The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre (12 page)

On his days off, Louis returned from his dance lessons or his evening walks to stand alone in the theater. While the apprentices slept above him, he brought up the houselights. Sitting in the front row, knees drawn to his chest, he stared out at the Tuscan panorama. Everything was in balance; the eye moved from one delight to another. He wanted to enter the panorama, to stand among the gilded trees. One night, as he engaged in this secret act of indulgence, Degotti shuffled into the theater. Louis anticipated anger at the misuse of the gaslights, but Degotti looked pensively up at the set. He nodded, cocked his head, then finally spoke. “A boy who paints this well is either in love with a woman or in love with the world. I hope for your sake it’s the latter.”

They stood there a moment, dazed by the Tuscan hillside, before Degotti slipped quietly from the room.

Louis could not sleep. He went back out into the overcast Paris night and found himself walking in the direction of Madame Treadwell’s mansion. Several afternoons a week, for months now, he had made love to the spinster in a mahogany bed that had been hauled across two oceans from Mozambique. While Rose and Audrey strained their minds around trigonometry in the courtyard with their new tutor, Louis and their great-aunt bedded each other with the pluck and technique of gymnasts. They never kissed. It was bed sport, an exchange of wills and pleasures. They spoke little, except to instruct the other. Tonight, when Louis showed up unannounced, Madame Treadwell looked both pleased and appalled. She led him quietly upstairs to the bedroom. She drew the curtains with a sense of ceremony, as if closing a country house for the summer. Louis took off his clothes, lay on the bed, and looked up at the ceiling.

Madame Treadwell lit a candle, undressed methodically, and began kissing Louis’s stomach. It was not so much tender as businesslike—a profusion of meager kisses, a bread-crumb trail that led to his groin. When she straddled him, Louis felt his mind go blank. It was this captive moment that he craved. He watched her above him, her eyes closed, a stray hand clutching at her own breast. He watched the sway and bob of their shadows on the ceiling. It made him think of the drowned girl from the morgue, of something rising through water. Suddenly, he wondered what that girl’s name had been.

A few moments later, Madame Treadwell stopped moving. He looked up at her. She unstraddled him and took his limp penis between her fingers. She held it the way a scullery maid might hold a kitchen mouse. “I can’t do much with this,” she said.

Louis felt himself redden with shame. “Sorry. I was daydreaming.”

Madame Treadwell stood and began dressing. “Do us both a favor and don’t ever come back to this house.”

Louis sat up in bed and reached for his clothes. He was surprised to feel a tremendous sense of relief. He stood for a moment in the doorway, watching her dress. Neither of them said goodbye. He descended the stairs and went outside. The streets were dark and empty. He moved among the neglected Right Bank mansions. For the length of several blocks, he had the sensation of being the only person alive in Paris.

At the end of his apprenticeship to Degotti, Louis, eager to try his talents on a larger canvas, accepted a job with the renowned panoramic painter Pierre Prévost. As a farewell present, Degotti allowed Louis to work on the scenic painting for Cherubini’s opera
Medea,
which was being staged at the National Opera House in the spring of 1807. Louis spent months painting sections of canvas—endless Greek statues and architraves—but was never permitted to see the completed set. Degotti had made Louis paint eight different versions of ancient Corinth, each time changing only the most minuscule detail—the width of a temple facade, the color of the rooftops.

On opening night, master and apprentice went to the opera together. From the exterior, the opera house resembled an elaborate train station—Waterloo Station with baroque swirls and turrets. But as they merged with the crowd of haircloth collars and chignons, Louis saw the rather drab lobby open into a cavernous temple. They had seats in the balcony, and from this vantage point Louis could take in the whole opera house—the musicians in the orchestra pit, their violins and oboes captured in small nets of light, the cantilevered balconies with their hooded archways suggesting grottoes.

Louis sat in his borrowed cape and watched the old aristocrats move to their seats, the paper-faced women in their burgundy gowns and jewels, the timber barons in their stovepipe hats. They chatted with vivid hand gestures and elaborate nods; money, it seemed to Louis, allowed one’s personality to expand. He watched them until the lights dimmed. The conductor raised his baton and the curtain lifted. As the proscenium opened, Degotti nudged Louis and showed him the program where
Louis Jacques-Mandé Daguerre
was listed as assistant designer. Louis whispered a thank-you to Degotti and turned to look at the stage.
I am part of this now.

