who said that was a compliment?” Degotti put his hands into the pockets of his bathrobe. “Do you know what a scenic painter does?”

“Paints the sets for dramas,” Louis said.

“Sometimes what we paint is the last thing Paris sees before she goes to sleep for the night, before people go to their dreams. But we don’t paint just for the sake of an arresting image—we must serve the drama. We must be able to paint the sea exactly as it appears during a storm or as somebody who is dying might remember it. We follow a vision larger than our own. I was asked once to paint a portrait of the pope in the Vatican. My instruction was to capture only that which was godly and stern. The portrait looked nothing like the man, but the Vatican paid me twice what I asked for.”

“I see.” But Louis had no idea what the point of the story was.

“Every artist must have the technique to first capture what he sees, then the vision to capture what he doesn’t see. And you seem to want to skip the first stage.”

“I’m sorry,” said Louis.

“No, you’re not. There’s arrogance in this kind of technique, a hunger.” Degotti cut his pale eyes across the desk at Louis. The old Italian had a habit of avoiding eye contact; he spoke to an undefined and shifting space before him. “Now,” he continued, “as to your punishment. It’s clear you need to be reined in, or soon you’ll be painting angels and wood nymphs when we ask for villagers and peasants. Each morning you’ll get up at four and start your day in the mixing room. You’ll be our master paint mixer and brush washer. When you can mix anything that I ask for and its hue is perfect, then we’ll consider that part of your apprenticeship to be over. You won’t paint a single inch of a set until you can provide the most distinguished palette in all of Paris.”

“I didn’t join the theater to mix paint,” Louis said, holding back the note of anger he felt gathering in his voice.

Degotti shifted his hands in his lap. “Take your portrait and go join the other boys.”

Louis stood and picked the portrait off the table. When he went out into the hallway, the apprentices were gathered at the foot of the stairs—all of them but Marius. Louis was holding the portrait in front of him, and one of the boys called for him to show it to them. Halfway down the stairs, Louis turned the picture to face them and they all looked at it in silence. When he reached the bottom, he delivered the portrait for closer inspection. The apprentices—teenagers from Provence and Burgundy, boys waiting to cross the threshold into manhood—stared at the delicately wrought flesh and bone of a drowned whore, and not one of them could think of anything funny or crude to say.

Light was different in Paris. Around Orléans it was green-tinged and full of lucerne haze, or it was saffron-hued from the flower and spice harvests, and these had the effect of softening the edges of things. The hills near Orléans were washed out by crop shimmer and distance; they stood perennially out of focus. Farmers thought they had myopia. But here, in the city, the light was hard-edged; it refracted off a million windows, sharpened by glazier’s sand—a yellowy-white powder from the riverbanks of the North. It was absorbed by masonry and alleys of brickwork. Paris light was complex and variable; it traveled in vectors, condensing here, refracting there, whitened by the aqueous mirror of the Seine, taking on greens and blues and reds in summer. As Louis took his walks in the spring, he tried to memorize the light and the effect it had on color.

At midday he saw the sunny splendor of the Tuileries Gardens, where men sat in lawn chairs, reading newspapers and magazines rented from a kiosk. He saw the diamond white of the glasshouses, where a three-hundred-year-old orange tree still hung with fruit. The shopwindows in this district were full of delftware—a cross between pewter and bone in broad daylight—and slabs of Belgian chocolate that stood as solid and brown as the earth itself.

He learned how to mix all these colors in the cold and damp of the theater basement. In the hours before dawn, he worked the vats of oils and tints, re-creating the strange metallic blue of the Seine in winter, or the umber of the tenements after rain. He learned to mix test swabs on the back of his hands, to spit in a batch of paint that was too clumpy, how to keep Degotti’s camelhair brushes in spirits for just the right amount of time. He did this for more than a year. When he took his walks after breakfast, his hands were calloused and there were specks of cobalt and sienna under his fingernails. He watched the day form in the shopfronts, in the avenues of glass and stone. Each day, between his paint-mixing duties and his house chores, he had several hours of leisure. He concealed this fact from the other boys and complained of his aching shoulders at breakfast. Marius—smelling of wood glue and tobacco—would nod smugly at these complaints and devise new chores for the
rapin.
Once a month Marius told the boys to line up their shoes around Louis’s bed and instructed Louis to clean them. Louis could imagine hurling the shoes out the window, but instead, he cleaned them each in turn, smearing a rag in shoeblack and buffing them to a shine. He wouldn’t let Marius unhinge him.

Degotti allowed this to happen, partly out of a belief that one should conceal talent from the young. Although he knew that Louis could make a startling vermilion from mercuric sulfide, that he could probably make the finest Moroccan turquoise in all of Paris, he was waiting for the moment when the arrogance he’d seen in the portrait of the dead girl would bring Louis storming out of the basement. He would not allow the boy to paint a set until Louis demanded it.