The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre (20 page)

“Your coffee is getting cold,” she said.

“Yes, of course.” He took up the china cup and drank. “A room that is too warm will adversely affect the image.”

“Is it too warm in here?”

“Perhaps.”

“Of course, I won’t have any clothes on.”

A slight bristling at the back of Louis’s neck. “For the briefest of time. I’m hoping for a short exposure.”

“How long?”

“A few minutes, at the most.”

“That’s an eternity for a naked woman.”

He looked into his coffee cup; a murky brown eye stared back at him. “And you must remain very still,” he said to the cup.

Now he looked down at the wide floorboards. Her apartment had no smell and there were few personal effects. She tapped at the edge of the wooden table.
The money,
he thought. He reached inside his coat, then stopped. Should he pay before or after? He didn’t want to insult what dignity she might have remaining.

“Mademoiselle, I am most grateful for this opportunity. You will go down in the galleys of history.” He winced from the sound of his own voice and placed a hundred francs on the table.

She pretended not to notice and took another sip of her coffee. “Are you ready?”

Louis bit at his mustache.

“Don’t worry. I have posed for some drawing classes and I am quite comfortable with the procedure of removing my clothes.”

The
procedure
? “I see.”

“In my bedroom?”

He looked at the poison-blue bottle of iodine. “How is the light in that room?” He made it sound clinical, a doctor’s inquiry—
How is the fever?—
even while blood jumped through his limbs.

“There’s a window that overlooks the alley. At this time of the day, it’s quite bright.”

“Very well, then.”

“I’ll go and position myself.”

“Yes, fine. With your back to the window.”

She left the room and Louis wiped his brow with his kerchief. He fumbled with the cork of the iodine bottle. He poured a small amount into the camera chamber and fixed a plate inside to prepare it to receive light.
This is science; fasten your mind to that.

“Very well, then,” he said audibly.

“Pardon?” she called from the bedroom.

“I said nothing.”

“I’m nearly ready. Crinoline is the curse of the Parisienne.” The sound of her undressing; waves of crinoline. He felt a searing in his cheeks that made him wonder if he’d gotten some nitric acid on his face. He performed a mental inventory of equipment: gauze, camera, tripod, plates. She called from the bedroom. The words were unintelligible, a piping cheeriness. He picked up the tripod, the camera and the plates, and walked delicately towards the bedroom. In his peripheral vision, he could make out her outline on the bed.

He set the tripod down and attached the camera to it. In a minute, he would have to adjust the unpolished glass to set his focus. There was no way to avoid looking at her. He looked up at the ceiling: a cheap fleur-de-lis was embossed in the molding. He thought for a moment of afternoons in bed with Madame Treadwell.

“In a moment, mademoiselle, I will insert the plate and find my focus.” He sounded to himself like a stage magician.

“What position should I assume?” she asked.

“You may cover yourself while I make some adjustments. If you’d be more comfortable.”

“Would you be more comfortable?” she asked.

“It’s of no consequence to me,” he lied.

He tightened the small tourniquets that held the copper plate in place and sealed the camera. “You would be surprised to know, mademoiselle, the intricacies of light in making the daguerreotype. The exposure time varies by latitude, time of day, and season. Paris outside in June at two in the afternoon may require a minute or two. Whereas Rome in August at noon may require thirty seconds. Do you see the proposition?”

“Should I be on my stomach or back? Sitting, perhaps.”

“Your back must be towards the camera, and you should look at something on the opposite wall.”

He craned down to adjust the focus glass. In his line of sight sat Pigeon, backlit by the light from the alley window, a naked white shoulder rising from the bedsheet she used as a shawl.

“I need the light to come in from the side. Could you turn and face the other wall?”

She swiveled her body to accommodate. Louis moved the camera and looked once again. The cut of her white shoulders; a net of hair on her neck.

“And what if you make a sun drawing at noon in the North Pole in December?” she asked.

“I would grow into an old man while holding the diaphragm open. There are some places that will never be photographed.” The nervousness had largely disappeared. He was a technician now, coaxing a machine into compliance. He focused the glass by using the lines of her mouth and teeth as benchmarks of clarity. He was in service, dilating the pupil of God. “I believe us to be ready, mademoiselle.”