What amazed Louis was the way the set had been married to the action. His own scenic rendering of Corinth—cypress trees diminishing into a red-sky horizon, flagstoned streets the color of tarnished bronze—looked like a bygone city. Degotti had told Louis to make it resemble “the museum of a city that once knew wealth and happiness,” and Louis had created suggestions of opulence from a previous era: corniced public houses, stone-cut steps, well-constructed battlements, but all of them strewn with ragweed and dulled by age. It was as if the city’s destiny had been poisoned by the murderous spells of Medea. The busts of Greek gods had been arranged in a semicircle, and as Medea threatened Jason and her children with murder, they were lit in such a way as to suggest ghosts floating through an ether. When Medea’s servant, Neris, delivered the poisoned diadem and cloak to the new bride, there came the sound of ringing bells, and Jason’s screams lifted from offstage. Then Jason’s tenor aria, a lament for his dead bride, surged as the Greek gods disappeared one by one and the stage was swallowed in shadow. The temple burned to the ground as Jason realized Medea had also killed his children. Midstage, an oxblood bolt of silk flowed across the steps. Columns toppled. The scenic depiction of Corinth—Louis’s montage of Greek masonry—was set to flame. Louis leaned forward, startled, then looked at Degotti. The Italian moved closer and said, “If I told you I was going to burn your work every night, you never would have painted the set.” Louis looked back at the stage and watched his canvas go up with the slow flames of paraffin. The audience was aghast; the sound of Jason’s voice mirrored the glimmering of the town, a long and undulant death wail. It was perfect and terrifying.

When it was over, Louis heard the sound of three thousand people standing to applaud. He watched the stagehands douse the set with water and blankets. Finally, he and Degotti stood in silence and went downstairs to the lobby. Louis walked in a half-trance, reliving key moments, gliding his hand against the banister, when he saw a striking woman standing with a man by the main entrance. It was Isobel, now in her early twenties. He felt his blood jump. Louis made his way to the bottom of the stairs, unable to take his eyes off her. She stood in profile and hadn’t seen him yet. The man she was with looked old enough to be her father. He noticed Louis staring and sidled towards the door, a proprietary hand at Isobel’s elbow. But something in the man’s gait made Isobel turn and look towards Louis. At first she did not recognize him, due to his additional height and heft, but then she must have seen him smiling. Louis pushed off the railing and began to walk towards her. He heard his heels on the marble floor and knew that tonight he’d been at the source of something great. He was smitten with his role in this grand conspiracy. Isobel was holding a program.
She saw my name, yes, and insisted on waiting for me.

He was a few feet away from Isobel when Degotti came shuffling across the marble in his Turkish slippers. Louis felt a flush of pride that three years after the night of watching the old mansion burn to the ground, he was now beside one of the most esteemed artists in the nation, emerging from an opera he had helped to design. Then the sheer weight of seeing her again. Her beauty was etched in; it no longer had the transient quality of a girl buoyed to loveliness by adolescence. She was still a middle-risen peasant girl, but there was now a veneer of gentility, and Louis realized in an instant that she had undergone her own apprenticeship these last few years. Someone with money, undoubtedly the gentleman at her side, had taken her under his wing. She was, after all, a maid at the opera.

“Isobel,” Louis said. That was all he could manage.

“I can’t believe it,” she said.

Louis turned to Degotti and introduced him, then Isobel introduced the man—Gerard Le Fournier, a banker from Lyons. Degotti, in a sudden display of loyalty to his apprentice, engaged Gerard in a serious conversation about commerce and art and led the stiff-backed banker outside. Louis and Isobel passed ten seconds of silence.

“There’s only so many times I can look at your shoes,” Louis said.

Isobel laughed and folded her arms across her gown. “When I saw you at the stairs, I wanted to run and kiss you.”

“I’d like to talk to you,” Louis said. “Are you living in Paris?”

“No, we just came in from Lyons for the opera. We’re staying at a hotel and returning in the morning.” She glanced out through the glass doors.

“Gerard is your—”

“Fiancé.”

