“What you are to do with your life is out there, Edouard,” she’d say to me, cupping my face in her hands, which were always cool. “And when the time is right you will find it—or more likely it will find you. You do not have to be impatient, my darling. It is there, I feel it. And it is beautiful.”
At fourteen I took a job helping the local portrait maker develop his plates. I fell in love with photography. I even fell in love with the word. Writing with light. I had been waiting all my life to discover that it was possible to write with light.
My mother was right. My destiny had found me, and it was beautiful. M. Martillon, my boss, reveled in his power. He was a force in our little town because he stood for both Progress and Art. He dressed in the Parisian style and talked a great deal about the refinement of his craft. He was a symbol of another life, and although he was fat the ladies sighed over him. His hands were always greasy, but he knew about the latest Paris fashions; he made trips to the capital several times a year and claimed the acquaintance of both Nadar and Charcot.
Although he was kind to me, I did not like him. He equated photography with power and an entrée into society, and he had no reverence for his work. I could not pretend indifference to his connections: Nadar, the Parisian photographer who had made intimate portraits of Sarah Bernhardt in a studio that contained a cascading waterfall; who went down into the Paris sewers to take the first flash photographs. And Charcot! The man many called the Father of Neurology, which was less important to me than the fact that he was promoting the use of photography to document the symptoms of his hysterical patients in the Hôpital Salpêtrière, in Paris. But I suspected, even then, that M. Martillon had scant reverence for the great men Time and Fortune had given him the privilege of knowing. And in spite of his connections and high standing, I felt his world was small, and I looked with burning anticipation to the days when such opportunities as he had had might open up for me, that I might show my mettle by my manner of taking advantage of them.
After a year of running errands and developing portraits, I became intensely curious about the people on the other side of the camera. I knew how faithful the camera was, and yet I wanted to see these people in the flesh, to see their eyes and hands before the light captured them. I wanted to be the one in back of the lens. I was fifteen years old.
Of my own initiative I took a job with M. Bousson, the town’s only other professional photographer. He did less business than M. Martillon, and so he paid me less, but I liked him better. He preferred the colloidal method of photography, which involved working with materials as diverse as mercury vapor, beer, and honey. He made portraits for those who could not afford my former master, but although he did excellent work his heart lay in two very different places: Nature, and the deathbed. On Saturdays we would go out into the woods, I without pay, and photograph the natural world in all its raw glory. M. Bousson could make a paltry tumble of water, hardly worthy to be called a fall, look like a ladder to heaven. Colloidal slides must be developed immediately, and they must be developed using water. There were photographers who carried along huge complex darkroom equipment and portable rooms that they can set up wherever and whenever they needed them.
Our needs were simpler. A large jug of water, a shallow pan, the appropriate chemicals, a collapsible tent that could be set up in a few moments anywhere we chose, While my master decided on what angle and aspect of his subject he wanted to photograph, I coated glass photographic plates with collodion, a thick liquid composed of nitrated cotton, alcohol, and ether, which had been sensitized to light with potassium iodide salts. After just the right amount was applied (my master being very particular in his needs), the plates had to be developed before the mixture dried. I would hurry the exposed plates to our makeshift darkroom and develop them using ferrous sulfate, then rinse and fix the image with a solution of potassium cyanide. The method was considered outdated by the Eighties, but the pictures produced were lovely indeed.
And the keepsake portraits he made for the parents of children who had just passed away—often free of charge—were works of great beauty and caring. I was so frightened the first time we took such a photograph! An adolescent girl had died of consumption and, although I did everything I could to hide it, I was afraid to enter the bedroom in which she lay. M. Bousson saw my fear and dismissed it—one of the many kindnesses he did me.
“Bring me my plates, Edouard,” he said curtly, and walked into the room without waiting to see if I would follow.
The dead girl lay still against white sheets. She lay in a kind of swoon, her head sunk into her downy pillow, her hair in a cloud around her, her arms straight along her body atop the blanket and her palms up in supplication to something we could not see.