She nodded and smiled.

“I should think if you recline on your feather pillows…”

When she leaned back against the pillows, the bedsheet slid down her side, exposing her thigh. Louis looked out into the alleyway. But he managed to notice a small blue bruise on her hip—a tiny sapphire star, as if someone had held a pen nib against her flesh.

“I think we’ll expose for two minutes, since it is quite light in here. I will, of course, leave the room while the image is registering, but you must remain very still. Any sudden movements could ruin the entire thing. As for your expression, I ask only that you imagine looking back through time.”

“I’ll try to remember that.”

“When you’re ready, you may remove the sheet.”

She cast a glance to the window and pulled the bedsheet off her reclined body. Louis stood for the briefest of moments to ensure the model’s position before beginning the exposure. Her back was to the window at an angle, perpendicular to the light, and her head rested in one hand. Her feet were unexpectedly slender and arched. The serpentine line that extended from ankle to hip to shoulder to head was well lit and would register as milk-stone. The darkened areas—the recesses beneath her arms, the shadow of her hair—would register as rust, brown if the mercury was too hot. Louis opened the diaphragm and hoped for perfection, for a rosewood frailty.

He sat down at the kitchen table, packed his equipment, and took out his fob watch. He marked the two minutes. How could he bring up the subject of Isobel without arousing suspicion? Was it wrong to withhold his acquaintance with her mother? The minutes passed within such questions. He stood up from the table and walked slowly into the adjacent room, where Pigeon remained in position. He closed the diaphragm and went over to the windows and drew the curtains. Pigeon wrapped the sheet around her. There was an awkwardness between them now.
Has something been stolen?

“I must fix the image within the hour, mademoiselle,” said Louis. “It will be more effective if I take it to my studio.”

“Everybody else calls me Pigeon.” She moved her head, loosened her neck. Louis took his camera into the kitchen while she dressed. She emerged in her crinoline. “Will you stay for a quick meal? I’m not at all bad with food.”

“I probably shouldn’t,” said Louis. Then, “Did your mother teach you how to cook?”

She cinched a ribbon on her dress. “Yes. She had a way with herbs.”

Louis looked out towards the windows where the plants flourished. “You must be the only woman in Montmartre growing valerian.”

“You know it?”

“Yes. I took it as a child for fevers.”

“I use it in tea. I secretly believe it gives me protection from sickness. They call this section of Montmartre the cholera kingdom.”

“A very nasty illness,” said Louis. He tapped his shoes together. He had forty-five minutes to fix the image to the best effect. He would have to decant more mercury from his jug. “Pigeon, I hope you don’t think me prying, but I wonder how such a woman as yourself has fallen to this profession.”

“Fallen?”

“Baudelaire told me of your, what, your nighttime occupation.”

“I dance,” she said, not looking at him.

“Yes, you dance.”

“And sometimes I work next door.”

“As a whore.”

“We don’t use that word.” Her eyes steadied in a beat of anger.

“What word do you use?” Louis tried to soften the sound of judgment.

“Companion, friend, soldier’s accomplice, apprentice bride, marriage saver…If it weren’t for us, Napoleon’s army would have been defeated long before they fell at Waterloo. It was us who sustained the revolution. I feel no shame whatsoever in what I do, monsieur. So do not cast that patronizing stare at me. I do it for pay, to eat, to give me the freedom to dance.” Her eyes bore down on his.

He said tentatively, “It must make your life very difficult. You are unmarried, for example.”

“Yes, and so are you.”

“That’s true.”

“I don’t believe in love.”

“But surely you are the product of a loving marriage?”

“My mother never loved my father.”

A tremulous bite came about Louis’s jaw. He was unable to speak for a moment. “I don’t believe it.”

“You do not know her. She was poisoned by something that took place before I was born, and never recovered.”

“A wild plant, perhaps, a berry with toxic effect?”

“Yes, the wild berry of regret.”

