The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre (3 page)

“Friendly,” said Baudelaire.

“You lack all manners.”

They sat on the bench and Baudelaire took out his pipe and lit it. He stared into the bowl of the pipe, at the pulsing orange eye of the tobacco plug. “Did you smell our mademoiselle?”

“I certainly did not.”

“A woodland herbage, I assure you.”

“God help our country,” said Louis. He dusted his sleeves. “Come, we’re going to execute the science of this. We’ll walk the grid, down to Palais Bourbon and east to the Pont Neuf.”

“Yes,” said Baudelaire, raising his malacca cane like a sword, “we will map the city in the name of nudity.”

Louis stood and clicked his heels together in a sudden display of officiousness. There was something regimental about him—the groomed mustache, the pomade-heavy wedge of gray hair, the Napoleonic jacket with epaulets. At fifty-nine he looked and dressed like a retired admiral. But he had a painter’s eyes: Antwerp blue and prone to fits of moisture and reflection.

They walked up a small hill, Baudelaire now in front, his amber-tipped pipe clenched between his teeth. He waved at a passerby and called, “We are on a mission of the apocalypse.”

Louis caught his reflection in a bakery shopwindow and noticed that his mouth was ajar, as if in profound thirst. He pursed his lips, then settled his mouth as his figure floated across the aqueous frontage of glass. But the seizure was already coming. The sun flared and whitened. Rivulets of sweat formed along his spine. His cravat and neck cloth restricted his breathing, and the mercury cough ascended from his groin, producing silver flashes in his peripheral vision. The taste of green copper in his mouth. He leaned against the brickwork of a building and was aware of Baudelaire standing beside him. Then the noise of the street bounded towards him, the clop and clatter of the wagons, the shriek of the vendors’ cart horses. He doubled over, hands in spasm, and fell to the street. He felt the dankness of the macadam against his cheek. A small crowd ringed him in and he could see their glaucous faces, their eyes narrowed. In the midst of the seizure, a woman stood preening her gloves. He was aware of everything—his own pulse, his blood breaking its banks, the kettledrum of the street, this lady’s chamois gloves. He could feel his head banging against the pavement, then Baudelaire’s hand and then the slowing, the release of pressure in his jaw and rib cage, his teeth coming apart, air being drawn back into his lungs. He lay there for some time, panting. The crowd dispersed.

“Are you all right?” asked Baudelaire.

“Yes,” said Louis, sitting up.

A deep calm always followed the seizures. He felt hollowed out, capable of great insight. He took in the street again, became aware of the light. It was now dusk and the objects of the afternoon were slipping away; one would position the camera obscura from a loft window to catch the diffusion of day. Nearby, a woman’s face floated inside a window. Her skin a smoky pearl, jade-green eyes, lips that curved with the grace of violin hips. Louis stood in front of the deserted wineshop and looked within—a cavernous interior of empty shelves. A dusty crate stood in the middle of a floor covered with editions of
La Gazette de France.

“I saw her,” Louis said.

“Where? In here?”

Louis nodded. He placed a hand against the windowpane and became aware of his own reflection looking back at him. The entire shopfront was a photographic plate, and here was his own specter trapped inside the waterfilm of glass.

“I don’t feel very well,” Louis said.

“Let’s get a cab. I’ll take you home.”

“She’s out there somewhere,” Louis said. “The woman I once loved.”

“Every woman we once loved is out there alongside the women we are yet to love. They exchange tips about how to ruin us.” Baudelaire stepped into the street and flagged down a cab. As he did so, he composed the first line of a new poem: “Twilight agitates madmen.”

As they rode through the Paris dusk, Louis leaned his head against the leather seat back. Baudelaire was talking to the driver about socialist causes and the rumblings of insurrection in the garrets. The air was cut with the smell of paraffin and rotting oysters. Several times Louis had to cough and spit in the road, and he prayed that nobody would recognize him. When the cab pulled up in front of Louis’s apartment, Baudelaire told the driver to wait, and he helped his friend down from the carriage. Together they climbed the long flight of stairs that led to Louis’s rooftop studio. Louis gripped the railing, careful not to stumble. At the landing, he handed Baudelaire the key from his waistcoat and they went inside.

