The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre (5 page)

She was, of course, three years older than he. This age gap—a stone dashed across the pond of his longing—kept their love-friendship within certain bounds. Regardless, there was something wild about her love for him. Sometimes when he appeared in a pair of ill-fitting pantaloons and a broad-rimmed beaver hat, off to see his Latin tutor, she wanted to strip him bare and roll with him in a paddock of oat grass. But this was not lust. No, this was the boisterous love that swells inside a woman who wants to marry a man who is still a boy at heart. This was the vision a girl-maid has of marrying her sister in the male guise—someone to wash her hair with rainwater and rose hips, to read her sonnets, to lie with her in a field of wheat and renounce the follies of the age. But this person, this boy-man she imagined spending a life with, would never possess her body or mind.

As Louis grew into a young man who wandered through the walnut grove with a set of watercolors instead of sitting at his desk with a set of calipers, his father became irksome. Although the clerk served the remains of an aristocracy, he found the laziness and ethereal concerns of the upper class intolerable. Monsieur Daguerre was a clerk with an impeccable sense of timing and order; he believed in an honest day’s work, sacrifice for king and country, marriage before the age of twenty. The house at the end of the glade—remodeled as a tribute to his services to the crown—was run with regimental precision. Each dawn Madame Daguerre served hearty breakfasts of soup and bread and eggs; she darned her husband’s black stockings the last Sunday of the month. To ensure his punctuality, Monsieur Daguerre synchronized the cottage clocks with those inside the château. The machinery of a household, he believed, needed to be as simple and reliable as a winepress. Nothing faddish, nothing wanton. God had designed man to calibrate with nature: to sleep with the stars, wake with the sun, hunger in proportion to his yields.

He tried to rein Louis in, at first with offhand comments: “Here, little man, come sit beside me and we will go through this pile of bills together. Ordered accounts and no debts, these are the hallmarks of any gentleman’s household.” In response Louis would sit on a high stool, take up his father’s daybook and inkwell. But soon he was sketching fir trees and ferny hollows in the ruled margins, and his father would dismiss him with the wave of a hand. Sometimes Monsieur Daguerre insisted that Louis accompany him to his office in the main building, and he would wait for the tardy boy to come downstairs. On one occasion Louis appeared in a topaz cravat and plaid trousers. The head clerk, appalled, said, “If my employer sees you in that yellow cravat, he’ll fire me. Where did you get such a thing?”

Isobel had made the cravat for Louis as a kind of dress-up, for when he was a duke out in the briar. Louis had spent the morning tying and untying the cravat. He found its style and color impossibly elegant. Louis stared at his father boldly and said, “Either that or he’ll give me your job.”

His father was riled by this comment. Rising from an ottoman, flushed with anger, Monsieur Daguerre said, “I will see you both this evening.” He pecked his prim wife—a woman of devout churchgoing and sunbonnets—and walked off through the glade. Louis ran up to his bedroom, ripped off the cravat, and watched his father from the window as he pinch-walked towards the mansion.
Hope you step in cow shit.

There was also an attempt to rein in Louis’s artistic sensibility with catechism classes. This was not because his parents were called to God—his mother prayed with the same domestic vigilance she employed when baking bread, and his father held the matter of God to be a meddlesome affair—rather, it was because Catholicism was seen as a bridge back to a time of superior discipline and manners. Before the revolution had topsy-turvied the nation’s mind and soul, young men and women knew the sacraments, and church was a forum for vetting another family’s respectability. How much could be determined by the polish and gleam of a man’s Sunday shoes or the hem of a lady’s skirt! Now the country was awash in eclecticism and revolutionary zeal, and boys like Louis were becoming indolent and doe-eyed. So Louis began a weekly routine of catechism classes under the supervision of a seminary student from Orléans. Together they studied the lives of the saints, the stations of the cross, the cardinal sins, the infallibility of the pope, the nature of purgatory and limbo. But what Louis absorbed from the scriptures and the asides of the hair-collared seminarian only intensified his fascination with art. Louis remembered the Bible stories as panoramas—the exodus from Egypt a stretch of pumice-colored sand under a high-blue sky; the parting of the Red Sea like two walls of fire; the saints in the desert with their forlorn faces upturned, their eyes made luminous by faith. Catechism only convinced Louis that the world existed to be rendered.

