The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre (4 page)

Three

A
t the end of his fifth decade, Louis Daguerre had surrendered to the vice of scheduled pleasure. He rose each day at dawn, drew a scented bath, and lay in it for precisely thirty minutes before dressing in a pressed linen shirt and a woolen suit. He believed in the inviolability of bathing and perfuming the skin. Dressing in front of a silver-backed mirror, he gave himself a thorough inspection, from teeth to fingernails.

The physical symptoms of his poisoning were, by now, plainly apparent: his gums bled upon waking, a metallic taste lingered in his mouth, a cough rattled in his chest. He understood that his body was faltering, a by-product of working with chemicals for more than a decade, but he had never made an association between his physical symptoms and his erratic mind. On the days when his mind felt overexposed, he often felt physically robust. There was light in his eyes, color in his cheeks. And even when his mind was the foggiest, there was always a submerged layer of clarity, something glimpsed, as through the wave of insobriety between a second and third glass of burgundy. He walked through the streets and felt that everything was in its place; Paris hung gathered and calibrated by the great balance wheel of life.

At eight o’clock, amid the commotion of masons and tanners and soap boilers going to work, he strode out with top hat and cane, high-backed, nodding fraternal good mornings to passersby. He stopped at a canopied café where he read the newspapers. He followed with great interest the advancements of science and commerce, read about chloroform as anesthesia, the discovery of ancient human bones in Africa, the gold rush in California. After the café, he returned to his studio workshop and spent several hours in pursuit of a new daguerreotype. At exactly three o’clock each afternoon, he took a nap with a black silk scarf wrapped around his eyes. Upon waking, he drank a cup of strong coffee and ventured out for his afternoon walk.

The first Monday of each month, Louis went to Corbin’s barbershop for a shave and trim. A week after the seizure on the Montmartre street, he sat in the pedestal leather chair, surrounded by the smell of brilliantine and the old barber’s cheroot, and had the sensation that he and the barber shared a secret understanding. Buried in the barber’s monologue about iron stocks and the pleasure of mohair in winter, there was something clandestine. The barber’s face was whey-colored and pocked with age; it suggested ravaged wisdom. He looked at Louis in the mirror and there was a pause, as if here he would name the unknown shadow. Their eyes met briefly, then Corbin puzzled over a rogue whisker. He opened his straight razor, and for a moment Louis saw it as a silver glaive flashing beside his neck.

He emerged from the barbershop replenished, a slight sting of cologne on his cheeks. The air felt brazen, sharp as pine needles. He walked down the street carefully, light on his arches, like some provincial mayor rehearsing a stage walk. He wanted to savor everything, the clack of his shoes on the macadam, the press and tuck of his waistcoat. He had made further inquiries about Isobel Le Fournier. This was not just to prove her continued existence and take her portrait. It was, in a way, to close his accounts with life before
The End,
to balance the ledger where her name appeared mostly on the left and in red. He had removed a page from the Paris directory where the addresses of the city’s two Le Fourniers were listed—one in Faubourg St. Victor and the other in Montmartre. He climbed up into his carriage and rode towards the first address.

Many years before, Isobel had been living under this surname, and it stood to reason that the name had persisted. Of course it was quite likely that Isobel did not live in Paris; after all, he knew her last to be living in Lyons, married to a banker. But Louis believed he had seen flashes of her around Paris—a woman with fine-boned hands one October day at the Sorbonne. He was late to deliver a lecture on his daguerreotype process when he saw her from a distance of fifty feet. Her hair was pinned under a brocaded scarf, and she was collecting autumn leaves and pressing them into a heavy book. It was not a physical recognition but the resonance of behavior. If Louis extrapolated from what he remembered of her during their last meeting in 1807, when she was twenty-two and he was nineteen, and added forty years of weather, revolution, illness, childbearing, she was more or less what he imagined: a woman aged with grace, a certain defiance in the way she gathered gold-and wine-colored leaves from the Sorbonne lawn while law students clopped across the pavestone in their gowns. Another time, he saw this same woman driving her own carriage, hurrying along Rue St. Honoré, this time with her hair down. Louis had emerged from the haze of a tobacconist and squinted into the glare of the street. The woman’s silken hair ribboned in the wind and there was a moment, an interstice, of hapless eye contact between them. Again, it was not so much recognition as pause. Thepast asserting itself in the present. It was that slightly dazed expression between strangers which suggests anything from daydreams to bemusements at a hat or gown, to that subtle infatuation with the mystery of another person’s existence. The carriage drove on. Louis watched it disappear, the bolt of the woman’s hair diminishing into the crowded street. Then there was last week’s sighting of Isobel—but that was altogether different. The sight of her youthful aspect in a deserted wineshop window was surely a delusion, something that came in the twilight of a seizure.

