The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre

by Dominic Smith

  Louis cared for the injured dog, propping it with pillows, cleaning its wounds with soap and water. He didn’t collect his tooth from the observatory, but each night, as he and the convalescing dog sat on his balcony, he pondered the history of stars and teeth, the secret journeys that result in form. The reddish-brown mutt was prone to long naps and hobbled about between sleeps, chomping uninterestedly on bones Louis fetched from the butcher. As the animal regained its strength, albeit with a hind leg that would forever resemble a gnarled tree branch, Louis grew attached to it. He awoke from his strange dreams in the empty hours of predawn and found the dog curled at the foot of his bed. He took it for walks before the sun was up. During these walks, Louis thought of Isobel and Pigeon and the infinite permutations of a man’s life. Louis ruffled a hand through the spiked hair on the dog’s back and connected the sight of Pigeon’s lustrous hair at age fifteen, the heartbreaking organdy bow, with the idea of her as a prostitute many years later. Had Isobel’s subsequent life been so cursed that she’d raised a whore? Inevitably, Louis was wrenched from these ruminations because the dog would dash under a bush or scramble for a ditch. The mutt was ungainly and seemed to have lived a feral existence. Louis scolded the animal but found himself carrying it in his arms to get home.

  One afternoon, Louis was sitting on a park bench with the dog at his side when he saw Baudelaire bounding towards them. The poet’s hair had grown in slightly, giving him the appearance of a man recently escaped from jail. His white teeth flashed as he called out and dodged several charabancs. His words were lost in a gust of wind. Louis sat adrift in his thoughts and did not stand to greet the poet.

  “Damn you, Daguerre,” Baudelaire said, panting.

  “Oh, hello, Charles.”

  “Don’t hello me.” Baudelaire dropped onto the bench.

  Louis adjusted his collar to shield the wind coming off the open boulevard. “What on earth?”

  “I have been trying to reach you for weeks. I’ve left notes under your door. I’ve knocked at all hours.”

  Louis thought back on the past few weeks. There had been some noises and notes, that was true. “I am sorry,” he said. “I have been hard at work on my portraits. Only a few items remain on the list now.”

  “Yes, well, that’s why I wanted to talk to you. Incidentally, what a strange-looking beast.”

  Louis looked down, almost surprised by the sight of the scraggly mutt beside him. “I ran him over and have taken him in. He’s partially lame.”

  Baudelaire cast another glance at the dog, its mouth hinged open, then looked at Louis. “Listen, Daguerre, Pigeon has been hounding me about her portrait. She wants to pose, and I think she’ll be perfect for it. She’s a little old, almost forty, but nonetheless a fine specimen. I’ve been tempted to pay for the privilege of her flesh, let me tell you.”

  Louis sat bolt upright. “You will do no such thing. I won’t have it.”

  “She’s a whore, Daguerre. That’s what she does.”

  “No. You will not. She cannot continue in that trade.”

  “Well, perhaps if you paid her to pose nude, you would keep her fallow for a night or two. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but times are hard.”

  “I can’t take her portrait.”

  Baudelaire took out his pipe and lit it, and the two men passed a moment of silence while the dark smoke streaked by in the wind.

  Baudelaire sighed and said, “I’m inclined to believe the world is ending. Ever since that night of cannabis, everybody has been acting most peculiar.”

  “Take my word for it, that cannabis will be enough to turn the world into a whirligig,” Louis said.

  “On top of that, I’ve run out of money completely. A poet must die a martyr to become a great poet. We all know that. But I have money my mother won’t give me. She’s a sea wench.”

  “Don’t say such things. God will punish you,” Louis said.

  “I mean it. She cut me off. I’m forced to write garbage for the papers to buy bread.”

  Louis looked at Baudelaire’s outfit—nankeen trousers and a black woolen waistcoat. “But look at you, your clothes are fine.”

  “I spend my last sous on looking like a dandy. Salvation through style and all the rest of it. I’m deep in discontent, Louis. This time it’s in earnest.”

  “But your criticism, surely it pays well,” Louis said.

  “When it pays. Last piece I did took six months to get a payment.”

  Louis ran a hand across the dog’s back.

  “I need that hundred francs, Daguerre. Take her portrait. Please.”

  Louis did not like the feeling of imposition in the air. “I can help you with food, for heaven’s sake. Come and I will give you whatever is in my pantry. Brandy, wine, meat. How did you afford that decadence of several weeks past?”

