The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre (6 page)

They rode home in silence. Something was different now in Louis. An insistence flared up in his chest. He spotted, through the woods, the yellowed windows of hunting lodges and the candle lamp from a bridge keep. He heard the low, jovial chiding of Parisian horsemen paying a river toll. Men were out in the night, making their way amid the cry of night fowl. Today he’d kissed a woman. He wanted to yell that as he passed the men on the bridge. He was a part of them now.

Fourteen, beardless, acting on the basis of one inebriate kiss, Louis proposed marriage to Isobel not long after. He planned it down to the last detail, choosing an hour by the brook when the day-lilies turned west. He dressed in the topaz cravat and his church-suit herringbone and donned his beaver-skin hat for good measure, because several times Isobel had said the hat made him look like a shepherd of the Pyrénées. Louis mistook this for flattery. So there he stood, an hour before Isobel’s appointed time of arrival, rearranging the decorative aspects of their little den. He treated it like a drawing room, aligning willow branches as if they were drapes, laying out polished stones like Venetian chocolates, combing the sandy bank with a broom of sticks to ensure she would have a soft place to receive his proposal. He floated linden blossoms on the water and coaxed a turtle to stay on a particular rock by spreading out slices of apple. By the time Isobel arrived, the little alcove had a monastic fragrance and serenity.

Isobel took in the arranged scene and her face grew white. She was immediately aware of the turn things had taken. The countless leaves of paper on which Louis compared her to doves and dahlias, swans and river idols, the hapless drunken kiss inside the wine quarry—these were so many articles of evidence in support of this terrifying and humiliating moment. She looked around for him in the ferny shadows. He stood, hands on hips, looking down from an island of granite in the brook with a glazed and maniacal love in his eyes.

“Isobel,” he said loudly, “I have something to ask you.”

“Please don’t, Louis.” She took off her shoes and came towards him, her bare feet pale in the chill water.

Louis hitched up his pants and ran his sweating hands down his rump. “I have made it known to you that I have every intention of fulfilling our destiny together. I don’t think I need to list my assets and talents. I come from an honest, clerkship family who will no doubt become property owners within the next generation. I am smart. I am also a good swimmer, which you know to be true.” He looked down at his hands. “Someday I will be a famous artist. I’d like you to be my wife. We’ll marry when I’m sixteen. If you say yes, I will write to your father.”

Isobel had moved out into deeper water, standing in front of his igneous pulpit drenched up to her thighs. Her maid’s skirt floated about her, raised and darkened by the water. The linden blossoms spun in small, tight circles and occasionally ran into her legs. Louis could see that she was crying, her face down, her fingertips gliding across the surface of the brook.

“You’re supposed to be sitting on the little beach,” he said.

She ignored him and came closer and wrapped her arms around his legs. She kept her face down but squeezed with a ferocity he would not forget. She thought of him as a doe she’d found out in the woods, an animal brought into her custody. She loved him fiercely and there was no denying that. But she wanted to lease the boy from the world as a friend and then buy him when he became a man. The kiss had confirmed that. Some time ago she had decided on the one unspoken rule of their ambiguous love—
do not ask me to decide what you are to me, for that will ruin everything
—and now he had violated it. Now he was a child in love with a woman, a boy trying to learn the anthems of men.

“Why did you have to do this to our friendship?” she said.

He looked at her with a dark and pure anger. “I do not wish to be friends,” he said.

“And I do not wish to be the wife of a child.”

The plainness of it struck him. He’d wanted to believe that those had been tears of surrender and that her embrace was an act of compliance. He looked over at the turtle sunning itself on the mossy rocks, idling its head from side to side. A long silence unfolded. The river weeds bent with the pull of the brook.

“Say something, Louis, or we will both suffocate.”

Louis stood up from the rock and looked down at her. The rage pulled at his mouth, making it thin and tight. “I seem to have made a mistake,” he said. “I thought you could see it. But look at you, you’re just a maid standing in her uniform, drenched up to her cheap underwear.”

He turned and leaped off the rock and began wading through the stream. He dashed up the small bank and ran out into the open. Isobel watched him disappear across the glade.