The first address was buried inside an enclave of widows. Austere mansions gave way to crumbling homesteads on acre plots, verandas worn to driftwood. These were the houses of the old guard, indigo and coffee barons whose fortunes had been winnowed by the revolution. These merchants, it seemed to Louis, had died all at once, leaving an army of widows to live like squatters. Three undertakers and a carpenter’s casket shop occupied the head of the road. Widows, dressed in black day dresses and woolen shawls, were out buying bread and glancing at the coffins that faced the street. Some of them traveled in pairs and made gestures to coffins of pine and walnut and beech, and Louis found himself wondering what interest these dovetailed boxes held after the loved one had departed. Were they discussing innovations in the field of coffinry? Had prices gone up with decades of revolution and restoration? Was inflation such that a man already in the ground was a man dispatched with some thrift?

Dotted among the black-shawled widows—flanked and dispersed like a murder of crows—were shopgirls and maids on their days off, carrying apples and boxed cakes, dressed in scarlet and burgundy. One girl wore a bright purple hat under which she ate a wedge of Brie from a bakery stoop. These were the women who no doubt worked for the wealthier widows, tending their soup and death vigil.
Who is better prepared for the end?
Louis wondered. The widows who had found a kind of integrity in their grief, donning black for a year or more, distilling life down to its essentials—prayer and bread and vigilantly run households; or the young girls who were oblivious to calamity and death, whose awareness of life’s inclination towards decay was based on scrubbing creosote from fireplaces and wringing the necks of chickens each Sunday for a widow’s after-church meal.
Who will die more righteously? The woman in black or the woman eating Brie in a doorway?

Louis stopped his carriage in front of the last house on a dead-end street. The roadside ditches were full of mown thistle and briar, and the air was redolent of dead flowers. He descended from his carriage. The house was fronted by a high-walled courtyard and a hem of brushwood. He walked towards the wall of small Roman brick and placed his hands against the wrought-iron gate. The house was in a state of ill repair. The eaves sagged. A bloom of ground-rot had inched beneath a windowsill. These could be symptoms of grief and regret, he thought, the hallmarks of a woman plagued by her past. It had once been an elegant house—there was a patina of wealth beneath the rot. It had been built as a provincial château, twenty minutes from the Champs-Élysées. There were garden beds, parterres of roses, flowerpots that made Louis think of Isobel’s country upbringing and earthy ways. Then he noticed a figure kneeling and weeding at the edge of a flower bed. It was an elderly woman, tossing tentacled weeds into a pile. She wore a white scarf and a blue housedress instead of a widow’s smock and shawl. If Isobel had lived to be over sixty and was now widowed, then surely she would have defied the custom of somber dress in some measure. Louis watched the woman for several minutes, the way her gloved hands picked at the base of flower stems, the economy of her hand at a trowel, the suggestion of prayer in the way she knelt beside her camellias. He realized he was gripping the iron gate, and suddenly the ancient hinges let out a rusty moan. The woman looked up from her gardening. When she stood, she wiped her cheek with the back of her wrist and Louis felt his shoulders turn for the carriage. He would say that he’d lost his way, an errand man on a cul-de-sac. She walked towards the gate, removing her gloves.

“Monsieur?” she said. It was less of a question than a statement—
a man is standing outside my gate.
This may not have happened for some time.

“Madame, I am sorry to intrude.” He studied her face for memorable traits. “I seem to have lost my way.”

“I see,” she said.

“I am delivering flowers to a Madame Le Fournier.”

She looked at his fine-weave trousers, then at the empty carriage. “But you have no flowers?”

