The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre (8 page)

Six

E
arly in the winter of 1803, a theater performance of
The Enchanted Forest
toured Orléans and Isobel invited Louis to go along. After so many months of silence, she could stand it no longer. And if she dropped any more vases or plates, her employer would surely dismiss her. She knew that neither of them had been to a play before and that, on some level, Louis could not resist. He lived, after all, in a natural state of drama, riveted by the three acts of dawn, noon, and dusk. For Isobel it was a chance to be someone she was not—to take her place among the theater ladies in their pelerine capelets and laced bodices. She thought it a lark to be a pagan healer in disguise, an alchemist in a borrowed petticoat—the only woman seated in that shadowland who knew the medicinal power of wolfsbane.

On the arranged night, they stole out from their respective households and met out on the glade after dark. Louis was dressed in the topaz cravat and a worsted suit that made his crotch sweat and itch. When Isobel came from the main house, she saw him under the walnut tree, hands in his pockets. She walked slowly towards him. She was expecting anger and silence. Instead, Louis turned on his heels and said, “Hurry, my good wife. We’ll be late for the theater, and I do so like opening night.” For tonight he’d let the resentment go. Louis looked surreptitiously at Isobel’s outfit. She wore a pale rose gown with scooped shoulders. Her hair was pinned up to reveal her slender neck. He couldn’t bear it and looked down at the gravel.

They walked towards the road where Gustav, the coachman, had been persuaded to wait. The monsieur of the estate was away on business, and accordingly, all manner of infractions were being committed throughout the estate—stolen hams, illicit naps in the guest bedrooms. By comparison, Head Clerk Daguerre had redoubled his efficiency, showing up to work an hour early each day in an attempt to set the tenor of his employer’s absence. Isobel and Louis passed through the rhododendron tunnel. They came to the carriage where Gustav was sitting on the driver’s box, smoking a stout cigar obviously stolen from the château’s library. He looked at the two of them—Isobel half a head taller than Louis—and jumped down from his seat.

“Allow me, my lordship and lady,” he said, bending at the waist. He took Isobel’s hand and helped her up into the carriage.

Isobel said, “Very good, Gustav. It’s too bad the royalty seem to end up with their heads cut off, because you’re very good at this.”

Gustav looked at Louis. “Your father will tan my arse if he finds out.”

“He’s in bed by nine.”

Gustav gave Louis a gentle shove and ruffled the boy’s hair. Isobel let out a gasp of laughter.

“Stupid oaf,” Louis said, climbing into the carriage. He recomposed his hair and put his hat on to prevent further spoilage.

They rode into Orléans, passing the stone canals that drained the Loire and the cloven pathways that led to darkened monasteries. Louis looked out at the crops of saffron; the crocus-like flowers gleaned silver in the moonlight. In the last days of autumn, farmers and their children harvested the flowers, bundling them into thatched carryalls. When Louis imagined these families at their kitchen tables, working to remove the delicate threads of spice and color from the flowers, he was overwhelmed by a sense of their happiness. The Daguerres were not known for passing peaceful hours in one another’s company. Mother cooked and read the Bible, Father kept books and made commentary about the machinery that held the world and good commerce together, and Louis meandered the woods reading books and watching butterflies. Outside of household affairs—fetching water, chopping wood, minor repairs to the piebald walls—they had little to speak about.

A quarter hour before the performance, they pulled up at the theater and again Gustav acted as footman. He helped Isobel and Louis out of the carriage while the gathering theatergoers looked on. A low, scandalous murmur went through the crowd—doctors, lawyers, society wives, dress-uniformed officers in Napoleon’s army. Isobel and Louis were dressed in the right style. Despite the revolution and the call for an egalitarian society, gentlemen still favored three or four waistcoats, a lineage of gold buttons, Polish trousers; the women continued to wear barege and merino gowns, gold fringed velvets, their hair up in chignons. So it wasn’t the clothes of the two failed lovers that were amiss. It was their manner that faltered and, on closer inspection, their ages. Isobel walked as sure-footed as a dairymaid, and Louis, the supposed gentleman of the duo, trailed behind like a boy at his mother’s skirts. Inadvertently, he’d given the woolen crotch of his pants an insistent tug as he stood up from the carriage seat. Sensing the scrutiny of the crowd, Isobel took his arm once again and told him to retrieve the tickets she’d given him. Louis rifled through his pockets, his fingers lingering over his good-luck charms: a magnifying glass, several butterfly carcasses, an acorn, and a piece of quartz.