The marriage proposal lived in the air between them; they kept the hurt rubbed and silent as polished brass. The weeks dragged on and the silence plagued them both. They lived, half dazed and preoccupied, in each other’s troubled thoughts. She dropped vases and dinner plates. He stubbed his toe on the stairs that led to his bedroom and misplaced his magnifying glasses every other day. Louis would retreat whenever he saw Isobel out on the grounds. He replayed those moments in the ferny den and saw himself as a fool, a circus dog groveling in the dirt. The images of that afternoon paralyzed him with bitterness; every detail was a humiliation. As for Isobel, the guilt and sorrow lingered in the months that followed—she felt it at the edges of everything she did. An accidental reminder could come in the form of a flower arrangement with linden blossoms or a glass of water resting on a table. All at once she would see that scalded look in his eyes and feel tears brimming.

Five

L
ouis was going to the Paris Observatory to take twin portraits of the sun and the moon. He dressed before the mirror in a silk waistcoat and woolen coat. He wanted to look serious and hoped the weave and cut of his clothes would lend something formidable to his appearance. Around his neck he hung the Legion of Honor cross on a chain and buttoned his shirt to conceal it. With its five silver points and enameled laurel wreath, it was both ornate and stately. It had been designed for official ceremonies, but Louis had taken to wearing it as a daily talisman, as proof of his own ascent. As he stood in front of the silver-backed mirror, he wondered if man’s reflection was the precedent for photography. Daguerreotypes were, after all, mirrors with a memory. Before his invention, men had stared into stilled ponds, plates of glass, and mirrors with simple fascination at their own aspect. Now they imagined themselves in the stop-time of a photograph, their flaws etched, their lucent eyes alighting on some future viewer, a grandchild in an attic, a bereft widow, and they were taken, if only for a moment, with their own mortality and the residue of a human life. They felt a fondness for their future dead selves, the specter laid down in the mercurous grain.

Louis had a stable hand bring his carriage around and carried his daguerreotype equipment downstairs. He emerged onto the street and noticed the perfection of the day. The pavestone had been glossed by an overnight rain, and from his stoop the entire boulevard stretched away like an expanse of oiled slate. He could smell the bakery ovens firing and the chalky odor of wet sandstone. As he loaded his equipment into the carriage, old men passed with their dogs, traveling in twos and threes behind leashed spaniels and hounds, complaining about their wives and the price of tobacco.
Fraternity is not dead. We will die as brothers.
Louis ran a hand over a horse flank and climbed up onto the box seat. He filled with the pleasure of the day ripening, with the wild luck of being alive in the middle of the nineteenth century. An artist, a scientist; he was on his way to chronicle the heavens.

The Paris Observatory stood on its namesake avenue, a stone rectangle with two wings attached, each facade facing a cardinal point of the compass. Louis admired the building’s symmetry before entering. The building marked zero latitude—it was literally the center of the world.

Louis knew from François Arago that the foundations and basement of the observatory were as deep as the building was high—about fourteen meters. The subterranean rooms were guarded with some secrecy. On one occasion, a colleague had mentioned that beneath the observatory was an underground portal into the catacombs. These tunnels serviced rock quarries of the Roman era and the mass graves of the revolution, when the cemeteries were abandoned for below-street tombs. In the high and final days of Charles X, before the July Revolution of 1830, the king had thrown wild parties in the catacombs as an affront to revolutionary blood: he held underground orgies, strange feasts of shaved ice and marinated eel. This had always struck Louis as wretched; even though he sometimes favored the monarchy over the revolution, the image of the monarch rav-aging courtesans beside entombed remains saddened him on behalf of the people. But it pleased him to think that above this debauchery, science went on unabated. Astronomers continued their night watch at the height of state corruption; they tracked and measured, gave names to the flash of comets and the pinwheel of stars.

As Louis entered the building, it occurred to him that the catacombs were the perfect place to store his doomsday portraits. Sealed off, far below the city, they stood a chance of surviving whatever storm of terror came with the final days. He would ask Arago on some other pretext for access to the catacombs. François Arago was not the sort of man to share an apocalyptic prophecy with—he was, among other things, a professor of analytical geometry. He believed in form and coherence, that a set of parallel lines extended to infinity.

