The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre (9 page)

He looked at the flask and suspected that mercury played some role in the end of the world. Objects and liquids had secret lives. A bent flower or a shiny brass button was part of a larger conspiracy. Everything conferred, leaned in. The signs and portents were coming faster now. Birds were singing on his balcony in the middle of the night. He needed to find Isobel Le Fournier before the world expired.

Eight

L
ouis left the glade for Paris. On the day of his departure, his parents came out to the carriage and his father pressed an envelope into his hands, saying, “Fifty francs towards your future. Found a household without debts and you’ll always be your own man.” There was a pause. Daguerre senior looked down at his fob watch—a clerk’s old habit—before adding, “Don’t marry a dancer. That’s all I ask.” Louis’s mother handed him a basket of hard-boiled eggs and told him to go to church and bathe every Sunday. Louis climbed up into the carriage and it began to pull away. He knew that Isobel had already left in search of work, but he half expected to see her standing barefoot in the brook, a branch of rosemary in her hands.

In Paris, Louis found an apprenticeship as a scenic painter. He arrived in the city between an execution and a coronation. Midsummer, the duke of d’Enghien stood before a firing squad while a silk hot-air balloon rose from a hillside of heather. Then in December of that same year—1804—Napoleon, cloaked in embroidered honeybees and stars, crowned himself emperor while the pope looked on in the stony light of Notre Dame. The Paris streets were full of bravado—the Municipal Guard lined the squares in their dress uniforms, the chestnut trees were draped with bunting. There was talk of invading England. Spies had been sent into Persia, India, and Australia. Louis had expected awe in the Parisian attitude towards Napoleon, but people spoke of him as a freak flood or a torrential storm. When he shot Josephine’s pet swans one night after a tiff, or when he kicked his economic minister in the genitals after doubting the man’s statistics, his deeds were recounted as episodes of weather, rants of nature.

That winter the sky hung pale and close; the river became tin. Louis took long solitary walks and tried to banish his love for Isobel. He knew that she’d gone south, to the vineyards. Despite this, he saw her everywhere in Paris that first winter—as a nut vendor’s daughter sitting on a barrel near the Pont Neuf, as a young maid lighting a tallow candle in a mansion window, her eyes cutting through the dusk. He became aware of women breathing under corsets, of hair pinned by whale-bone barrettes. A young woman came in from a downpour and stood shivering on a grocer’s stoop, Louis beside her. She smelled of rain and tea, and he found himself turning away, forcing himself out into the weather.

Each afternoon Louis walked a brisk circuit, a loop through Montmartre and out into the barrens behind the Left Bank, before returning to the theater. He walked past the public works that Napoleon had sponsored as part of the new empire—the granaries and wine cellars, the quays along the Seine. He waved at the old men who stood neck-deep at the river baths, bantering in their red stocking caps, their breath smoking up from the water. Everywhere men deliberated and conferred. Quarrymen trudged home from the gypsum pits, their faces dusted white with plaster of Paris. He would try to greet them, but they were lost to each other, to a flurry of advice about someone’s destitute niece or anguished brother. Louis wanted to be recognized out in the street, to share the camaraderie of a people who now owned the streets and the markets. But nobody waved back or returned his civic greetings. He went to the same bakery every day for three months before the shopgirl said hello back to him.

For the first time in his life, he was frequently cold and hungry. His apprenticeship allowed him porridge, soup, mutton stew on Sundays. His wool coat was wearing in the front, and one of his boots was split at the seam. When Isobel rose into his mind—the camphor flame of her presence—Louis counted his steps and felt his hunger. It was a bone-deep hollow, an ache that carried into his spine. He found himself staring into restaurant windows, stupefied by families of cheerful diners. The taverns spilled a festive light out into the street. One night, in front of a patisserie, he was transfixed by a tiered wedding cake. It was a perfect landscape of snowcapped terraces, an artifact of happiness waiting to be delivered out into the world. He stood there, O-mouthed, his shoulders up from the cold, and understood that he was waiting for life to begin again.