M. Bousson went about his business quietly and with reverence. I think I loved him that day, as a mentor and a friend. He showed me how to create a living memento. Many photographers relied on mountains of flowers and sentimental backgrounds to create the kind of feeling they think necessary to evoke memories of the dead. M. Bousson captured the loved one’s essence. I heard the bereaved say it again and again: “That’s our Nana exactly! Her expression! Her eyes! How did you do it?”
He never told me.
He showed me. In the room with the dead girl, I stood at the ready, slide in hand, hovering over the elements of the darkroom we had by necessity set up in one corner of the room. I readied the materials and watched my master go about his work.
First he stood and gazed at the body a long time. The girl looked to be about thirteen. M. Bousson moved to the bed and caressed her face—at least I thought he did. But when he moved away I saw that he had gentled her mouth, which had been turned down and slightly twisted. He passed his hand again over her, turning her face so that she seemed now to be looking directly above her instead of to the side. The photographer continued to move around the body, gently touching and arranging it as if he had known the girl in life, and wanted to make sure she looked in death as much like her natural self as possible. But when he was done I saw nothing strikingly different; I would not want a picture of this thing in the bed, I thought, if it had been my daughter. But the photographs, when I developed them, were exquisite: The dead girl did not look as if she were sleeping—but she looked as if she were dreaming, and might wake. It was the first time I had seen beauty in death. Suddenly I wanted to render death lovely, as my master did, to give the grieving a truth they could hold in their hands, a picture that would bring the loved person to them whole and palpable every time they looked at it, for years to come, for the rest of their lives.
So I learned to love death, because an artist cannot photograph any subject without real love and respect.
After some years with M. Bousson, it was M. Martillon, after all, who gave me the opportunity to go to Paris. There was an opening, he told me, at a tintype studio near the Tuilleries. I would be only one of many young men, but Paris was full of opportunities, and full, to my young mind, of possible dreams. I ended up one of a cadre of young men whose job it was to develop the seemingly endless series of photographs taken at the studio, mostly portraits of families, young men and women on the Grand Tour, and old generals. It was tedious work, but it made my hands careful, fast, and sure. But I found that I had learned more of human nature photographing the dead and dying than I ever would from the stiff and formal photographs taken at the studio. At least all the expressions of death are natural ones, and the expressions of the dying are true and clear. But these people, young and old, tourists or girls making their first debut, stood as frightened and frozen in front of the camera as people did fifty years ago, when they had to stand immobile fifteen minutes for the creation of a daguerreotype.
Although a single photograph took only a matter of seconds to shoot, each person looked somehow almost identical. Whether the subject stood or sat in front of the most lifelike setting of trees or waterfall, only rarely did the spark of
individuality light the eyes. It is intimidating to most people to have their picture taken. I have read that the savages in Africa fear that the camera, in taking their pictures, will steal away a part of their soul, and it seems that there is some vestigial fear of such a thing even in civilized societies! The vast majority of subjects stare at the camera lens with a blankness more blank than death’s.
But I can still remember one young girl because of her insistence on the breaking of this pattern. From the back room where I sat with a dozen other young men churning out portraits, I suddenly heard cries emanating from the studio proper: Renée, Renée, you must sit quietly! Renée, Renée, that is not an expression proper to a young lady! And I knew Renée when I saw her. She sat defiant on a papier-mâché rock next to a painted stream, her head tilted back, her eyes bold. This is a girl made for adventure, I thought, and I think of her still. She was not beautiful, but her eyes held such promise, such passion, such will often I have wished Renée well, when passing a midinette or other young thing on the street. Often I have wondered for what adventures Renée was fated, even where she is now. For a week I was half in love with her, I think. And perhaps I will always think of her now and again. Linked as we are by glass and image, perhaps I will always wonder, and wish her well. And that is the very magic of photography, that we can look, and wonder, and care, long after the documented moment has passed.
After perhaps six months of toil at the studio, I was moved into the front room to begin photographing subjects myself, a blessing not unmixed, as I had often to reject my natural urge to prod my subjects into life. It was not my business to do more than arrange the subject in proper relationship to whatever background was chosen; mine was not the pleasure of a Nadar. No Sarah Bernhardt lithe and lively even in stillness, no great advancements to my art. But I found satisfaction in the almost abject gratitude of my subjects, as though each time I clicked the button I had performed some complex and quite amazing feat of magic.
