The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre (21 page)

The foreman swiveled his torso slightly when Louis called out to him. It was an economy of movement that suggested orders barked from the side of the mouth. It reminded Louis of Marius, the head apprentice and prop boy from all those years ago.

“I have come to buy a barrel of mercury,” said Louis. “How much is it?’

The man wiped the great shelf of his forehead with the back of his wrist. “You a hatter?”

“Not exactly,” said Louis.

“What, then?”

“Does it matter? I am willing to pay whatever you ask.”

“Is you now?” The man clicked his teeth together and yelled something incomprehensible to a boy in the corner. When he turned his head back to Louis, he inspected his shoes and hat.

“Don’t sell the quicksilver. Hard to come by, it is.”

“May I speak with the owner?”

The foreman did not like this tack. “If you catch a ship and go to Morocco, you might.”

“I see.”

“Yes, you see.” The foreman walked off, wiping his hands on his thighs. Louis followed. He reached into his pockets and produced the wad of francs.

“There is five hundred francs here,” said Louis. “I don’t know what it costs you, but I wager it’s not that. You may keep the difference.” He held the faded francs in front of the man’s chest.

The man involuntarily extended his eyebrows like archers’ bows. “Quicksilver don’t come in barrels. It’s a keg you wants. And heavy as lead it is.” He snatched the money from Louis and used his chin to point to a row of metal kegs, each one painted with the symbol
Hg.
Louis turned to ask the foreman for some assistance carrying the keg, or to hold it until he could bring his wagon, but the man had disappeared.

Louis rolling a metal keg of mercury through the Paris streets. Passersby thought he was a drunkard with a keg of home-brewed beer. A policeman stopped him, suspecting it was a gunpowder keg, that revolution might be fuming in the garrets. Louis was all politeness and lies, masking the ridiculousness of his predicament.
Yes, Officer. No, monsieur, not gunpowder. Yes, I’m a hatter.
He hunched and pushed the keg, rolling it up and down gutters, the metal clinking on the macadam, his back aching, the ferment of boiled mercury still in the back of his throat. He arrived home and heaved the keg to his shoulder. He grunted up the stairs like a rag-and-bone merchant, complaining and panting with every step. The sound of the laboratory dead bolt sliding into place was supremely satisfying. Louis sat on the floor, his hands blistered and red. The keg rested on its end, and now he saw the dented tin and wondered how he ever got the monstrosity home. He laughed at the prospect of the keg rupturing on the way, a gushing river of quicksilver coming down on the cobblestone. They might have arrested him. He allowed himself another exhausted laugh, and soon he noticed his top hat was torn on one side, and this prompted another chuckle, this time at his own expense, at the fool in the ragged hat loping his way through the boulevards. He had never felt so ridiculous and lucky.

He worked all day and night, refining the process. He decanted mercury from the keg into metal trays. These became his mercury baths, heated on the wood-burning stove and taken into the confines of the darkroom. If he angled the exposed image above the hot mercury, passing it back and forth, he obtained the best result. He watched the mercury vapors draw line and edge onto his plates. The air thickened around him, a metallic brume that watered his eyes. It had an elusive smell, something acrid but fleeting, like iron railings in the rain. It caught in the back of his throat, and sometimes he felt faint. But the images themselves made this discomfort inconsequential—here was time stolen, wafered, and pressed onto silvered copper; here were nature’s blueprints, transcripts of light, from the finial point of a flagpole to the tweed edge of a man’s jacket, all of it replicated in nuance, shadow, and substance.

After several months he perfected the bathing technique and was already showing the first signs of mercury poisoning—stomach cramps, headaches, soreness in the mouth and jaw. But what ran parallel to this progression of symptoms was the infatuation he developed for quicksilver. The liquid metal adorned his workshop and apartment; it glossed from jars along the windowsill, it lay beaded in the washroom sink. He didn’t want to be without it and carried a phial of mercury around his neck at all times. In the middle of the day he would think about its silver sheen, about the way it defied chemistry and, like glass, stood between liquid and solid, between substance and reflection. He was, in a sense, in love again.

