The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre (11 page)

In his hours of leisure, Louis began preparing for life as a gentleman. He took dance lessons in a studio in Montmartre. He sat alone in the bohemian cafés where actors and poets gathered. He made lists of writers and philosophers as he followed the thread of an argument. On a hilltop behind the barrens, he read the letters of Saint Augustine, the allegories of Plato. On the last Sunday of each month, he wrote to his parents. These letters were full of long passages about the cafés and the river spilling light. He trained his handwriting to be beautiful—a convent nun’s hand, the hooped and fluid cursive of feminine devoutness. Louis’s father wrote back with an economy of style and ink, chronicling the weather in Orléans and speculating that Louis had fallen in with gypsies and vagabonds.
No,
Louis wrote back,
I am preparing for a great and serious life in the theater.

And he felt that life gathering in small gestures and moments. In the smile that rushed across a woman’s face as he bade her good morning, in the streets brimming with exotic fruits and flowers. One autumn evening, he spoke to a table of serious-minded poets at his regular café. They stared at him. He was seventeen, tall and lean, with a dozen specks of paint on his hands and clothes, and they took him for a seasoned artist from the neighborhood. They had been discussing the idea of absolute truth. Louis said, “There are infinite shades of blue, but there is only one that is the primary blue. Surely truth is no different.” At first several of the men scoffed and glowered at their mugs of beer, but later, Louis was brought a glass of wine compliments of the poets. He drank it and felt something light in his chest. He thanked them on the way out and they called him
little brother.
The rest of the day he dreamed of his future self—a young man in a vest, a painter and philosopher, someone who could dance a waltz and a jig, who could tell a joke and recommend a restaurant. But each time this excitement for a vibrant future ended with an ache for Isobel. He saw an image of Isobel on a daybed, curtains aflutter in a sun-dappled room. He saw a wooden house in the country, children playing in an orchard. And he wondered who had fathered these phantom children.

More than anything, he wanted to be rid of the penance of these images. Midway through his apprenticeship, still mixing paint in the basement before dawn, Louis decided to seek out the company of women. He did not want love; he wanted distraction. Initially, he frequented venues where he was bound to find young women with lamentable scruples. He went to provincial hall gatherings and market soirees on the fringes of Paris, to cabarets in the Carousel District. He did not approach the most beautiful of the young women he encountered—that rare class of beauty which had found its way into a shopkeeper’s family like an embezzled diamond. Instead, he circumnavigated the venue and looked for a flaw that drew him in: a narrow gap between the teeth, a widow’s peak pointing down like an index finger, excessively thin lips, distended elbows, pigeon toes. These traits aroused his curiosity; he thought they might be signposts, as if a woman with gapped teeth might be prone to self-doubt and pity, as if thin lips might betray a poverty of the spirit. He wanted to solve the riddle of imperfection.

He kissed a girl named Matilde—a sea merchant’s daughter with a mealy mouth—in the halo of a gas lamp outside the Institute for Deaf-Mutes in the second arrondissement. In the cheery lantern light of a dance hall, he held hands with Claire, a nut vendor’s daughter. The girl would not kiss him and talked incessantly about the wood pigeons she fed slivered almonds each morning. Then came Rose and Audrey, two English cousins visiting their spinster great-aunt on the Right Bank.

Degotti, in an attempt to jump-start Louis’s ascent, had arranged for him to give drawing lessons to the girls. Louis was delighted to augment his apprenticeship with a few extra francs. He borrowed better clothes and showed up at the spinster’s mansion with his camelhair brushes and inks and charcoals, a purple cravat ablaze around his neck like some tropical bird. He was shown into the large drawing room, where a white spitz slept on a large divan. The walls were mounted with bear heads and oil paintings of British admiralty. Madame Treadwell, the spinster aunt, came into the room a short time later.