After another six months I was granted the great good fortune to photograph for the newspapers one of the officials of the Prefecture of Paris Police, Capt. Henri Bezier. He was as stiff as any other who sat for a portrait, but he talked more, and loudly. He was insistent that he needed, with the utmost urgency, to hire a young photographer of sound physical and mental constitution and a steady hand and eye in the face of death. I was to find out later that the most important requirement for the job was a finely honed sense of the absurd.
Now I settled into the work that was before me.
The first step toward developing the pictures in evidence that I had gathered was simply to expose them to what light there was in the darkness. I readied a solution of sodium thiosulfate, which I would then use to fix the exposure to the paper and watched the first image emerge out its hiding place in the glass plate. The woman lay as I remembered her, her face turned away toward the darkest part of the courtyard. I waited, watching as she emerged. The bolero jacket, the pale gloves, the pretty dress. Even though my lady’s golden head was turned away, I almost flinched as it crystallized into view. There was the trail of blood that led away from the body, toward the street, the blood that had dripped from my dying lady as she was carried hence. And there was something . . . three dark drops leading away from the body in the opposite direction. I remembered a door that lay that way, a back door to the tenement, most probably.
Another photograph: her face. The strands of loose hair that had so pulled at my heart. And what was that dark object? I had not noticed it when I was looking at her face, her sorrowful hair.
I grabbed the magnifying glass and held it above the picture. A small, dark, rectangular shape. A box? Yes, a matchbox holder, probably of silver, some three feet from my lady’s head. I gently released the other photographic papers from their glass plates even as I bathed the first in the solution I had mixed. I would add a toner, either of gold or selenium, in order to stabilize against fading. As my hands performed the familiar actions I wondered what this victim had been to her murderer. Capt. Bezier said that the identity of the victim gives us the identity of the killer every time, but it seemed to me that it was the relationship between the two that was important. I applied the gold toner—this girl deserved gold—and began cleaning up my workspace. I worked more quickly than usual. I had someplace very important to go tonight. After I had finished I opened my window and saw the last light lingering at the top of the sky. But even if it were pitch when I reached my destination, I was certain of what I would find.
I hurriedly put on my jacket and set off.
Chapter 4
From the Journal of Augustine Dechelette
MY MOTHER SAYS the new telegraph in town is causing this spring’s hails, and Papa complains of the rumors that Paris time is to be imposed throughout all the country, saying that he will have himself tied to the face of the old cathedral clock rather than have anyone come and change its ancient hour. I listen to them talk as I boil the morning milk. Maman had to wake me to cook it before it turned, else we would have spoilt milk by afternoon. I could see the worry in her eyes; of late I have been hard to rouse. I have woken before the dawn since I was small. Now I cannot sleep at night, and dream with my eyes open. And in the mornings,I cannot rise.
I do not know what it means. I would like to think it means nothing. But Maman has a sad panic on her pretty face when she looks at me now, and questions. I stir the milk, I listen to them talk. I dream.
I look at myself in the windowpane as the milk cooks. When I live in Paris I will own a mirror. Yvette, the greengrocer’s daughter, has one almost as big as her palm. I remember the first time I looked in it; how afraid I was! It was only two months ago, in midwinter. Maman did not like that I looked, she said it fed my vanity; but all I saw in that mirror was a girl with unruly brown hair and eyes far bluer than I thought I had. My nose was quite familiar, with its little uptilt, but my lips pinker than I expected, and my skin darker than I would like it to be. In the windowpane I am not as pretty as in the mirror, but in the mirror I am not as pretty as I would wish. I have to admit that my vanity has been fed and is hungry. I go to look at Yvette’s mirror at least once a week now.