“Let’s put you to bed,” Baudelaire said as they moved through the darkened interior. The main room was cluttered—tripods, zinc cameras, copper plates, tall glass jars filled with briny-looking solutions, salts heaped into earthenware bowls. Baudelaire found the air decidedly pickled. He helped Louis into the bedroom, where the walls were covered in daguerreotypes, portraits and landscapes framed under glass. Baudelaire set Louis back on the cotton mattress and removed his shoes. “We’re having a party at my house in a few weeks. It’s going to be very elaborate,” Baudelaire said. “There will be schools of minnow.”

“What does that mean?” asked Louis, his eyes closed.

“Women fluttering by the curtains. I’ve thought of some nudes for your project.”

“Excellent.”

Baudelaire patted Louis on the shoulder. “Should I pour you some brandy?”

“No, thank you. I’ll be asleep by the time you get to the bottom of the stairs.”

“The nervous attacks are getting worse,” Baudelaire said. “You should see a doctor.”

“With their invoice pads and leeches—no, thank you.”

“Take care of yourself,” said Baudelaire, turning to leave.

Louis heard the door close at the bottom of the stairs. His chest was on fire, a tightness that made him pinch-eyed. He reached for the brandy decanter and drank a small swig straight from the glass lip, spilling some on his bedsheet. It loosened his breathing enough that he could relax and wait for sleep to settle over him. The bedroom window was open and he heard the noises of the street below—the submerged sounds of Paris descending into night, the shrill bell that announced showtime to the actors at a nearby theater, the street mongers calling their wares out against the brickwork alleys. Louis felt more of the deep calm. He took off his clothes and got under the swansdown quilt. He looked up at his daguerreotypes and saw that they were more eerie than beautiful. Portraits of bankers with waxed mustaches, their faces grim, old brasserie maids with henna cheeks, a sea merchant with sad tea-brown eyes, a riverside picnic where a wooden boat rippled in a wave of amber and the sun appeared as a pale ball of wax. The portraits appeared to him now as images of the dead—the shipwrecked, the drowned, the hangdog.

Two

L
ouis Daguerre fell in love with women and light on the same day. This was in 1800, when he was twelve and living outside of Orléans. His father was head clerk on an estate that belonged to a distant cousin of the now executed Louis XVI; the estate had somehow been spared from the purging of the Reign of Terror. The hundred hectares seemed immune to change, a protectorate of the old aristocracy. The père ruled with a benevolent hand; he gave out cloth bags of sugared almonds at Christmas and lent money to those in his employ when they were sick. And while Paris abolished, for a time, the use of
monsieur
and
madame
in place of
citoyen
and
citoyenne;
while it gave up the Christian calendar—making March
Wind,
May
Flowers,
July
Heat,
etc.—all in the name of Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality, the estate brimmed with antiquity and servitude. For the most part, the peasants and clerks here regarded the revolution as an excess of the city. They had never seen a bread riot or a barricade. They served the royal bloodline the same way their forebears had done for six generations—with that odd mixture of pride and complaint that is the hallmark of a career servant. Only they kept it secret from the revolution.

Louis Daguerre’s family lived, at this time, in a cottage that stood at the edge of a glade, surrounded on three sides by fields and with a view to the château. Louis had a bedroom in the attic, and from his window he spent hours watching teams of horses plow the fields back to russet, or the gardeners prune the apricot trees, or the maids go out with their woven baskets to pick gillyflowers and foxgloves. From this vantage point he imagined he was the duke of this estate, and when he was sick, which was often as a child, he stood in his bedclothes and quietly directed the bucolic scene:
Now, plowman, turn your gig to the west; maiden, pick those flowers at the end of the rhododendron tunnel.
If the gardeners came into the orchard to remove a dead apricot tree with handsaws and axes, as they sometimes did, Louis closed his curtains and refused to watch.

One day in August, after being sick for a week with a fever, Louis was convalescing in his rooftop bedroom. A maid who had a way with herbs had been sent over from the main house as a goodwill gesture on the part of the old aristocrat. The girl was all of fifteen, though her servant’s papers declared her two years older. Louis thought her pretty in a defiant sort of way. Her caramel hair spilled loosely from a bow, and her eyes—a vivid green—seemed to suggest scrutiny, even scorn. She came into Louis’s room with head presses and broth, and each time she closed the window and drew the curtains. As she did so, she spoke to Louis about her belief in the healing properties of camphor baths, valerian teas, brown sugar dissolved in warm water. Then she paused at the end of his bed and said, with complete authority, that those with fevers should not endure sunlight.