Summer afternoons, whenever they could escape their respective households, Isobel and Louis played out their pantomime of love. Isobel, rose-crowned, pale against the heather, sat motionless for Louis as he sketched her with charcoal. She sat, a chain of poppies about her splayed skirt, and looked off at hills blued by distance. He studied the slope of her neck, the triangulation of chin, elbow, and ankle. When he felt bold, he put the flowers in her hair himself, tucking blossoms into the crossweave of brown and blond. They discovered new backdrops for his sketches—limestone ruins, the shell of an old carbine—each giving occasion for new intimacy in the portrait. Louis was riveted by the gentle line of her bared shoulders, by the sight of her thin-boned feet swaddled in rye grass.

Louis also served as a kind of model for Isobel. He was her patient. Under a hollowed-out den of willow boughs, Isobel kept her apothecary. She lined a rock shelf with tinctures and herbal remedies and sat Louis down on a tree stump to inquire of his health. He was instructed to invent various maladies for which Isobel would concoct medicinal blends. “Night sweats, followed by vomiting in the mornings,” he might say. Or “I have itchy eyes and feet.” Or “I dream about horses in the grove.” She would administer an examination that was based on various modalities she had studied: she’d learned how to take a pulse according to Vedic tradition; she ran her hand over his spine and felt for engorged glands; she asked homeopathic questions about whether his throat itched when he sneezed and if his morning urine burned on the way out. Louis lay on the ground, his shirt open to her organ probes, and lied with all the seriousness of art. “A little burning, but not too much. The most dreadful headache whenever Father enters a room.” She did not laugh, but sometimes her hands gave in to nondiagnostic touch. At first Louis thought he was imagining it—that slow, undulating finger at his spine, or the light caress following a circumnavigation of his stomach. He saw his own body, the sallow skin, the bony chest, in the broadness of daylight. He became self-conscious and she seemed to sense it, moving to the remedy shelf to take down a jar of pressed pomegranates or silica powder.

They swam together in the cold spring behind the fields. She wore a petticoat and he a pair of cotton trousers. Isobel eased herself in among the lilies and floated on her back, her hair fanning out across the light-grained surface. She stared up through the branchwork of willow and elm, listening to her breath and taking her pulse from within. Louis dived for thrown coins and collected rocks. There were long stretches of silence. Isobel sloughed her skin with river sand and washed her hair with lilac. Louis came upon a monarch butterfly on a leaf platform and studied the geometry of its wings. Then something would quicken one to the other, a particularly fragile plant or insect, and they would find themselves squatting on the bank entranced by one of nature’s curios. Louis looked at her body when she wasn’t watching—the summered hairs on her arms, the whites of her fingernails, the wet-cloth rise of her chest. And Isobel looked at Louis when he dashed off in pursuit of a glistening pebble or when he shimmied up a tree trunk for wild apples. She looked at the mystery of a boy’s sinewy back and shoulders, at his knuckles and wrists, at the flats of his stomach. Then they returned to their dark houses and Louis wrote her love letters in which he compared her to a swan. She pretended she never read them and he never asked. She lay in her bed in the servant quarters and drank minted tea and laughed to herself that she had fallen for a fourteen-year-old boy when she needed to be finding a husband.

One day Louis took his father’s horse—an old gelding that came with an off-kilter trot and a hunting saddle—and he rode out into the countryside with Isobel snug behind him. Louis had been given a new set of watercolors from a bourgeois uncle and he wanted to make a portrait of Isobel in a new setting. It was mid-autumn; the sky was oyster, the fields straw. The leaves were turning from claret to gold. The gris meunier grapes had been harvested and the stems pruned, leaving long varicose lines of stem and stock. Louis knew from his father that the technique of pruning the miller’s gray vine had been discovered by the monks of Marmoutier centuries ago. It happened one season when their donkeys ate a harvest down to the ground. The next year the grapes rebounded to produce the best wine to date. Louis told this story as they rode, calling back to Isobel over his shoulder.

“So we owe the delicacy of our wine to an ass?” she said, laughing.

He could feel her laughter on his neck. He nudged the gelding into a loping trot. Isobel had no choice but to hold him tighter.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“To find the perfect place for a portrait.”