Louis had not quite planned on this turn. Instead of giving him hope that Isobel had loved him all these years, it dashed his spirit. He had also hoped she’d been happy and that this penance was something he alone carried. He looked again at his fob watch. Pigeon seemed close to tears.

“Mademoiselle, I am sorry for this imposition. I really should go and fix the image.”

“Will you let me see it? Nobody has ever taken my picture before.”

“I will certainly bring it by to show you.” Louis sidled towards the front door. “I think the daguerreotype portrait will be lovely. Good day.”

“Goodbye.”

Louis wheeled the dolly of equipment outside with one hand and loaded his carriage. He heard the door close behind him. He climbed up into the carriage and pulled down the street. The camera sat beside him on the seat, the latent image of Pigeon trapped inside. If he could execute the picture in his mind, it would render the silver canvas at its most perfect—capture the intersection of two spheres, where the underworld appeared sun-kissed. A woman of the night, forlorn and light-spun. She might crown his doomsday list. These images, when stowed in the catacombs, would survive the cataclysm and stand as silent monuments of what men held in their hearts. The camera obscura was the eye of God, and these final portraits would be His keepsakes. Here a half-turned harlot. Here a flock of swallows. Here a king in the last days of his kingdom. Put your children under glass and go back to sleep for another million years.

Fourteen

O
ne December afternoon in 1838, Louis climbed the stairs to his laboratory. The room was a clutter of chemical flasks and decanters. The day before, he had exposed a plate of a street view and placed it inside a desk drawer. It was a dismal picture—the light was bleak and the cloud-capped sky was gauzy and pale; the buildings and lampposts were smears of charcoal. He had exposed and developed the plate in pursuit of the right chemical fixing agent. He’d tried a new mixture of petroleum and vinegar and left the unsatisfactory plate to cure overnight in the drawer of his workbench. Now, when he removed the image, he saw immediately that something had changed. The edges of the buildings had darkened; the clouds were absorbed into the silver skin of the plate. Instead of fading, as was usually the case, the image had etched deeper.

Louis began rifling through the drawer to see what could have affected the plate in this way. There were a dozen other items in there—phials of iodine, petri dishes of glycerin, mineral oils, spools of wire, theater ticket stubs, mixing inks, a defunct brass compass, and a damaged thermometer he used to measure the temperature of chemicals. He spent the rest of the day conducting a process-of-elimination test. He exposed a plate, removed all the items bar one from the drawer, and then left the plate to fix inside the drawer. The fifth item he left in the drawer was the thermometer, which he now saw had a fracture in its glass casing. Tiny globules of mercury had bled out of the glass and gathered in the seams of the thermometer. Within an hour, the new plate was fixed. He did another test, then another. He smashed the glass tube and emptied the mercury into a petri dish. Same effect, only faster. He gathered his chemistry and alchemy books and rifled through the pages that mentioned mercury. Melts at –39 degrees. Boils at 357 degrees. Insoluble in water. Here it is, he thought, the Trojan horse.

He told nobody about what he’d found. From under a loose floorboard he produced a wad of francs and went out into the street. There was a hatter factory behind the Left Bank, beside an abattoir, where he knew they used enormous vats of mercury to fasten hide into hats. He would buy himself a barrel.

A guard sent him into the factory in pursuit of the foreman, a stout-chested man in overalls. Louis walked down a succession of cooling and stretching aisles, where women in bonnets handled strips of animal hide. The smell was ghastly—a combination of offal and the high, sweet chemistry of tanning solutions. A woman pointed him towards the mercury room where the hats were taken for bolstering.

It was a low-ceilinged room with no windows or ventilation. There was a sunken area where enormous copper urns bubbled above wood fires and thick mercury steam rose towards the ceiling. Upon entering, Louis heaved a cough. The air was liquid, hot, and burned on the way in. A motley collection of men, women, and children dipped hats on wooden paddles in and out of copper boilers, their faces drenched in sweat. There was a stupefied look on their faces. Later, Louis would recall this tableau and imagine that the mercury had literally fixed their faces, etched their countenances pale, waxy, and hangdog. But for now he had discovered something wondrous, and no amount of squalor would dissuade him from his entitlement.