Louis was led up a long spiral staircase and into a waiting area outside Arago’s office. From out in the street he heard the sound of attendants unloading the photographic equipment from his carriage. There came a loud clatter, and he crossed swiftly to the window. A man in overalls was carrying the tripod over one shoulder as if it were a side of beef.

“Mind the equipment, you oaf!” Louis yelled from the sill.

He was surprised by the volume of his voice. The man looked up, swore under his breath, and plodded into the observatory. Louis felt oddly proud of having yelled out the window. A stand had been made. Most of his life he’d observed decorum and custom, but now he felt an urge to bellow. He looked around, a little annoyed to be kept waiting. He had no faith in daguerreotypes of the sun and moon. In 1845, Hippolyte Fizeau and Léon Foucault had made an image of the sun. To Louis it appeared as a ball of pale wax giving off smoke. It was not the method of the men that was in question. Both were sound methodologists—Hippolyte had several other images of limited acclaim, and Foucault’s pendulum was already under development, inching nearer to proving the rotation of the earth. No, Louis was not here to remedy the image. He was here to repay a debt to Arago. As the director of the observatory and secretary of the Academie des Sciences, Arago had rallied for Louis Daguerre’s national pension of ten thousand francs. It had been Arago who believed in the importance of Daguerre’s invention when others called it lunacy, an affront to painterly art and tradition.

A clerk ushered Louis into Arago’s office. It was a bare stone chamber with a single brass telescope poised at the window. Arago sat behind a large desk stacked with dossiers bundled in twine. He rose to greet Louis. “Monsieur, how can it be all these years and only now you’ve come to fetch me the heavens? Very good to see you.”

They embraced. Arago was an elegant, precise man with a square jaw and a Roman nose. He dressed like a Burgundy vintner, despite being an ardent Republican—an heirloom cravat pin, cuff links, moleskin trousers.

“You look good, François.”

“I’m balding and I don’t sleep well, but I appreciate the lie. It’s quite touching. Please make yourself comfortable,” said Arago, sitting back down.

Louis sat in a high-backed chair.

Arago said, “Where have you been? You dropped off the face of the earth.”

“I’ve been very busy with the process—making improvements and such.”

Arago leaned forward, his hands together. “Are you eating enough? You look ill.”

“You were always known for your tact. I’m too busy to eat these days.”

“Have a cigar,” Arago said. “Health is for the idle.” He reached into a top drawer, produced two cigars, and cut off the ends with a bone-handled knife. He handed one to Louis. “I hear,” he said, “that the Americans are quite taken with your invention. There are hundreds of portrait studios in New York. Even Samuel Morse has one.”

“I hear that also,” said Louis. He lit his cigar, being careful not to ignite his cough.

Arago leaned back in his chair, lit his cigar, and blew smoke up at the ceiling. “You must be pleased.”

Louis settled in his own chair. “I owe much of it to you. I’m always indebted for your sponsorship.”

“So indebted that you don’t answer my letters for five years?”

Louis felt himself about to stammer, then relaxed his mouth. “I don’t always read my mail.”

Arago’s mouth puckered with a sarcastic smile. “Ah, the vagaries of fame.”

A smoky silence filled the room.

“Some men might be bitter, Louis. I went before the Academie for your invention, recommended a national pension. Meanwhile, I measure the speed of sound and chart the stars and planets, and your average Frenchman doesn’t know who I am. They’re not going to name a street after me when I’m dead.”

Louis looked down at his feet and spoke quietly. “I wonder if the dead are vainer than the living.”

“What’s that?” Arago gripped the arms of his chair.

Louis watched the red eye of Arago’s cigar flash, then recede. “François, I have had trouble with my eyes, and that’s why I didn’t read your letters. My vision fails me at certain times of the day. The doctors say it’s a reaction to the nitric acid I use in my process.”

Arago cocked his head to the side, a little unwilling to yield his irritation. “I’m sorry to hear about your eyes.”