The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre

by Dominic Smith

  “Friends, this is Monsieur Louis Daguerre, father of the daguerreotype,” Baudelaire said as they came close.

  “Good evening,” Daguerre said.

  They introduced themselves: Monsieur Girou, an astronomer; Eggshell, a barmaid; and Pigeon, the alleged cabaret dancer. Eggshell and Pigeon appeared to be in their thirties, and neither of them wore a wedding ring. Louis attempted to exchange a few pleasantries about the balmy evening and the large crowd, but they would have none of it. They were intent on the fire. Louis thought he could make out the object on fire: it appeared to be an old coat of arms, crossed heraldry swords and full-plumaged birds stuck to a shield. The coat of arms was damp and full of mildew—hence the smell.

  “What is it we are burning?” Louis asked after several minutes of silence.

  Baudelaire said, “It used to hang in the drawing room inside. It belonged to the previous owners—a general and his family. We’re sending out their ghosts.”

  “Yes, of course,” said Daguerre. He sat down beside Pigeon and stretched his hands towards the fire pit. Pigeon and Eggshell found this very amusing.

  “Are you cold, Monsieur?” asked Pigeon over her wine goblet. “I have a cold.”

  Some nodding. Some silence.

  Baudelaire was over by the other man. “Monsier Girou is what we might call an avant-garde astronomer,” he said.

  “How so?” asked Louis.

  “He doesn’t believe in the existence of the sun. But after popular pressure, he has conceded the existence of the moon.” Baudelaire smiled at the women, who were in giggles. Arago was right; Paris was full of madmen. Louis looked at the astronomer. He was a man of perpetual lip-licking and hand readjustments; something hemming and bucolic about him—a nervous country vicar on the brink of a sermon. The man nodded, fondled his hairy knuckles, and raised his eyebrows, braced for mockery.

  “I would have thought Copernicus had put the issue to bed some time ago,” said Louis.

  “Sir, just because we see perhaps something orange in the sky doesn’t mean it exists. We see dreams at night, does that make them real?” Girou said.

  “My dreams are real,” said Louis.

  The astronomer said, “No, no, here is the thing: the sun is, how should we say, an invention of the calendar…a convenience of the state.”

  Louis stared at him, waiting for the linchpin item in his behavior that would allow him to hate the man without remorse.

  “Mystical astronomy. I have to say, it’s quite a notion,” said Baudelaire. “What do you think, ladies?”

  Eggshell, pretty in a childish manner, fresh-skinned and bright-eyed, rubbed a hand down her dress pleats and said, “I knew a man, a regular at the tavern, who believed the sun had set inside his own head.”

  “Sunset cranium!” cried Baudelaire.

  “This is madness,” said Louis, scanning the faces for a rational ally. “I make photographs from sunlight. I have spent my life studying its movements, the way it travels between two fixed points. If there is no sun, then none of this is real.”

  “Perhaps that’s true,” said the idiot astronomer.

  Louis felt a cough rattling in his lungs like a rat in a sewer. Suddenly, he looked over at Pigeon and his chest expanded. She sat peeling an orange with her long bone-white fingers, laying the crescents in her skirt. “Would anyone care for a piece of orange?” she asked. “It’s a little bit like the sun.” Her face was delicate, a fine nose, high-blown cheeks, but her mouth was solid, wrought by some heavier flesh and perpetually a little open. Her mouth reminded Louis of a basalt cave. Her hair was the color of cinnamon bark, a color Louis knew would register well in a daguerreotype. She painstakingly pulled the pith off each piece of orange so it was smooth and flawless. This attention to detail seemed natural in her. As he selected a piece of orange from her ruffled skirt, Louis grazed a wave in the gown with a finger. He put the orange in his mouth. It was extraordinary—a quince bite followed by an explosion of sweet citrus. Baudelaire, Girou, and Eggshell each took an orange portion and ate in silence, dumb-struck by flavor. Mercifully, the argument about the existence of the sun abated.

  Eggshell, in a burst of jocularity, said, “Know what they call this color taffeta I’m wearing?”

  “Do tell us, my gooseberry,” said Baudelaire.

  “Spider meditating a crime.”

  They all laughed at this, even the astronomer.