They trotted on. Louis had imagined they could ride out to one of the medieval castles or to an old abbey. He pictured Isobel on a rampart, her prone figure beside the mossy capstones. But they kept riding and it was getting late. They had to stop and water the horse where a vineyard led down to the Loire. There were cliffs adjacent to the river. They stood and waited for the horse to finish drinking. Isobel looked down at the river. They were abruptly at a loss for conversation. Louis noticed an opening in the chalk bluffs and realized that the vineyard kept a cellar in the cliff face.

“Look,” he said. “That’s where they mature the wine.”

“Let’s go see,” Isobel said.

“I don’t care to be shot by some drunken vintner.”

“Don’t be such a coward. Let’s go see,” she said.

Louis quietly tied his father’s horse to a fence paling and walked in front of her, leading the way. He began repeating wine lore he’d heard from his father—that if the weather was still hot in September, they had to harvest the grapes at night, that there were winepresses powered by windmills that could crush a man, that the Germans had discovered ice wine one year when the grapes froze. Isobel found this folk litany tiresome. She caught up to him just shy of the cellar entrance and said, “And tell me, Monsieur Vin, was this year a good vintage?”

“The grapes this year are too sweet. They’re calling it a year for the ladies.”

“Well, not all ladies like their grapes sweet. I prefer mine bitter, wild, and still on the vine.” She pushed in front of him and went inside the cellar. Louis followed.

Inside was more a system of quarries and galleries than a cellar. There were skylights chiseled into the facade, and these gave enough illumination to make out the winemaking apparatus. They walked between several winepresses and into a racking area. Against one chalk wall were open barrels of residue, the excess pressings destined for pickling vinegar or the Loire. The smell was bitter and tannic; the vague scent of oak softened it as they walked into the fermenting area. Hundreds of green bottles were inserted into the augered wall.

“Let’s drink a bottle,” Isobel said.

The light was fading and Louis couldn’t make out her face. “If we get caught, we’ll be done for.”

“So cautious,” she said. There was the hint of a test in her voice.

“Fine. Pick a bottle.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “The gentleman chooses the wine.”

“And what does the lady do? Get planked?”

Isobel walked up and down the aisle of wine bottles. Louis came behind her and pulled a bottle from above his head. He dusted it off and held it in front of a narrow band of light coming from above. It was from 1785, from before the revolution.

“Oh my Lord,” said Isobel, taking it in her hands.

“We can’t,” said Louis.

“I’ll kiss you if you open it,” she said.

He wanted to see her face, but all he could make out were the whites of her eyes. He felt his blood pushing into his temples and his mouth becoming briny. Clearing his throat, he reached into his back pocket and retrieved a cheese knife he carried for the purpose of sharpening his sketching charcoal. He dug around the cork and, after almost cutting his finger, managed to push it down into the bottle.

“Hardly the Right Bank,” said Isobel. She took the bottle from him and took a long drink. Louis did the same. The world had been reduced to the threat and promise of a tannic kiss—he imagined their mouths brimming and heavy with wine. They passed the bottle back and forth until it was half gone. Then Isobel said, “If you’re going to kiss me, then go ahead.”

An elaborate silence.

“I want to see you if I do,” he said.

“No,” she said. “Here or nowhere.”

“But we’re hiding in—”

She took his face, a face that was smaller than her own, and brought her mouth to his in the darkness. Here was the winey cup of his mouth, the feel of his jawbone set against her fingertips. She would regret this later, but only in the brassy aura of a twilight hangover. For now she took her fill of him, drank him down like spring water, and pictured, in the darkness, an older and stouter version of Louis. She pictured him with a mustache and brass buttons. She was kissing the man he would become and yet here were his hands all about her—pressing into her bodice, spanning the small of her back. Roused, Louis clamored for her in the dark. And Isobel felt her body undulate almost uncontrollably towards him; she was a virgin and this was a rehearsal for the wifely arts. This was practice, she told herself, a preparation for a future husband. She stopped kissing him when she inadvertently placed her hand behind his head and realized she was still several inches taller than he was. She took his hand and led him, stunned and silent, outside. It was now dusk; the river held a trace of daylight. Louis watched Isobel move towards the horse and thought abstractly about the portrait he’d wanted to paint of her. She stood waiting to hoist herself onto the saddle—her mouth slightly scalded by the kiss, her eyes darkened, her hair caught up in a halo of river light. Louis knew these to be effects of water and twilight, but he couldn’t help feeling he’d found a moment of perfection—Isobel captured in her sulky bloom.