Louis had earned his apprenticeship with Ignace Degotti, the master scenic painter at Theatre Clementine, on the strength of two watercolors—
The Glade at Dusk
and
Isobel on the Riverbank,
the light perfectly inflected in both. He also had to pay an entry fee—the
bienvenue—
of twenty-five francs for the privilege of joining the theater. As the latest apprentice, he was known as the
rapin,
which, he came to realize, was shorthand for brush washer, floor waxer, outhouse cleaner, canvas stretcher, paint mixer.

Louis slept alongside the other apprentices in an old storage room behind the stage. A number of iron cots had been dragged into the room to make a dormitory so that the boys—future prop masters, carpenters, scenic designers, lighting and effects masters—retired beneath Gothic portals, Roman architraves, jagged sections of Parthenon, painted shop facades, carriage wheels, papier-mâché busts and statues. Louis slept under a small mullioned window that overlooked a back alley. Marius, the head apprentice, had a bed at the end of the room inside a gold-painted gondola that was suspended from the ceiling by metal ties. He’d cut his mattress to fit the shape of the boat, and there, in his suspended cocoon each bedtime, he enumerated the chores for the next day. He was a big-nosed prop-master-in-training and treated his apprentices like ship hands—calling them by last name only and refusing to eat at the same table. The scenic design apprentices looked down on him, on his sausage fingers and his nails bitten to the quick. He was a tradesman and they were becoming artists; he was from Marseille, the son of a shipbuilder, and they, for the most part, were part of the petit bourgeoisie, a class on the ascent. Louis and the other scenic boys nodded to his commands and called him Pork Chop behind his back.

One night, at the end of Louis’s first month at the theater, Marius woke the apprentices in the middle of the night and told them it was time for the
rapin
’s initiation. Louis had been told by the others to expect this, that Marius was particularly ingenious at scheming up ways to induct the new boys. They all dressed in silence. Louis, in what he thought was a flash of resourcefulness, slipped a pocketknife and some coins into his back pocket. He could imagine having to cut himself free from ropes or having to pay for a carriage from the other side of Paris.

Out in the street, the apprentices fell in behind Marius and he led them through the damp and gloom of Rue du Tourniquet, where the passageway was so narrow that two men could not walk abreast. They walked single file, Louis in the middle, through a district of brothels and underground gaming houses. Near the dog markets they fanned out and Louis felt a sudden urge to yell or run, to break the stupor of the dozen boys marching him to some unknown humiliation. The smell of canine squalor, something like wet fur and urine, was everywhere. Louis noticed a row of wooden cages that held that day’s unsold inventory—Russian wolfhounds and Great Danes leering from the shadows; herding dogs from the Alps, their ribs worn into relief. The dogs were too tired or hungry to bark. For a moment Louis thought he was being brought here to fight a dog and wondered if his pocketknife could bring down a wolfhound, but Marius kept marching them in the direction of the Seine.

They finally stopped at the Quai du Marché, where the city morgue rose from the riverbank. Louis had not yet visited the morgue, though he knew it was a popular destination; the curious and the morbid came on Sunday afternoons to move among the dead. There was an exhibition hall where the corpses were arranged in naturalistic poses and the murdered reclined in armchairs. In another room, the new arrivals were laid out on marble slabs with their clothes hung at their side, waiting for identification.

Marius stopped a hundred yards from the morgue and turned to face the bedraggled boys. As if on cue, the boys pushed Louis forward. He felt their hands at his back.

“Apparently you can paint, but can you sketch?” Marius said.

“Of course,” said Louis.

Marius reached into his coat pocket and produced some crumpled paper and a piece of charcoal.

“You want me to sketch the morgue?” Louis asked. “From the riverbank?” He looked over at the building: a rectangle of stone and mortar, fronted by a low wall.

The boys laughed at this. Marius took his time answering—the delight was in this particular moment.

“No,
rapin,”
said Marius. “You have a special model waiting for you inside.”

The boys had formed a half-circle around Louis and Marius. They leaned in, waiting.

Marius said, “You must sketch a particular corpse and stay in there for an hour. When you see the night watchman, ask for Frederic, a friend of mine. We will wait for you here.”