  “Oh, that’s very good,” said Baudelaire. “Tell me some more of the colors at the department stores.”

  “Light green is lovesick toad and pale gray velvet is frightened mouse.”

  “Poets of the gown.” Baudelaire nodded, grinned, then stood abruptly and began twirling around. “These are the times, friends, the crucible of the heavens. In America, Poe is scaring a nation, and here we are naming the spectrum of ladies’ garments after startled mice and jilted toads. Splendid, splendid. Any more of that wondrous orange, Pigeon?”

  “One more piece,” said Pigeon.

  Baudelaire tiptoed over to her lap and lifted the piece with extreme delicacy. “I think our friend the lonely astronomer should have it.” He turned and marched towards Girou, who looked admiringly at the piece of orange. “If I give you this last piece of orange,” said Baudelaire, “you have to promise you’ll stop this miserable mule shit about the nonexistence of the sun.”

  Girou looked at the orange, then swallowed. “Esteemed sir, I cannot make such a promise.”

  “Fine,” said Baudelaire. He threw the orange piece into a small parabola above his head before opening his mouth to receive it on his tongue. The fruit poised there a moment, an orange star at the entrance to a grotto.

  “Bravo,” said Louis. He hadn’t wanted the astronomer to get the last piece. In a wave of confidence, he leaned over to Pigeon and was about to mention his need of a model when a man in a Venetian mask came into the garden pavilion. The man came to Baudelaire and whispered something. Baudelaire’s face brightened. He said, “It’s time. Come with me, friends.”

  Eggshell clapped and jumped up, grabbing Pigeon by the hand and running outside. Girou, still miffed about the orange, stood slowly and looked one last time at the fire pit before plodding across the slate floor. Louis came close to Baudelaire. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “What do you think of Pigeon? What a find,” Baudelaire said, taking Louis by the arm.

  “She may do fine.”

  “Don’t you think it fitting that the final portrait of a woman should be of a whore? The Madonna of our age charges by the hour.”

  “I really must go find Madame Le Fournier. Could you ask Pigeon if she’s interested in modeling for me?”

  “There’s plenty of time for Le Fournier. As we speak, my minions are stopping any woman over forty. We will find her, Daguerre. I’m not sure who this woman is, but if she is here, I will find her for you. Now,” Baudelaire put his arm about Louis’s shoulders, “I’m having a secret gathering up in Poet’s Corner, and you’re invited. We’re doing a scientific experiment. Pigeon will be there.”

  Pigeon stood in the entranceway by one of the espaliered trees, touching the spindled branches with her long fingers. Louis found himself caught between the past and the future, between wanting to balance the cosmic ledger and wanting to sit for an hour beside a beautiful woman who smelled of oranges. He looked at his watch: ten o’clock. There was still time.

  “Come,” said Baudelaire. He turned and dashed out of the pavilion. Louis followed him outside but soon got caught up in the crowd. The poet, the astronomer, and the two ladies disappeared ahead of him.

  Inside the mansion, people spilled from all directions, out of the ruined drawing rooms and anterooms, hoisting carafes of wine, eating yellow custard from plates. Ladies in pleated dickeys were being shown a line of oil paintings that hung in a long hallway, illuminated behind candles in sconces. Men in sugarloaf hats held court with Moroccan pipes in one hand. Louis took the wooden stairs two and two. On the second floor, he wa
ited a moment while his chest convulsed. Down the hallway, an argument was under way between two groups of men who were loading small boys into a laundry chute. “Yes, yes, petit Jerome, five francs if he makes it all the way to basement.” Jerome, his sooty face peeking over the metal chute hatch, looked terrified. There was some money exchanged, and then the chute closed and the boy’s voice echoed as he shot between floors.

  “Where is Poet’s Corner?” Louis yelled to the men.

  “Top floor,” somebody yelled back.

