The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre (19 page)

“Niépce is a funny old bird,” said Vincent. “Retired he is, though from what, nobody can recall. Comes in here, and we make him camera obscuras and lenses, and then he does the rounds of the neighborhood. Goes across to the apothecary and the grocer and bundles home in a carriage to Chalons-sur-Saone and pays everybody with small franc notes and coins, like he’s an old miser raiding his coin jar.”

“That is strange,” said Louis. An intuition rose up in him, a startled hunch. “Gentlemen, please excuse me. I must be on my way.”

“No lenses for you today, then?” asked Charles hopefully.

“No, thank you, Charles.” Louis was already out the door and heading into the neighborhood. He ran across the street to the apothecary and entered. It was a maze of ceiling-high shelves with small wooden boxes lined out, each of them labeled.

“Morning,” said the puglike man behind the counter.

“Hello,” said Louis. “I wonder if you can help me.”

“Are you sick?” asked the man, resting his fleshy hands on the counter.

“No, no. I have a friend who comes in here quite often. Monsieur Niépce.”

The apothecary gave a quintessentially French shrug.

“You don’t know him?”

“Not from a wheel of cheese.”

“He comes in here perhaps once a month, and he always has a lot of coins about his person.”

Now the man nodded, chuckled. “And he keeps a purse around his neck on a lanyard?”

“Yes.”

“What about him?”

“Well, he can’t come to town just at the moment, and he has sent me for his usual supplies.”

“I thought he was off to London.”

“Delayed,” said Louis.

“How much of it?” The man sniffed the air, relishing the simplicity of small commerce.

“Ah, let’s see, what does he usually get?”

“A jug.”

“Well,” said Louis, all levity, “a jug it is.” He could feel his hands mist the counter with sweat as the pugish fellow moved around. He returned and placed a heavy ceramic jug on the counter.

“Thirty francs, that is,” said the apothecary.

Louis placed fifty francs on the counter. “What is the name of this stuff, anyway?”

“Can’t you smell it? They say oil of lavender will raise poets from the dead.”

“Of course.” He lifted the cork and took a heady whiff. What came to him was not poetry but the lavender-scented water Isobel used to soak her poultices in when they had lived outside of Orléans. So this was Niépce’s fixing agent—perfumed flower oil. It seemed too romantic to be true. He replaced the cork, picked up the jug.

The apothecary tapped at the counter. “Don’t you also want the bitumen of Judea?” he asked.

Louis stood in place, nodding. “Yes. How silly of me. Niépce would be very cross.”

The man placed a cloth bag of the powder on the counter. Louis took his change, a colossal smile on his face, and left the store. Outside, the wind had died and the light was dazzling.

The letters between Niecéphore Niépce and Louis Daguerre were perfectly cordial—full of phrases like
in conformity with your aspirations…our mutual gain…with the certitude of science and goodwill.
It was Louis Daguerre who wrote the first letter, galled after a series of failed attempts to duplicate the pewter-plate helio-graph. He had confessed to the Chevaliers of his experiments and asked for Niépce’s address. The brothers gave out the address and within a week had briefed Monsieur Niépce, recently returned from London, on Louis’s work. It was no coincidence that Vincent and Charles Chevalier invented the Parisian spyglass that year.

The letters went back and forth in a kind of chess game. The writers hedged the Latinate names of minerals and salts, the techniques that issued tone and shade. Niépce divulged that he came from money and had trained for the priesthood before sacred orders were abolished under Napoleon. He was now a full-time inventor and was working on many projects, including a patent for his method of extraction of dye from the woad plant; he hoped this would prove profitable in the face of a continentwide indigo shortage. Niépce said his interest in heliography was primarily to improve lithography, his longtime passion. Louis cared little for the man’s biography or motivation and wrote back more candidly;
Did the English show interest in your near-consummate technique? Alas,
Niépce wrote back,
they seemed uninterested. And I met another man in pursuit of a similar method of sun drawing by the name of William Henry Fox Talbot. He sensitizes paper and places it in a camera obscura, but to very little effect. Still, it shows promise.
This sentence made Louis feel ridiculous; he had imagined for a time that his manipulations with the camera were unique. Now there were at least two other men attempting to harness its powers. He returned to his studio in earnest, taking his meals there, and refused to tend any quotidian concerns for months on end. He went back to earlier methods and tried a broad range of chemicals for fixing. Progress was slow and erratic. The letters continued, both men trying to convey that they were more baffled than they actually were. At least three men in Europe now knew that the missing ingredient in photography was the primary fixing agent—the solution that would emblazon the latent image permanently to the plate. And they were all doing it with different motivations: Niépce was trying to improve lithography, Talbot was trying to make up for a deficiency in his drawing ability, and Louis was trying to trap nature. But he was also trying to punish the world, and Isobel, with his fame.