“Here they are,” he said, thrusting the tickets into the air.

They stepped up to the brass doors of the baroque theater, and Louis handed the doorman the tickets. The doorman’s face, stern as a magistrate’s, brightened when Isobel asked, “Are we permitted to sit together?” They’d imagined a section for the ladies and a section for the gentlemen. The doorman ripped their tickets in half, then let out a patronizing chuckle and told them not to heckle during the performance. Isobel’s cheeks fumed red, and Louis began fidgeting in his woolen pockets for a favored piece of twine.

The theater was cast in a low light from candelabras and oil lanterns. The proscenium stage stood covered by a tasseled burgundy curtain. Louis craned up at the gilded ceiling and the cantilevered balconies that jutted above the house seats like great warrior prows. Isobel rustled a little in her gown.

“Thank goodness it’s dark in here,” she said. “I was about to challenge one of those awful staring ladies to a duel.”

Louis leaned back in his seat. “They think we’re married.”

“I hope not.”

Isobel knew from the silence that she’d said the wrong thing. “Poor boy,” she said. “One day you’ll see this as the hopeless thing that it is.”

“One day when you marry some gouty old farmer, you’ll remember how elegant I look tonight.”

“You do look dashing. Perhaps the ladies were staring at you.”

Louis raised a finger to his lips; he could hear the orchestra coming to the pit. The house lights dimmed and the curtain lifted to reveal a backdrop of canvas. A painted landscape of mountains, forests, and lakes. Pales of soft bluish light threw themselves against the set, giving the appearance of night. Louis looked for the source of the light. Long metal tubes with gas lanterns and glass lenses were suspended from a series of iron railings on the side of the stage. Colored pieces of glass had been placed in front of the light apertures. Now a yellow ball of light rose from the mountain range. As the sun swam into the sky, it banished the pale blue of night, and the sound of birds could be heard. Louis could see a man holding a cage of chirping sparrows at the edge of the orchestra pit. Louis leaned forward, lost to a new devotion.

The husky sound of a cello opened the score. Actors and dancers came out onto the stage. Violins, mimicking the birds, rose steadily; flutes and the timpani coaxed a brighter day onto the set. The light changes were gradual and each new effect, it seemed to Louis, was tied to some emotional shift. The damask and melancholy morning, the first blues of dawn and the yellowing of tree crowns; a noon of lustrous lakes and white haze; then an afternoon of verdure—the greens darkening, shadows becoming visible in the groves. An entire day spanned, cradled in the palm of the ethereal music. Isobel’s hand found his in the darkness. She held his fingers lightly. He closed his eyes. He could smell her—camphor and rain, a perfume distilled from clouds. He knew she loved him.

After an hour of hand-holding and shimmering displays of light, the dramatic climax of the piece emerged. Isobel took her hand back and Louis lost himself to the drama. He had not been expecting such a dramatic ending. Although he read novels and knew something of how a tale unfolded, he had half expected the spectacle to simply wither and die without a crescendo. So, as a pale moon turned to oxblood, as a mountain stream was transformed by light and trumpets into a raging torrent, and as stage trees opened to reveal dryads and demons, Louis reflexively stood up from his seat. The man next to him tapped him with the butt of a rolled newspaper, and Isobel grabbed his hand and pulled him back down. A gale—the timpani unleashed—caused the trees to fall down, and a fiery red glow erupted across the stage. The demons and the dryads wheeled. As night fell, the dance-combat slowed between the guardians of the underworld and the wood nymphs, and the keepers of the safe ferny places had won out. The stage darkened and the final note of the cello floated up from the orchestra pit. Louis was unable to move. He closed his eyes for fear of seeing something as ordinary as a man dusting dandruff from his shoulder. He was sixteen, in love with a woman he could not have, moved by a desire to trap loveliness. Isobel took his elbow—she knew his moods and passions—and they remained in their seats until the theater had cleared. Finally, Louis opened his eyes, stood, and walked towards the front of the theater. Isobel watched him as he climbed the stairs to the stage. He leaned into the gold-tasseled curtain, trying to find the opening. Then, in an instant, he disappeared, swallowed by the proscenium arch. He was gone for several minutes and Isobel fought the desire to go after him; surely the ushers would come through the house any minute. When he came out, he was holding a green paper leaf. He looked at Isobel, his eyes on the verge of something. He opened and closed his mouth several times in consideration of speech. At last he said, “Nothing else matters.”