Louis felt an insistent shove at his back and began walking, paper and charcoal in hand, in the direction of the morgue. He heard Marius say from behind, “And no fucking any dead old ladies,
rapin.
”

The boys snickered at this and Louis heard them walk down towards the riverbank. His hands were numb from the cold and he put them in his pockets. He knew they would be watching him, so when he reached the front stoop of the morgue, he bounded up the stairs and knocked loudly on the wrought-iron doors. The night watchman appeared after several moments—a disheveled man in his sixties, a reek of whiskey on his breath.

The man peered through the heavy doors and said, “We’re closed unless you’re dead.”

“I am here to see Frederic,” Louis said.

“Is that true?”

“How would I know his name otherwise?” Louis said, shuffling from one foot to the other.

“Come in and be quick about it.”

The door opened and Louis entered. He was immediately overcome with the smells of damp clothing and formaldehyde. They stood in the entrance to a long hallway, with dimly lit rooms leading off on both sides. The man settled into an armchair stationed by the front door and arranged a blanket over his lap.

“Frederic is all the way at the back. Follow your nose,” he said.

Louis started down the hallway, his feet echoing across the slate floor. He passed the exhibition room where divans and armchairs stood arranged by the windows, where leather-bound books were splayed open on side tables. It resembled a sunroom in a country manor, a room where houseguests might retire to read after a meal. Further on was a series of closed doors, each marked private, then a flight of stairs. A wall sconce lit a small area beside the stairs and Louis could see a human silhouette through an open doorway. He came closer and heard a low murmuring—a man talking to himself.

“Hello?” Louis called.

The low-set voice stopped abruptly. A boy, not much older than Louis, appeared in the doorway, wiping his hands down his shirtfront. “Are you the
rapin
?” he said cheerily.

“I’m supposed to sketch a model.”

“Excellent timing. I’ve put everyone away for the night except your special lady. My name is Frederic,” the boy said. He extended his hand and Louis shook it. Frederic’s hand was effeminate and cold.

“My special lady?” Louis said.

“Some of the others like to give the dead girls names, but I don’t like that practice. I do like to call them ladies and give them proper treatment and all. They found this one in the river, black and blue like someone had taken a mallet to her.” Frederic clasped his hands together and shrugged. “A whore, most probably, not that I’ve looked, but the ones they haul out of the river are usually whores. Sometimes they’re suicides, with notes and rocks in their pockets.”

The high, caustic smell of death became overwhelming. Louis put his nose and mouth into the crook of his arm and inhaled through the tweed of his jacket.

“Come on, friend, smells like a bed of roses in here,” Frederic said. “Follow me and we’ll get you set up.”

Frederic led Louis back down the hallway and into the exhibition room. They walked towards the large windows that overlooked the river. An amorphous figure lay covered by a sheet on a divan.

“You get comfortable, and I’ll get some more candles so you can see better. But first you need to meet each other so we can all start off on the right foot. I covered her up to keep her fresh. Dear, I’d like you to meet the
rapin.
”

“My name is Louis.”

Frederic said, “Louis, this is Lady.”

Louis feigned a smile.

“She’s not fussy, don’t worry, your name could be Dog Balls for all she cares. Have yourself a seat.”

Louis sat on a footstool at the end of the divan and Frederic lifted the sheet. At first Louis could not make out the naked girl’s features, but then Frederic brought a number of candles and, by degrees, her mutilated form came into focus. She was a blond girl, no more than sixteen. On the side of her face was a bluish gash that ran from temple to chin. Her throat was swollen and purple, her lips gray. A series of diagonal welts covered her breasts and stomach. Louis could feel his throat tighten. Her body smelled strongly of vinegar and damp earth.

Frederic said, “Somebody had some fun with this one. They say drowning is the worst way to go, but I reckon in her case that drowning was the best part of her whole day.”

Louis had never seen a dead body before, and what struck him was the vulnerability of the human frame: it was little more than a constellation of fracture points, a net of skin over some bones. Every woman—his own mother, even Isobel—carried the possibility of this kind of death, the threat of a secret and brutal end wrapped inside her delicate flesh. Frederic continued to bring candles, and soon Louis and the dead girl were encircled by a ring of half-light.