Madness began as a seduction. There were portents and omens; everything reminded him of his beloved. The world was infused with quicksilver—the Paris winter fogs were a lambent metallic gray, fixing pedestrians’ images onto glass shopfronts; jars of rainwater gave off vaporous fumes; the coins in his pocket were silvered with it. He walked the streets, jangling his coins. He knew the process would carry his name—D-A-G-U-E-R-R-E-O-T-Y-P-E—and there was something scientific and stately about it, like the regal sound of geological ages or the Latin names of plants. The impossible vanity of it, he thought, but then he was struck by a sense of entitlement, of being chosen. He wrote a letter to François Arago at the Academie des Sciences, declaring his process with such phrases as
your humble servant
and an endowment for
His Majesty.
What he didn’t write, but wanted to, was the simple and brash truth:
I see things others don’t; I always have.

Now Louis made a quick ascent. Here was the extended hand of fame. On August 19, 1839, nine months after hauling the keg of mercury across Paris, Louis Daguerre stood with Niépce’s son—the elder Niépce had recently died—and François Arago in the great chamber of the Academy. The announcements in the newspapers had brought heavy crowds. People bustled into the baroque meeting rooms three hours before the sitting was due to commence. Louis opted not to make his own presentation, being satisfied with what he had set out in a pamphlet. He let Arago discuss the history of optics, the methods of the process, the applications for astronomy, art, and geology. When Louis heard the process referred to as the
daguerreotype,
he felt a sting of embarrassment; all the geriatric men of the Academy—patent-holders with hooded eyes, aldermen with aquiline noses and snuff pouches—peered in his direction. The vanity, the gall. But by the time Arago had woven a tale with the exactitude of a man who could prove the existence of planets with numbers and Greek letters, there was a palpable wonder and silence in the vast gallery. The process, said Arago, though seemingly mystical, was quite simple: a plate of silver upon copper is sensitized, then iodized, until it assumes a tint of pale yellow; the plate is inserted into a camera obscura, the aperture opened for a varying length of time, and then the plate is removed and the image is fixed with mercury vapor before being exalted in daylight. It was an exact replica of the scene before the camera, sketched by the sun herself. Arago held several of Louis’s plates high above the lectern and then passed them around the room. Monocles came out; the old vanguard, the owl-faced men in frockcoats and gold-buttoned waistcoats, exchanged their Tartarean frowns for expressions of stifled awe. People had come in from the countryside—cattle dealers and their wives, gentry from the coast—and these folks clucked and cheered with delight, puzzled audibly over the verisimilitude of human faces and cottages before them. A band of Louis’s old theater buddies—under-studies and scenic painters—started a chant of
Honor to Daguerre.
Louis, wedged between Arago and Niépce’s son, looked out at the crowd from the front of the room, at the nobles and workingmen, all of them rapt at the possibility of their own images enveloped in skins of silver. A sea of doffed hats. A standing ovation rippled through the crowd. He felt Arago’s congratulatory hand at his shoulder. He shook hands with Niépce’s son, Louis’s other hand on top, sealing the shake in the manner of diplomats and mayors. A profound levity overtook his whole body. Louis took a very slow bow.

Within an hour of the presentation, Paris was crazed with photomania. Hundreds set out into the high-summer streets, descending on the optician shops for the makings of Louis’s mercury dream. Within a week of this event, the country and the world knew him by name. Within three months, Louis’s pamphlet went through twenty-five editions and five languages. Within a year, his process was being used on five continents, in service of almost every field of human endeavor—to yield photogenic drawings of fossils, for phrenology portraits of captured Congo slaves, to study the geological strata of the American West, to catalog the medical pathology of the harelipped and the goitered and the leprosied, to chronicle eclipses and astronomical events, to render portraiture of politicians and kings and heads of state. In America the luminaries paid their respects: Samuel B. Morse at the annual supper of the National Academy of Design said the daguerreotypes
could not be called copies of Nature, but portions of Nature herself
and that
the name Louis Daguerre will stand beside Columbus and Galileo.
Edgar Allan Poe called the daguerreotypes
miraculous beauties
and
photogenic drawings of absolute truth,
and a few years later, Walt Whitman, then-editor of the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle,
said the new art form possessed great magnetism and
captured the soul of the human face.
If Louis’s portraits captured the mezzotint of reality, then these articles and kind words, unfurled across the newspapers and journals, were telegrams of his passage to fame. He had arrived.