“Yes,” said Louis. “You see, I have been robbed. And I must find Madame Isobel Le Fournier to explain the theft of her flowers. There were road bandits.”

“You poor man. I am Madame Le Fournier, but I haven’t received flowers in many years. Are you sure of the address?” The woman cocked her head to one side.

Her eyes, he could see now, were blue instead of green. Could eye color change in the old and widowed as it did in infants? Could grief turn a woman’s gaze from jade to cornflower blue?

“Quite certain,” he said.

“Who was the sender?”

“Do you know a Monsieur Louis Daguerre?”

There was a slight quiver in her voice. “Of course,” she said. She loosened her scarf and retied the bow under her chin. “Half the country knows that braggart’s name because of that abomination of his. If you ask me, it’s not God’s intention to suspend our images in such a manner. It’s idolatry.”

He knew now it was a different woman; he was simultaneously thankful and dashed.

The old woman, a different Le Fournier whose stories of romance and widowhood were entirely unrelated to Louis Daguerre, placed her two varicose hands against the iron gate and began a tirade. “The saints and apostles do not wish us to harbor vanity. No. For when the Day of Judgment arrives, we shall be appraised according to measure. The seraphs will ripple over the fields. A great sweeping storm and a cleansing of the likes we’ve never seen. The vain and the proud will be among the first to perish. My monsieur died in the battle of Waterloo with his face in the mud, martyred by the emperor, and he, my husband, cared nothing for his own image. Never looked at mirrors. You will not find mirrors in my house to this day.” She let out an asthmatic but satisfied breath. She glanced back at the garden beds. Her bottom lip gave a tremulous pout. “My flowers are being eaten by worms.”

“I’m sorry to have troubled you, good madame.”

“Tell Monsieur Daguerre that giving widows flowers will not make them buy his daguerreotype. Not while an angel is called Gabriel.”

Louis began a retreat from the gate. “Good day, madame.”

She swatted at something in the air and lowered her face. Louis climbed up into his carriage and drove back through the neighborhood of sackcloth.

Four

L
ouis lived inside his rooftop camera near Orléans, making that awkward passage from boy to young man. In many ways his boyhood mirrored the revolution—born in 1787, two years before the Bastille fell; showed signs of rebellion against his father as Parisians raided the royal tombs of the Abbey of Saint-Denis; clambered towards puberty during a coup d’état; departed for Paris in 1804, aged sixteen, to find his place in the world as Napoleon crowned himself emperor.

But at fourteen—two years after he’d watched sunlight etch a walnut tree onto his ceiling—he was a sensitive boy lost to love and distraction. He spoke about sunsets and the lustrous effect of high noon on bird plumage; he quoted Voltaire; he walked alone through thickets of orrisroot with a set of magnifying glasses, in pursuit of miniature kingdoms. With the bonehandled glasses and a leather notebook to record his observations, he would sit before a dynasty of granulated quartz and clover and study it for hours through the various lenses. He discovered colonies of ants, parades of aphids, gangs of pollinating honeybees. He studied the way the light intensified when he used a higher magnification. He set dried leaves or dead butterfly wings aflame with narrow bands of condensed sunlight. He felt a part of things. Sometimes he hid in the rhododendron tunnel and flashed secret, glassine messages to Isobel as she worked in the upstairs of the château.

Isobel cared nothing for the vagaries of light. She washed bed linens and sometimes served at table inside the mansion. She knew about arnica and nettle teas, about the day in the spring when rapeseed sprouted from sandy soils. She made poultices with cheesecloth and mustard leaves. As she walked around the estate—smelling of herbs and camphor—she sang pastoral melodies, shepherds’ laments. When Louis was sick, or when he pretended to be sick, she wore a white apothecary apron and carried a mortar and pestle in a small basket. They struck up an arrangement out of mutual need: Louis needed a woman to study, to fall in love with, and Isobel needed distraction from her household chores. She loved him, but there was nothing carnal in her affection—he was the unformed kernel growing inside the husk of a man. He wrote her love letters, made her crowns of tuberoses, painted watercolors of her transformed into a nymph on a bed of heather. He was in love with her, and she was in love with the man he might become.