  Louis turned and took another flight of stairs. The walls were cracked and bloated with moisture. Copies of Italian masterpieces, caked in grime and dust, hung in the final stairwell. One depicted the torture of a saint, his rippled white back being flayed by dragonets and archangels. Louis felt his throat grow dry as he looked at it. He took the last steps, calling out for Baudelaire. The top floor was quiet, and the rest of the house and the partygoers seemed distant, as if he were listening to a banquet from the end of a tunnel. There were bedrooms off the main hallway, and as he walked, he caught glimpses of the poet lairs, like monk cells, where antiques lay stripped and mottled by age. Louis XIV chairs with splintered legs and frayed seat cushions now seemed ascetic and grim. The feather mattresses—the conjugal bed of a French general, the bedding of his virgin daughters who’d fled the revolution in the night—were now piss-stained and tawdry. Louis leaned against a door frame and found to his disgust that he was weeping. He took out his kerchief and dabbed at his eyes. It wasn’t the stained mattress or the chairs that looked like objects dredged from the Seine; it was something else. He tried to retrace the tears. First the tortured saints on the stairwell, then the general’s daughters escaping their mansion in the night…given enough time, the poet and the general sleep in the same bed…Was that it? No, it was a memory of the older revolutions, of coming to Paris the year Napoleon became emperor and noticing the jasmine in bloom and peasant children playing cork-penny in the alleys. There had been a feeling of change in the open-air markets, of salt before a sea storm. Those days, he thought, everybody was building utopias, like castles in Spain. That was when he’d begun crying. A box of matches, the beds of generals where poets now slept—the end of the world was being sung to him in its details. Who will eat the last orange on earth?

  He put away his kerchief and walked towards the end of the hallway. He opened a heavy door covered in crushed Utrecht velvet. Inside, his companions were seated around a large round table under a domed ceiling. A gentleman whom Louis did not know bent over a side table, tending a range of dishes.

  “Come on, Grandfather, we’re waiting on you.” Baudelaire gestured for Louis to sit in the empty seat between him and Pigeon.

  As Louis came towards the table, he looked up and noticed a painted allegory faded beyond comprehension. Some shadowy greens, perhaps some foothills in Italy, and an expanse of bleached blue that may have been a lake. He looked over to the man at the side table.

  “The doctor is almost ready,” said Baudelaire.

  “Doctor?” repeated Louis, sitting down.

  “I’m terribly excited,” said Pigeon.

  Louis nodded and, out of pride, gave her to understand that he was abreast of the evening’s agenda. The doctor, a man in his sixties wearing a black smock, turned and carried to the table a wooden tray filled with Japanese porcelain saucers. He placed the tray on the table beside Baudelaire and smiled magnanimously. Louis stared at a crystal dish out of which rose a dark mound.

  “Greetings, good friends, and thank you for coming to our first dinner,” the doctor said. Louis looked over at the grim-faced astronomer.

  “As you may know, Charles and I share a common interest. We are currently collaborating on a series of experiments involving cannabis indica, which is a member of the nettle family. We are privileged tonight to sample and experiment with some very rare Bengalese plants that just came ashore. We have mixed the cannabis with butter and opium, forming a potent green paste. I recommend you swallow it, then drink a cup of coffee. Throughout the evening I will be noting your reactions to the paste, and I may, with your acquiescence, ask you some questions.”

  Louis, unable to contain himself any longer, said to Baudelaire, “What is this?”

  But Baudelaire ignored him and addressed the other guests.

  “Herodotus describes how the Scythians gathered piles of hemp seeds on which they threw stones heated in a fire. It was a steam bath of sorts, with far-reaching medicinal and meditative effects. This plant, which is scorned by most of our countrymen, is being accepted in some quarters of the medical establishment. Our esteemed Dr. Aultisse is conducting research that may prove, once and for all, the benefits of this plant for the insane, for those with chronic maladies, and so on.”

  At the conclusion of Baudelaire’s comments, the doctor handed each of the participants a saucer with a smear of the green paste and a vermeil spoon. Louis formulated a plan in which he would spoon the paste into his kerchief when nobody was looking. But when the Turkish coffee—black and with the grounds left in—was dispensed by the doctor, it was clear that he intended to inspect the mode of ingestion. Monsieur Girou ate the green paste and swilled his coffee with the expression of a man tasting an uncertain vintage. To Louis’s horror, the others began applauding, and the doctor, his arm crooked as that of a Right Bank waiter, said, “Very nice indeed.” Eggshell went next. Her mouth bittered at the hashish, then she swallowed her coffee with her eyes pinched shut. She waved a hand in front of her mouth and gestured to the water jar. She drank some water and recomposed herself. Baudelaire spooned his hashish into his coffee and downed the concoction with a swift throwback of the head. The doctor sidled around to Pigeon, his face demure, lost in a kind of ministerial efficiency, and watched her drink the coffee.