Fifteen

T
here were other portraits of Pigeon, each of them brasher than the previous—her face coming towards the camera, her smile widening, her hair lit so that it resembled nothing but strands of copper and bronze. Then, in the middle of the night, the idea of a rooftop portrait came to Louis. He slept little these days, and the dog shared his insomnia. They went out onto the balcony, the wind gusting up from the streets. Snowdrifts blew in front of tavern doors, forming great waves above the gutters. From this height, with the wind a-gale and the slow blink of kerosene lamps behind a curtain of high-spun snow, Louis felt himself sway. He was standing on a ship’s prow, the night cloaked around him. He studied the snow, the way it wheeled and flurried about the eaves. He saw an image of Pigeon reclining on a rooftop, tuberoses in her hair, white on white, a thousand smears of snow against her flesh.

The next day Pigeon met him at Baudelaire’s derelict mansion. She was only too delighted to receive another hundred francs. When she arrived, he led her up the gloomy staircases to the rooftop terrace of Poet’s Corner. Baudelaire, hair grown back, sat bundled in a deck chair. He wore a ragged fur coat and read Poe’s “The Raven” beside a frosted brandy balloon. He looked up as they approached. “You can’t take her portrait out here, Louis. She’ll die of exposure.”

Louis said, “Imagine it: the alabaster nude in front of the snow-tinged battlements.”

Baudelaire considered this and looked at Pigeon.

She shrugged. “Makes no difference to me.”

Baudelaire said, “And what about my portrait? When will I be commissioned for the list?”

“Please leave us,” said Louis, spreading the legs of his tripod.

“I wouldn’t mind watching, to be honest.”

Pigeon bit at her nails and gave the poet a stage scowl.

Louis said, “I need my model’s undivided attention.”

“Yes, I’m sure you do.” He winked at Pigeon.

“Goodbye,” said Louis, looking off at the Paris rooftops.

Baudelaire stood and slouched across the terrace. He looked at Pigeon and said, “My balls are frozen. One by Poe, the other by the fucking cold.”

Pigeon slapped Baudelaire on the shoulder before he disappeared inside.

Louis pulled from a cloth sack a satchel of hothouse tuberoses. There was a Dutch woman who kept a glasshouse on the Left Bank and used a system of mirrors, lamps, and skylights to grow veronica, roses, and carnations all year long for aristocratic families. King Louis-Philippe had once commissioned her to grow orchids in February. Louis handed the tuberoses to Pigeon.

“Where did you get these?” she asked.

“You’d be surprised what people do in the winter to stay sane.”

“I know what soldiers do to pass the time,” she said.

“Yes,” Louis said gravely.

She walked towards the stone wall. Louis stretched out a bolt of red satin on the snowy terra-cotta of the rooftop and placed a number of tuberoses on the ground. He handed Pigeon several of the flowers.

“Do you know how to make a crown?” he asked.

Pigeon took them and began to weave a chain of stem and socket. “Mother taught me.”

“She had a way with plants, no?”

Pigeon nodded. “Our house was filled with plants.”

“Herbs?”

“Everything. She’d send off to London for seeds that came from the West Indies. We had a rubber plant in our garden.”

“In Lyons?”

“It died. Lots of her plants died. She didn’t care. She’d grow anything once.”

“I see.”

Louis rubbed a plate with carded cotton and inserted it into the back of the camera. With the snow and the wintry sun, it would have to be a long exposure.

“This may take quite some time to expose. I’m sorry if it will be very cold. As a result, I have decided to pay you an extra fifty francs.”

“No, you can’t.”

“It will be fifteen minutes.”

“I don’t mind.”

“Just the same, I am paying you more. There is a guild, you know, for nude models. I intend to comply with all their stipulations. A nude portrait in snowy weather is an automatic fifty percent increase.”

“Stop teasing me. What am I to do?” she asked.

“I was thinking you might recline on your side, with one hand holding your head. I will have the camera tilted up so that you are in the foreground and the skyline is in the background. The turrets and steeples will be behind your head.”