“Best keep the window and curtains closed,” she added gravely. Her voice was nasal, from the South, an accent Louis already knew to be several stations beneath him.

Louis waited for her to leave the room, then crossed to the window and opened the curtains. They continued this shuttlecock match of wills until his fever broke and Louis demanded that she leave the curtains open. “I’m better now. Stop closing the curtains or I’ll tell my father that you’ve disobeyed my instructions.”

She cinched her hands behind her back, crossed to the window, and pulled the curtains shut in one swift movement. The room dimmed and Louis noticed a small tear in the middle of one of the calico curtains. A cone of August light came through the tear and cast a series of shapes onto the ceiling. Louis felt he was at the bottom of a pond looking up at the brocaded surface. The maid walked slowly through the half-light and sat down beside Louis. She took up a piece of torn fabric and dipped it into a metal bowl filled with lavender-scented water. Louis closed his eyes, trying to indicate that he wanted to be rid of her, that he no longer needed a nurse, but she simply placed the head press over his eyelids. The water dripped down into his ears, his mouth, and the blossomy smell was drawn into his lungs. He was rendered complaintless.

“What if I don’t want you to get well?” she said. “When the fever goes, I’ll be back in the laundry room and at table.”

Her voice floated through the lavender darkness.

“Nobody can be sick forever,” Louis said.

“A little longer. Wednesday is bed linens.”

“Fine, Isobel. I will get better on Thursday.”

Louis felt her cheek against his forehead as she checked his temperature. For a moment the sound of her breathing was indistinguishable from his own; he could feel a strand of her hair grazing his neck. After a while, she quickly kissed him on the forehead, mumbled a
merci bien,
and was gone. Louis took off the head press and sat up in bed. The light was still dancing on the ceiling. He lay back down to watch it. Then, slowly, he took the soaked cloth and put it beneath his eiderdown, under his nightclothes. He wanted to cool his blood, an effect he knew from swimming in springtime brooks when the chilled water would banish his testicles like mussels to their shells. But the blossomed water energized his skin, and soon he was recalling Isobel at the window, the sunlight silhouetting her thighs, her breasts through the gossamer of her tunic…or her face in the blue aura of the spirit lamp when she came to tend him in the middle of the night. Louis looked up at the ceiling, at the flickering of dusk, and let out a truncated sigh. He felt the fever come back in a burst and shot a hand under the bedsheet. His hand emerged drenched and salty to the smell. He began a prayer to Saint Ouen, the patron of his father’s dinnertime toasts, guardian of hallowed vineyards, in hopes of a celestial blessing.
Bless the soil with your goodwill. Give me the patience of a grape ripening on the vine.
But it was soon interrupted by Isobel coming back into the room.

“I heard you cry out,” she said. She looked down at the soiled cloth.

Louis had tears in his eyes. She sat beside him on the mattress. Five seconds of silence passed between them. Isobel blushed, then collected herself.

“Poor boy, don’t be humiliated. You have just become a little monsieur.” She took the cloth from him with the simplicity of passing vinegar at the table. She handed him a clean piece of cloth. “Do you need to bathe?”

“Should I?” Louis asked.

“No hurry.”

She looked away while Louis cleaned himself beneath the eiderdown.

“Don’t tell my father,” he said.

“This is our secret,” Isobel said. She smiled and gathered the used cloths. On her way out, she said, “You might be better after all.”

When she was gone, Louis closed then opened his eyes. The light from the torn curtain dappled on the ceiling and the amorphous outline of a tree appeared. He got up from his bed feeling lightened and cool. He took a piece of white linen from the bedside table and carried it to the window. Holding his eye to the hole in the curtain, he looked out at the late afternoon. The sun was going down behind the grain fields, and as it descended, it shot an orange glow from behind the hedgerows and poplars. Louis held the piece of white linen in front of the small curtain hole and saw, projected on it, the shimmering image of the lone walnut tree that stood by the stone fence. At the time he thought it merely a trick of nature or the convalescing mind, but years later, he would realize the importance of this discovery. The compression of light through the small hole had borne along the image of the walnut tree, projecting it onto the ceiling. Nature could sketch herself. He was growing into a man inside a dark chamber, a camera obscura fashioned by worn curtain fabric and August light. He went back to his bed and wrote in his journal:
I plan to be ill for some time.