The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre (24 page)

Signs were everywhere now. Men read poetry in the squares before bands of moved and cheering peasants. Funeral processions marched along the riverbanks with open coffins. People woke with cold fevers and came out onto the curbstone to look up at the stars. Crows flew into chimneys and windows. The fishmongers sold nothing but eel and herring. A woman leaped to her death from a town hall window. Somewhere in Paris a man was shooting dogs.

There were mercury chills, agues that scalded his eyelids. Louis lay in bed in his rooftop belvedere, surrounded by the brandied twilight of his portraits. He got drunk inside the husk of the fever. Faces brindled, boulevards receded, the room shimmered.
I may rise. The mind has mountains.
He could feel himself on the verge of great knowledge. The photographic record, the catalog of creation. Nothing was denied him. Then sleep, long hours in the pale afternoons.

Civil unrest was in the papers. The anti-royalists were organizing an outdoor banquet to protest the government’s policies. Louis read about the dinner plans and thought of bunting, of paper lanterns strung between chestnut boughs. The workers’ struggle—strikes, marches for higher wages—were an abstraction, a dinner story to tell grandchildren. It wasn’t until he read about the fiscal crisis that he took it personally; his life’s savings were in the National Bank.

The next day at noon, he went to close his bank account. He had no delusions that he could take his money into the afterlife, and neither did he want to spend it before the final day. He simply wanted to hold his accumulated funds in his hands. Here was fame made manifest, watermarked and bundled, secret codes lurking in the treasury inkwork. The bank gallery was a procession of bespectacled tellers behind mahogany and brass counters. Louis waited on the marble floor. Men in suits sidled as they filled out their withdrawal requests—
is there a run on the bank?
He filled out a withdrawal form for fifty thousand francs and presented it to a pink-faced teller. As Louis waited, he looked down at his own feet and noticed he was wearing a pair of mismatched shoes—on the left, a black English brogue; on the right, a brown Italian slipper. He stood looking down, baffled.

“Going on a trip, are we?” the man asked.

Louis paused, looked up. “Yes, a trip.” The man’s solicitousness and his skin, ruddy as a winter apple, bothered Louis.

“I will, of course, need the manager’s signature,” the man said. He gave Louis another look and went to the manager’s office in the back. Louis looked around the bank. The vault door—a lead portal with lock-wheels at the end of the marbled gallery—stood serene. It emitted a power over the bank customers, Louis thought, like the tomb of a virgin saint. People kept their distance, regarded it sidelong. The teller returned, pinker, more officious, and informed Louis that this amount of cash was not kept in the drawers and that the manager was organizing to have the vault opened. Louis took a step back from the counter and unleashed a torrential cough. The teller winced, then the two of them looked on as the manager, a balding man with a monocle, and two guards marched to the vault. A curtain was drawn while the manager administered the combinations and key locks. Louis heard the vault open. The smell of money—something clothbound, like hymnals in an old church—wafted into the bank gallery. After a moment the guards emerged with a metal box and they carried it to the pink-faced teller. The teller counted the money, and Louis presented him with a carpetbag. He watched the stacks mount.

“What is your name?” Louis asked. It suddenly seemed important.

The teller puzzled this for a moment—perhaps no customer had ever asked—then said, “My name is Antoine Cousier.”

“Godspeed, Antoine Cousier,” said Louis. “May you die in peace.” He carried his bag outside and strode home in his mismatched shoes.

Apocalypse came on February 22, 1848, the same day that the government canceled the reformists’ outdoor banquet. The sound of bronze convent bells rallied in the streets. A wintry twilight settled over the river and pushed up against the tavern windows, giving the glass an obsidian polish. Quietude as well as a particular Parisian rot consumed the air—the offal of the abattoirs spilled across patches of snow; perfume factories funneled expired ambergris and musk into the gutters. Louis knew it was happening when the calm was ripped apart by cannon fire. The high-caustic smell of gunpowder rose from the garrets. He awoke from an afternoon nap in his bedroom, where he slept beneath the accusing burnt-almond eyes of his daguerreotype portraits. He dressed with some measure of calmness, putting on a silk cravat, a woolen suit and waistcoat, a top hat. In front of the silver-backed mirror, he resembled—for the first and last time—his father. His parents had passed away some years before, his father leaving Louis a gold-tipped pen, a watch and a compass, and half a century’s worth of ledgers that balanced, month to month, down to the last hobnail. That this fatherly resemblance bloomed on the final day seemed both ironic and appropriate.
This is the day we become our fathers.

Louis ran a bone-handled comb through his pomaded hair and then through the dog’s bushy coat. He applied some mustache wax to the animal’s chin and whiskers. “We must all be dressed for the occasion.” Another sonic boom of cannon fire. Louis and the dog walked out to stand on the balcony. There was smoke and a light dusting of snow but no proscenium of cloud yet, no naphtha flash or magnesium flare from above. It would come slowly. At the end of the street a band of men were erecting battlements with all manner of household items: ladder-backed chairs, divans, kitchen tables, an old pianoforte that emitted an off-kilter arpeggio as it rattled across the cobblestone. They were going to try to fight it, Louis realized with simultaneous delight and horror. Only a nineteenth-century Frenchman would attempt to bring down the angel assassins with a musket or a flintlock. A blockade of carriages formed at the other end of the street, and Louis was galvanized into action, for it was clear they intended not to let anyone in or out of the faubourg. He needed to escape with his portraits, stash them in the catacombs beneath the Paris Observatory, find Pigeon, and have her lead him to Isobel. The immediacy of the world’s decline would allow Louis to take Pigeon to her mother without argument or resistance. Everything would be revealed.