Louis pitched his hands into his pockets. “There—I am looking at your shoes again,” he said.

There was more silence. Louis heard the echo of the ushers’ footsteps. Isobel adjusted her pearl necklace and shawl.

“Do you still carry dead butterflies in your pockets?” she asked.

Louis lifted out a coin and a piece of lapis lazuli. They both stared into his palm.

“I can find a way for us to speak. Can you meet me at a café at midnight?”

Louis nodded. “Café Senegal, near Pont Neuf.”

“I’ll wait for you there,” she said. She turned abruptly for the glass doors.

Louis walked slowly into the men’s washroom and splashed some cold water on his face. A man in a white linen vest appeared out of nowhere and commenced doing the same beside him, splashing the Seine up into his flushed face. Louis realized after a moment that it was the conductor, a Czech man with counter-sunk eyes. He stood before the silver-backed mirror and, without looking at Louis, said, “Did you enjoy the opera?”

Louis straightened his cape and said, “I painted the set.”

The man smiled and headed for the door, saying, “That’s funny, you don’t look like a seventy-year-old Italian.” The door closed and Louis stood before the mirror. He was growing a mustache and realized it looked terrible. He waited several minutes to avoid the spectacle of the banker from Lyons.

They met at the café. Isobel, still in her opera clothes, arrived flushed and a little breathless. Louis sat at a table outside, rolling the piece of lapis lazuli in his hand. He watched her approach. She still had a flat-footed walk, and she held one arm at a slight angle, as if it might be injured.

“Is your arm broken?” Louis said.

She sat, shook her head. “When I saw you at the opera, I thought you were a gendarme. You’ve broadened.”

“Good, we’ve exchanged our first insults. Now we can talk. And I don’t think I can bear to sit here. Shall we walk?” he said.

“Yes,” Isobel said, standing. She took his arm and they headed towards the Pont Neuf. The streets were still busy with theatergoers and cabaret crowds siphoning out towards the river. Louis composed routes in his mind. By now he knew the city as only a daily pedestrian could—the secret courtyards where widows grew their antique roses, the view of Notre Dame from the barrens, its Gothic silhouette against the skyline—and he wanted to show her passageways and shortcuts, evidence of his time here. Paris was a city of warrens, of escape routes. He could feel her gloved hand at his elbow, the hand pressure one reserves for dancing.

“I’m tremendously proud of you,” Isobel said. “You still seem like a boy to me but you’re not. Look at you.”

“I’m nineteen,” Louis said. He felt a moment of condescension approaching. He warded it off by taking her hand and helping her across a loosened plank. “There’s so much to catch up on,” he said.

“Tell me everything first. You must be outrageously talented. I saw the set. My God, Louis, people were mesmerized by the temples.”

Louis found her speech affected. “People are easily mesmerized,” he said.

“If you’re going to be falsely modest, I’ll leave right now. You must be very happy.”

“Thrilled,” he admitted.

They stood on the apex of the Pont Neuf and looked down at the Seine. It was dark with field runoff, and at the base of the bridge there were eddies of flotsam—twigs of straw and wine corks in a brownish foam. He would kiss her. That thought hummed at the base of his spine. These three years had led to this, to kissing Isobel by the Pont Neuf after midnight. She leaned against the railing of the bridge.

“I’ve thought a great deal about you these last few years,” she said.

“Me as well. I tried not to, but you’ve cursed my mind.”

“That estate near Orléans was enchanted, even if he was enslaving us. Sometimes I think liberty is a waste of time.”

“Is that why you’re getting married?”

His question lived in the air for a long time. She pulled her shawl around her and turned her back on the river. “I met Gerard after working in a vineyard. They were horrible people, I can’t tell you. Mean-spirited. They made me scrub the vats until my hands bled. I went to Lyons penniless and tried to get employment as a governess. Gerard is a widower and his wife had died from consumption. He placed an advertisement looking for a maid to cook and clean.”

Louis could not look at her. “And now you’re betrothed and attending the opera together. I suppose you found exactly what you always wanted. A man with more money than talent. Someone to let you dabble in plants and herbs. Voltaire said people do not change.”

“Voltaire also said weakness on both sides is the motto of all quarrels.”