“I imagine you are the art tutor,” she said in superb French. She was tall for a woman and still rather young to live under the weight of the title
spinster.
She sat opposite Louis, petting the white dog on the divan. She spoke with her eyes down, as if to the cur. “There will be no drawing of nudes, do you hear me? I am rather interested in perspective and should like my nieces to learn the structural aspects of drawing. I assume you are versed in all the foundations?” She looked over at Louis as if in afterthought.

“Yes,” said Louis, “all the basic principles.” The truth was he drew and painted mostly on instinct.

Madame Treadwell allowed herself a smile. She took out a cigarette and smoked it while divulging stories of her childhood days in Africa, mentioning three times that her father hunted leopards and bushmen in the same afternoon. Louis realized, after an hour, that he was being held captive in the room. Several times she got up and took a drink of brandy at the side cabinet. She stood at the window, waving smoke from her hand as she gestured. There was something sibylline in her carriage and bearing, a glazed and diaphanous look to her eyes, as if she might be plagued by communiqués from the dead. After some time she leaned close to Louis and said, “You may go and conduct your first lesson, monsieur.”

The butler—undoubtedly British, to judge from his jowls and melancholic eyes—reappeared and showed Louis out into a courtyard where two girls sat before easels like repairing aristocrats in a Swiss valley.

“We’d all but given up on you,” said the shorter one. Her French was atrocious; she sounded nauseated.

“I was being interviewed,” said Louis.

“Seduced, more like it, if I know anything about my aunt,” said the taller girl. She placed her accents on the wrong vowels.

They introduced themselves. The taller one—a seventeen-year-old girl with a mole on the side of her neck—was Audrey. The shorter girl was Rose, a pale-faced delight, the skin around her neck and shoulders so white it was luminous. She sat beneath an epic sunhat.

“What are you going to teach us?” asked Audrey.

“Perspective,” said Louis.

“I should think the French know very little about that subject,” said Rose. Audrey offered a well-timed giggle.

Louis wanted the fifteen francs he’d been promised and refused to be baited. “Well, ladies, let us draw the confines of this courtyard, using all the rules of proportion. First we will draw a grid on our blank paper,” he said flatly. The young ladies reluctantly turned to their easels.

This appointment continued for the better part of six months and led to a three-part addition to Louis’s romantic experience. Audrey told him to kiss her one day when Rose had taken ill with a cough. Audrey said she was going to kiss a Frenchman before she went back to England, and it might as well be him. Louis complied. It was a dry-mouthed, brief affair that sent Audrey into the house chuffed. Two weeks later, Rose said she knew of the illicit kiss and threatened to tell the aunt if he did not repeat the favor with her. Louis obliged with a kiss, and he would have gladly unfolded many more across the veiny riverbed of her neck. But she stopped him, walked towards the house, then returned and put her hand inside his trousers to the count of ten.

“If you move or touch me, I will scream,” she said. “My aunt is taking her nap and she so hates to be disturbed.”

Louis stood with one elbow on an easel while Rose’s hand gripped him. He felt faint and slightly sick to his stomach. He walked home that evening, his desire groaning like an ale press, and for a day he failed to think of Isobel and was thankful. He pictured Rose in a thousand different ways. When he returned to the mansion, he was told that Madame Treadwell had summoned him. Louis went upstairs and found the woman reclined on her bed, a cigarette wafting from a limp hand.

“From now on the girls are going to be studying mathematics instead of art,” she said.

“I see,” said Louis. “Have you been unhappy with my services?”

“Come in here, Louis, and close the door.”

Louis obeyed. He could smell brandy beneath the tobacco.

“I’m going to do something for you that should have been done some time ago. I thought they treated this kind of thing in a civilized city like Paris. My God, there’s a mademoiselle of the night everywhere you look.” She sat up on her bed and placed her hands on his shoulders. “How old are you, Louis, and don’t lie.”

“Almost eighteen,” Louis said.

She began unfastening his pants and removing the plumage of his cravat. She moved without hesitation or lust, the look of a simple chore on her face, as if she might be portioning a teacake for guests at a party. Louis found it hard to breathe. He was standing naked, a foot from the bed. He became aware of his knees.