She guided him out of the theater, through the lobby, and out into the alley where Gustav was waiting. They rode home, Louis with his head against Isobel’s shoulder. He was entranced; there was no other word for it. As they neared the estate, Louis noticed the smell of wood smoke in the air. A caravan of peasants was spilling out of the estate’s main gates—old farm nags hauling box carriages loaded with armoires and high-backed chairs, sides of meat, carpets; the village blacksmith, hunched, was carrying a Venetian mirror on his back; a rag-and-bone merchant looked up from his wagon of spoils and pointed to their carriage, to what he thought was the approaching aristocracy. Some cries came from the front of the caravan. Several people scrambled on the side of the road for rocks to hurl. Gustav turned the gig and galloped towards the graveled pathway leading behind the mansion. They could hear the sound of breaking glass and the crack and hiss of a fire as they rounded the fields and came upon the château. Gustav pulled the horses to a standstill and they watched the furious black smoke pour from the windows and doorways. The flames were more blue than orange, as if the trunks of jewelry, the lacquered walnut desks, the pelted chairs, the ivory trinkets hauled across the deep from Africa burned hot and pure on account of their value. Gustav ran to find the rest of the servants, to hear the story of peasant looting. Isobel and Louis watched the mansion burn to the ground, unable to speak. The revolution had found them.

Seven

T
he night after Louis Daguerre lost his tooth at the observatory, he dreamed of his own death. He was a boy again, running along a beach. It was nighttime and the salt air pressed into his lungs as he ran. The sand was coarse against his bare feet. Something moved swiftly behind him, gaining. The beach tapered to a narrow sandy spit, and soon he sprinted across the shallows. A boat strung with yellow lights sailed for the horizon and he knew that he must swim towards it. It was safety. He plunged into the cold sea, into a great rushing darkness. He tumbled and raked in the blackness. Then everything slowed and shapes emerged; amorphous shadows loomed from the green depths. He struggled, called out, the salt water filling his lungs. Right at the moment when he felt his chest would burst, there came a release, an emptying. He felt himself rise. As he did so, the shapes receded and he could see the luminous stars magnified and blinking through the ocean’s surface, as if through a sheet of ice.

He woke coughing to find blood on his pillow—a chain of small red islands. Sitting up in bed, he looked across the room and thought,
I’m dying.
The injured dog was asleep at his feet, its breath slow and rasping. Daguerre took a sip of water. He looked around the room, disoriented. A flask of mercury stood on top of his dresser, though he could not remember putting it there. He reclined against his pillow and stared at it—five pounds of the liquid metal, glossed by the yellow of the gas streetlights. This had been his boon, the addition to two millennia of experimentation with fixing a permanent image using sunlight. And he had discovered it quite by accident. It was Divine Providence, the hand of God. He had been chosen to bring this invention to his era.

Once he had discovered the power of this metal as his fixing agent, he delved into its history and lore. He became a devotee, a reader of the epic poem of quicksilver. It was a monarch in the ordained
tria prima
of alchemy, brother to sulfur and sister to salt. It had been the secret furnace of tantric recipes in India, had been poured into the kernels of Italian hazelnuts to form amulets against bewitching. It was the gleaming polish rubbed onto the point of a Prussian plow to prevent the growth of thistles in a turned field. It was the deathly unguent infused into loaves of hard bread to locate drowned and trapped bodies in the British fens, the loaves sinking to dead men like their souls in reverse. This metal that would not yield to form, that resisted the clutch of the human hand and yet was absorbed by the skin upon touching. A gift from the cinnabar mines of Spain. A metallic sonnet, a love letter written by God and veined through the earth for millennia, fissured through slate and sandstone, waiting for its highest calling.