Thirteen

L
ouis Daguerre drove his carriage through the streets towards Pigeon’s flat. It was autumn and the leaves had turned, all gold and wine, and the wind cast them through the alleys like dazed butterflies. Pedestrians—bundled and shawled—sloped into a headwind. The sky hung a high, pale blue. Everything felt cleansed, emptied, the windowpanes a little aqueous in the early morning. The omnibus rang throughout the city, empty and glassine. Paris was on the verge of something.

Louis now had a very clear portrait of Pigeon in mind. A full-plate daguerreotype depicting a nude with her back partially to the camera. There would be nothing sexual about her womanliness—a swath of flesh caught up in sunlight, shadows in the hollows of her back, perhaps the amorphous suggestion of an amber-tinted breast. Staring away from the camera, she would lend an ambiguity to the end of womanhood.
As long as she faces away from the camera she will remain anonymous, an artifact of the end.

Louis turned in to Pigeon’s street and noticed a cat in a bakery window passively taking in the world. He smiled at it; the rescued dog had given him a feeling of communion with animals. Paris was full of cats, he realized, who held that aloofness of looking down from a height. But mostly they were asleep in wine and cheese-shop windows, Angoras curled and impervious to grief or happiness. They were silent witnesses, spies of the apocalypse. Louis suspected that cats, like the souls of the dead, could not be photographed.

At eight o’clock on a Sunday morning, Louis stopped his carriage beside the whorehouse with the wide veranda. He was the only moving figure in a street whose daylight hours were reserved for a long, slow ascension from excess. He tied his horses to a hitching post and unloaded his apparatus. Among the many objects were a zinc camera obscura, a wooden tripod, two silver-plated copper sheets, two small phials—one of olive oil and the other of nitric acid—a flask of mercury, a box of carded cotton, a pumice stone in a muslin bag, a wire frame, and a spirits-of-wine lamp. He placed these items on a small dolly he’d made from a wheelbarrow and approached Pigeon’s ground-floor apartment. He knocked loudly on her door. There was no answer, so he moved to the front windows and rapped. He peered inside.

Pigeon dragged herself from bed, suspecting that a drunken soldier had mistaken her window for the brothel. Still in her cotton nightdress, she pulled back the curtains to reveal Louis Daguerre, flask of mercury in hand, hair tousled by a windy carriage ride, flat-nosed against the plate glass, peering through the gossamer curtains. Startled, Louis visibly jumped back a step and dropped the flask of mercury. The flask shattered, and beads of mercury rolled across the footpath. Louis struck the air with his fists, settled into a burst of violent coughing, cursed and head-bobbed as he attempted to collect the mercury with his hands. To Pigeon, on the other side of the glass, this was a dumb show of lunacy.

She grabbed her dressing gown and came out onto the front stoop, then down to where Louis was on his hands and knees.

“Monsieur Daguerre?” she called.

Louis stood but could not look at her. He held his hands in front of him. Splinters of glass and pinheads of blood shone from his hands. His eyes were unnaturally blue, the vivid blue of illness.

“My God, your hands,” she said.

Louis looked down at them. A bead of mercury rolled back and forth in one cupped hand.

“Come inside, please. I’ll bandage them,” she said.

“You’re not dressed,” he said, addressing the street.

“It’s still early, and I danced all night. I told you to come in the afternoon.”

Louis nodded seriously at the word
dance.
Finally, he looked at Pigeon. Her hair was down, resting and curled against her collarbones.

“My barrow,” he said. “I can’t leave it out here.”