“Now, don’t be anxious. Lie down and get under the sheets. We’ll take a little nap together.”

Louis found himself obeying. The faint smell of down came from the pillows. Then came the surprise of her hand beneath the white bedsheet. He felt as if his chest were going to explode. “In general, a gentleman who looks intently up at the ceiling or at the weave of a rug might find a way to delay climax. This will prolong the pleasure, if you receive my meaning.” Her speech and her hand were mismatched—her languorous voice defied the steady stroke of her fingers. After several minutes she guided Louis on top of her. Louis felt the odd moment of perfection as she gave way beneath him. Something in the room crystallized and he looked her dead in the eyes, startled, for the first time. The fear was gone; whatever power she’d held on account of her wealth, age, and parentage evaporated in this one cleansing moment. They were both surprised by his vigor. He did not study the fleur-de-lis in the ceiling or the faint roses of the rug; he studied the lines in her face, the blemishes that came with a decade of resignation to a childless middle life, and it was pity that kept him on top of her for two hours. They made love until they were sweaty and exhausted and sore about the joints.

Afterward, Louis walked home, jaunty and light on his feet. He returned to the theater to find an assemblage of scuffed footwear around his bed. A note from Marius read
Clean enough to eat off.
Louis looked down at the shoes—boots with lopsided heels, shoes with ragged leather tongues, the footwear of provincial chumps who fancied they could paint. He kicked the shoes under his bed and went to find Degotti. The Italian was sitting in his study, door open, slippered feet up on the desk, nursing a cup of coffee.

“I’ve come to tell you that I wish to leave the theater,” Louis said. He was surprised by the forceful tone of his voice.

“And why is that?” Degotti said, a half-smile on his lips.

“Because I didn’t come to Paris to clean shoes and mix paint for boys who have half the talent that I have.”

Degotti said nothing for a moment. He pointed at the empty chair with his chin. Louis, his hands curled and his shoulders tense, took a moment to uncoil and sit.

“There’s a mountain village outside of Sienna where the women go to bed with volcanic mud on their faces. They say they dream of Vesuvius and wake without wrinkles. I spent a summer there hauling buckets of pigment out of caves, just so I could capture the color of the clay on their faces. I didn’t paint a single picture all summer. I hauled the clay back to Rome. Then, months later, I woke at three in the morning and began a painting of the women, and it became my most celebrated work. A painter needs to know when not to paint.”

Louis said, “I can’t stand it any longer. I have to paint. I can create the most delicate shade of blue, but then some halfwit from Dijon slaps it on the canvas like it’s wallpaper glue.”

Degotti smiled. “I’ve been waiting over a year for you to come bursting in here.”

Louis felt a flush of anger in his cheeks; everything in this theater seemed orchestrated for his belittlement. “I want to leave and join another theater.”

Degotti folded his arms. “Without my letter of recommendation, that would be very difficult. I will be happy to let you go, but first you have to paint me a set. It’s only fair, after I’ve invested in your education.”

Louis looked down at the floor.

Degotti added, “As you paint the set, you will answer only to me.”

“And I won’t clean another shoe the rest of the time I’m here?”

“Agreed.”

Louis allowed himself a smile; the spectacle of a whitewashed canvas fifty feet across came to him. He stood and left the room before the image evaporated.

Louis’s first stage design was for a drama set in Tuscany. There was a village surrounded by a wall, olive groves hemmed in by cypress. He worked twelve hours at a stretch, until his eyes ached from the close work of foliage. Degotti was true to his word, and nobody tried to instruct Louis except the master himself. He spoke to Louis in a vague, personal shorthand, asking him to silver the clouds or shimmer the treetops. Louis understood the effects Degotti had in mind, the way movement and shifting light could be implied by brushwork. For a year he’d walked the Paris streets with his eyes squinted so as to reduce the world to swaths of color and light.