He came in from the balcony and, in a gesture of finality, closed the heavy curtains that hung from the doorway. In the relative dimness, he gathered his supplies and took down the framed daguerreotypes. He had completed all but two of the portraits on his list—Isobel and the king—and this would have to suffice as a final testimony. He wrapped the pictures in hessian and secured a length of twine around each mummified portrait. But then he found a dozen more daguerreotypes he believed worthy of leaving to history, and it took him nearly ten trips to load them into his carriage. Each time he reentered the gloomy staircase, he felt his pulse throb in his neck. He stopped and leaned against the banister railing, his legs cramped, the brine of daytime sleep still in his mouth.

He loaded the carriage with a few other incidentals—his brushes and inks, his accumulated funds stacked inside the carpetbag. He felt a little silly bringing money into the apocalypse, but here it was, enough to buy a Paris apartment. He looked up and down the street. The barricades had become a leaning metropolis of housewares and furniture. A makeshift flag—a man’s shirt dipped in red paint—hung from a broomstick at one end of his street, and at the other end a convoy of unhitched charabancs and buggies spanned from curb to curb. Perhaps an hour had passed, and a sulfurous storm had gathered in the distance. God’s fury would begin with the mineral balm of rain before the gutters flowed with blood. Louis set the dog on the seat, climbed into the carriage, and gave the reins a snap. The horses took off at a trot in the direction of the wagon blockade. When the men at the blockade saw him approach, they converged upon their weapons—rifles, hoes, machetes, a bedpost with a metal spike attached. The leader, a bearded peasant in a brown hood, took a few steps ahead of the rest and raised his hand to the trotting carriage. Louis could see there was no opening in the line, so he had no choice but to stop.

The man in the hood yelled loud enough so that all his fellows could hear. “Slow down, old man. Not so fast. We’re not letting anyone in or out.”

“We both know what day this is, and I cannot be denied my final errand.”

“Will you fight with us, citizen Daguerre?” a familiar voice called. It was the neighborhood stable boy.

Louis answered the crowd of militants. “It is futile to fight, but fight we must. Each in his own way. I have a battle to run on the other side, and time is running out. You see the storm approaching.”

There was a brief conference during which Louis heard himself accused of being part of the ancien régime. The hooded man ordered several of the men to move their carriages, and soon a gap formed through which Louis could drive.

“See you on the other side, gentlemen,” Louis called.

The men raised their weapons as he passed them by.

Louis could not gallop his horses on account of the glass-fronted plates, but he continued to trot through Montmartre and out towards the Paris Observatory. He wended past the old mansions of the Right Bank where scenes of terror and discord played out—bonfires of antique furniture and heirlooms burned in stone courtyards; favored pets, Abyssinian cats and green parrots, were being released by servants. He moved up a hill and heard the distinct and lonely sound of piano scales coming from an open Gothic window. He passed a looted department store, its windows smashed and all the mannequins broken apart in a scatter of white clay limbs. He saw a hospital with all its doors and windows flung open. Some of the gowned patients—men with the blue-white pallor of malaria and typhoid—wandered out into the street. Peasants hauled off wheels of cheese and pairs of leather boots. Bankers and merchants paced on their mansion rooftops with pistols. Bands of gypsies wandered out of ransacked churches with candles and incense. A priest’s white robe was slung over the back of a mule. Through all this Louis passed unhindered. He rode through the sinuous streets with the same authority that Pope Pius and Napoleon had possessed on coronation day forty-three years earlier. Out of certain doorways, Louis saw hunched women and old men. Those too scared or too old to fight God’s judgment gave him a solemn salute or the sign of the cross. For a moment he imagined himself a saint of the people.

The Paris Observatory stood in the gloom like a galley ship, its stone wings flanked by shadow. The looting had not come this far, and Louis was able to tie his horses and unload his portraits onto the stoop of the main entrance. The main door was closed and he knocked with the heavy brass ring. He feared for a moment that the observatory had been abandoned along with the grocer shops and wine cellars. Then he could see in his mind the image of Arago on the rooftop, watching the celestial scene unfold, and he was not at all surprised when France’s eminent astronomer came to the door himself.

“Daguerre.”

“I’ve come to stash my portraits. As we discussed.”

“What on earth has happened to you?” Arago looked him up and down.

Louis looked down at his clothing. “I’ve just ridden across the city. There is mud in the streets.”

“Quickly, come in, before the Municipal Guard sees us. There is an immediate curfew.”

“I suppose you know, then?” said Louis, entering.

“I think all of France knows by now.”

“We will all be dust soon enough.” Louis came close and pressed a hand against his waistcoat. “The key to the catacombs, François. Take me there.”

Arago reeled from Louis’s acrid breath before complying. They brought in the portraits from the stoop and bolted the door.

“Wait here and I will get the key from my study.” Arago climbed the spiral staircase to the landing above and returned in a moment with a silver key on a chain. “If we are caught, I know nothing of this. You stole the key, do you understand me?”

“Of course. I am eternally grateful,” Louis said absently.

“I must leave with my family in less than an hour. I will show you where it is, but you must take the portraits there by yourself.”

“Lead on.”

Arago turned on his heels and walked to a small iron door beneath the spiral staircase. He took the key and slid it into the barrel. The opening of the iron door unleashed a pestilential stench from the catacombs, a fetid smell that Louis imagined as the dead getting ready to rise. Arago lit a torch and handed it to Louis.

“At the bottom of the stairs is a small chamber and an informal crypt for our illustrious colleague. That would be a good place to store your pictures.”

“Thank you for this kindness, Arago.”

“I worry about you, Louis. I think perhaps you’re out of your head.”

Louis dusted off his coat sleeve and glanced up. “No matter.”

Arago kissed Louis’s cheek and they embraced.

“Long live the freedom of France,” said Arago. He turned and headed for the main entrance.