  “Will I see things?” she asked.

  The doctor remained silent and gestured to the Japanese saucer. Pigeon filled the vermeil spoon and brought it to her mouth. When she swallowed, she placed a hand to her throat. The doctor returned briefly to the side table, then came and stood next to Louis, who saw the small wooden spatula the doctor carried in one hand. Everyone was watching him—passengers pulling away from a train station. He thought about outright refusal, but he didn’t want to seem antiquated, especially to Pigeon, whom he regarded as more suitable to his photographic task as the hours passed. He tried to formulate some scientific interest in the plant, draw some allegiance with the Greeks and their hemp baths, but in truth he found the whole enterprise childish. The world was slipping away while men sought their salvation in the solace of wine and the balm of crazed nettles.

  “We’re leaving without you,” said Baudelaire.

  “Sir,” the doctor said in a genteel, professional way.

  Pigeon gave Louis a brief, encouraging smile.

  “In the name of science,” said Louis. He picked up his coffee in one hand and his spoonful of paste in the other and in two movements consumed both substances. He felt a slight convulsion in his stomach.

  In a short while, the doctor served a meal. Louis had a brief coughing spell that left his fingers tingling and a cold sweat on his back. No one seemed to notice. He looked down at the table. The silverware was agleam, laid out as if for surgery. Nobody spoke as the doctor came around with slim-necked flasks encased in raffia, German steins, Flemish water jugs, earthenware plates arranged with sausage and buttered asparagus. Louis was relieved to find that he had an appetite. He noticed that his companions had been transformed in the candlelight—their pupils dilated and ominous as owls’, their mouths like mail slits in old wooden doors. They ate in a silent reverie, the silver arc of their utensils cutting through the half-light.

  Louis watched Pigeon cut her sausages into little logs and swim them through her butter sauce. He wondered whether now might not be the time to ask her to be his model. He wanted to go downstairs and begin his search for Isobel. Suddenly, he became aware of Girou and Baudelaire engaged in conversation. Baudelaire smiled
over his plate of food, cutlery poised, and said with some delicacy, “I suppose you realize, Monsieur Girou, that you have a very large head?”

  A long silence. Louis heard the Utrecht velvet sway on the double doors.

  “I beg your pardon?” said the astronomer, spittle in the corners of his mouth.

  Pigeon and Eggshell erupted into laughter.

  “I am merely commenting on the size of your cranium. It’s a behemoth. I suppose you are accustomed to people commenting on it.”

  Louis looked at Girou’s head and noted its size; Baudelaire seemed riveted by its sheer volume. Louis held back a colossal urge to snicker.

  The astronomer scratched a wrist and cocked his head to one side, a planet shifting on its axis. Louis laughed despite himself.

  “My head is the normal size for my body,” said Girou plaintively.

  “Balderdash, it’s a good three sizes too large. You must have your own hatter. I don’t mean it as an insult, because surely it indicates a very large brain. But I wonder,” Baudelaire said, glancing at the near-hysterical Eggshell, “if you find that you’ve developed certain eccentricities on account of your head. I have a good friend who has a very large nose, a proboscis of sorts, and he’s modified his personality accordingly. He wears very colorful waistcoats and cravats—you see my point? A kind of camouflage.”

  The doctor, poised at the sideboard, scribbled something in a leather-bound book. The scratch of the nib on the paper filled the room, a knife blade on whetstone.

  Girou said, “I don’t wish to continue this conversation. I was under the impression that I was a guest here, not a source of ridicule.” He took a swallow of brandy and left the table, shuffling over to a divan against one wall.

  Louis could feel the man’s humiliation; for a moment he was Girou, sitting on the divan, flummoxed and sour. “Leave the man alone,” he said.

  Baudelaire set down his cutlery. “He’s a fraud. The sun could be rising and setting inside his own anus and he wouldn’t know it.”