But I make faces in the mirror, too, Maman doesn’t know that. And Yvette makes faces, , and we pantomime all sorts of emotions into it and pretend we are on the stage. She talks of going on the stage, but I know that she will marry Jean-Pierre, the baker’s son, and have babies and grow fat. But I know that someday I really am going to Paris, and I will act upon the stage. It seems such an ordinary schoolgirl dream, but it’s not. One day I will stand at the railway station, next to the clock that keeps Parisian time, with my bag and my secret, listening for the rumble of the locomotive that will come into the station quite precisely at ten after ten, and in the space of three minutes will set me free.
Louis Mouret opened a bookshop in our town eight months ago. It was a brave act, as we are still practically in the provinces and quite unsophisticated. Many of our women still wear the traditional costume of our village, the blue skirt and cornflower-blue cap, with its characteristic strings at the back, as their daily dress.
Louis’ bookstore is not the only innovation. A photographer opened a studio next to the train station last year, and it has been doing a steady business. Papa was even able to persuade Maman to go there to have our family’s picture done, for which we stood in front of a great façade of a forest scene complete with waterfall. There was a plaster rock for Maman to sit on; for once she forsook her wooden clogs for leather shoes, and she looked lovely with her hat high atop her hair, which she had had shaped and filled out over a horsehair mold. Her hair is still thick and dark (although not thick enough for fashion, which makes demands few women can meet), and her skin is fashionably fair because she never leaves the house. Papa tells me what a great beauty she was in her youth. In the family portrait she sits with tightened lips. She does not trust this black glass eye that is making magic
in front of her. At the breakfast table that morning she asked nervously how far away from these new cameras must we stand, and was there any danger, and what if it stunted my growth? I told her a thousand times, as Papa resolutely read his paper, that cameras are not new, that they have been around longer than she has been, much longer, forty years. But she would worry about the chemicals, and whether the skin on our faces would be burned.
I barely remember standing for the photograph. I was so excited, and it took such little time! We were set up and shot in no time at all.
And when I see the girl in the picture I do not know her at all. I look like a country bumpkin, such a child, with my corset laced so loosely I hardly have a waist, and my skirt so short you can see my ankles even though I am almost fourteen. Maman had almost made me wear my hair down, and I remember how I cried and pleaded with her to put it up, not in a loose, high chignon the way a woman would wear it, but at least off my face, as befitted a young lady. I stand forever fixed in children’s garb between my parents, and my father wears a peasant’s hat on his head. I showed him a whole page of men’s hats from the Bon Marché, the Ladies Paradise that Zola writes about. But although Papa could easily afford one, he brushed away the paper and insisted that the one he wears to church on Sunday was good enough for any portrait. I must say he cut a fine figure, though, in his Sunday suit, looking proudly at the camera, showing for generations to come the great joy and achievement of his life: his women.
I am his only surviving child. He educated me in science so that he would have another mind with which to share his ideas. Both before and after my birth my mother lost children, two to miscarriage, one stillborn, and one after three weeks in this life. She has been subject to nervous prostration since the death of that last babe, the only boy. I would like to think that my father taught me to exercise my mind as you would a muscle, to shape it as you would an arm or a thigh you needed to toughen for strong work because he had progressive ideas about the feminine sex. Nothing could be further from the truth. Papa wanted sons; he got no sons. He wanted strong minds to match his own; he is surrounded by minds naturally incapable of the intricate calculations and minute observations, the abstract reasoning and argumentative abilities to which he feels he must be exposed for his own intellectual sustenance. So he has taught my mind, since I was small, as if it were a boy’s mind. He sent me to school and hired a tutor to teach me at home as well: Latin, Greek; the botanical and astronomical sciences; rhetoric and the Scholastic method of argument; the study of electricity and chemical analysis; and, of course, all of the mathematical skills necessary for such work—and this in addition to my regular round of feminine accomplishment, without which I should surely never marry: dancing, singing, piano; sketching and painting; lace-making and baking and the entire catalogue of endless household chores. I argue better than I sketch. I can look at a picture of a hat in a ladies’ magazine for thirty minutes, but I love to discuss Progress with Papa more than almost anything in the world. I am utterly unsuited to be the wife of anybody in this town.
The Green Muse Page 3