“Wait a minute,” said Pigeon, disappearing into the apartment. When she returned, she carried a towel and handed it to Louis. He wiped some of the blood from his hands and walked over to his equipment. With his right hand—the left was augered with glass shards—he delicately pulled the barrow towards Pigeon’s front door. She held the door open for him and he wobbled it slowly inside. Her apartment was sparse: two rooms, a stove and wooden table in one corner; through a bedroom doorway, her unmade bed on wooden posts.

Louis stared down at his hands. He did not like the sight of his own blood. “I’m afraid your towel will be ruined.”

“Let me get the glass out. Come over to the window, where the light is better.”

Louis followed her to the window and held out his hand. She took him by the wrist and studied his palm. The small tributaries of palm lines and mercury-tinted blood made Louis think of deltas, of drained waterways.
Time is running out.
Pigeon wiped his hand with the towel. His hand was now relatively bloodless and Pigeon began to pick out the shards of glass. After placing several wedge-shaped pieces into her dressing-gown pocket, she laughed. Her head was down, but Louis could see her small white teeth under the rim of her mouth.

“You looked like a madman at my window,” she said. “I thought you were a drunk midshipman.”

“I must have looked a fright.”

“There’s a piece I can’t get. Right here.” She pointed to the heel of his hand, where the head of a glass shard shimmered. Louis reached inside his waistcoat and retrieved the paring knife he used to scratch powder from pumice stone. He handed it to Pigeon.

“I don’t know that amputation is called for,” she said.

Louis looked up from his hand.
Ah, yes, a joke.
He forced a smile to his lips. “Would you like me to do it? It needs some digging around the flesh.”

Pigeon nodded at the window. “Look out at the street while I do it. Watch for sailors going home or widows hocking their gold.”

Louis obeyed and stared outside. He was heartened by the sight of a few people emerging from doorways, dressed in their Sunday best. He had never been much for churchgoing, but he was comforted by those with devoutness, moved by the sound of vesper bells calling them inside a church. Louis felt the paring knife gouge his hand, but the pain came slowly, like an aftertaste.

“I need my hands,” he said.

She held the bloody piece of glass between two fingers. “I think that’s the last of it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to dress.” She turned and walked towards her boudoir.

“I’ll go check on my horses,” he said.

“As you wish.”

He went outside and rinsed his hand with a water bottle he kept in his carriage. He dried his hands on a horse blanket and adjusted the straps of his gig. Several minutes passed before he tapped gently on Pigeon’s door. When she opened it, she was dressed in a crinoline dress that fluted out from her hips. Holding his left hand palm up like a beggar, he came inside and unloaded his apparatus, placing the various items on the kitchen table.

“Would you like some coffee?” she asked.

“As long as it doesn’t have any hashish in it.”

They both laughed at this and she moved towards the stove. She said, “I don’t think I’d ever do that again. I had chills for a week after.”

“I consider myself a scientist as much as an artist, and that was not science,” Louis said, placing the phials beside each other.

“And this is science? Asking strangers to pose naked for you?”

“I’m a student of light,” Louis said.

“And a poet.”

“No, I leave that to Charles Baudelaire. My job is to capture things before they disappear.”

“Am I going to disappear, Monsieur Daguerre?”

“No, I meant—capture things in their essence.”

She threw pure coffee grounds into the pot. Louis was a little surprised that a whore could afford coffee without chicory. Without turning around, she said, “And what is my essence?”

He carefully lifted the spirits-of-wine lamp out of its case, taking his time to reply. “I don’t know until I see it on the copper plate.”

Pigeon brought him a cup of coffee. She had brushed her hair, but it was still down—perhaps she had photogenic ideas of her own. He tried not to stare at her; the past was trapped in her flesh. He dusted the two plates with the fine powder of pumice, then swabbed them with carded cotton and olive oil. Next he rubbed some nitric acid in a circular motion across both plates.

“Who makes the photo drawings—you or the sun?” Pigeon asked.

“You might say we are partners. Is the stove still alight?”

Pigeon nodded. He inserted each plate into a wire holder and took them over to the stove. He ran the plates, silver coating faceup, back and forth above the hot burners for several minutes. “This works even better than the spirit lamp,” he said. He brought the plates back to the table and repeated the coating with pumice dust and acid. “Now, once we’re ready, I’ll set up the camera on a tripod and expose the plate to iodine.” There was little fussing left to do. There came a silence.