  Baudelaire studied his perfect shoes. “All of it was donated by rich lawyers and merchants and weepy-eyed ladies with a weakness for oil paintings and verse. Every now and again they get a sorry heart and want to throw lamb chops to the dogs.”

  “I see.”

  “Maybe you could take my portrait and pay me. You need a poet on your list. How about it?” Baudelaire pointed at his face with a finger on each hand. “Look carefully, Daguerre—if this is not a doomsday face, then I don’t know what is.”

  Louis said, “Too bad for you I already took the portrait of the horses.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  Louis again looked at Baudelaire, whose eyes were slightly jaundiced. Louis reached for his leather wallet and removed a small bundle of francs. He handed it to Baudelaire.

  “Go see Pigeon and take her portrait. If nothing else, you must share your wealth before the end of the world. You can’t take it with you when your French brothers and sisters are in need. Something is rising in the garrets.”

  “Goodbye, Baudelaire.”

  “Long live France,” said Baudelaire. He trotted off towards a nearby tavern where, no doubt, he would spend the money on wine and snuff and perhaps a scratch of food. Louis had no delusions those francs would garner much in the way of real sustenance.

  He sat for a long time, watching the dog sleep the sleep of the wild. Finally, when he felt the streets had emptied a little, he walked back towards his apartment. But soon he was taking a detour via 72 Rue de l’École, standing in the street with his hobbled mutt, trying to understand Pigeon from the exterior of her ground-floor apartment. Her wood-framed building was wedged between a pawnbroker and a brothel whose wide veranda was full of recumbent whores. Her windows were covered in gauzy curtains, and the medicinal plants, lined along a sill, sprung their foliage in front of the gossamer cloth. Louis imagined the comings and goings of such a street, the young soldiers coming to hock family heirlooms and spend their dividends on a consort. He pictured Pigeon on the veranda, done up, her cheeks rouged like a Russian doll’s. The organdy bow. He could not bear it. He tugged at the leash and the dog gimped at his side, head up, ears back. He would not come back to this address until he had a plan to rescue Isobel’s daughter. Whatever else the final plan had in store, Pigeon could not die a whore.

  Twelve

  Paris in the years of cholera. The epidemic swept down from India and Russia like a mistral, blowing into London and Paris with a vengeance. At its worst, cholera killed five thousand Parisians a week. Passings in the night—men dry-lipped with thirst, their nails blue, heaving themselves out windows and into buckets, a torrential unleashing that hadn’t been seen since the bubonic plague. It peaked in the summer and spring when the Seine warmed. People called it pestilence, a divine rebuke for their sins; whorehouses closed for lack of business, churches were full of widows and orphans. The doctors administered bloodletting, laudanum, saline solution—all of it powerless.

  For years Louis had thought cholera was coming for him. After that day when he saw Isobel ride away in the carriage, he half wanted the blue-lipped fever to pull him under. He had made some contributions—the diorama
, certain innovations to panoramic painting—and he could imagine a peaceful death. Cholera decreased ticket sales for his dioramas, and soon the lines were thin, then nonexistent. The expanses of transparent linen that took six months to paint stood unobserved in the gloomy gallery like entombed saints in a sealed crypt. He continued with his photography experiments, making various permutations with lenses and iodine-coated plates, but nothing significant yielded.

  On a blustery day in the autumn of 1826, he made his pilgrimage to see Vincent and Charles Chevalier. For four years he’d been coming here and dodging their inquiries. He had made slipshod progress and returned every few months to try a new lens or filter, each time Vincent becoming more brazen until he was asking questions with the directness of a glassblower, of a man whose lungs doubled as bellows—What’s this for, then? Must be building a colossal spyglass, is that it, Monsieur Daguerre? Vincent would allow Charles to witness the art of customer interrogation before dispensing his son to the workshop or to an amateur astronomer come for a stop-lens. Vincent would sit down at the ramshackle table, up to his elbows in refraction glasses and prisms, and in a hushed and conspiratorial manner tend to Louis’s requirements with a theoretician’s conjecture. Each requirement, Louis was led to believe, posed a great dilemma, a trade-off between the practicality and the divinity of light. “This is just the thing for you. Of course, you will lose some prismatic effect. This lens here, for example, will give you hue without glare, and what is hue without glare? Why, it’s church without the hymns.”

  But today, something was different in the Chevalier shop. Louis walked in to find father and son standing before a framed picture whose composition Louis could not discern. Upon hearing the clamor of the tin bells on the door, Vincent immediately covered the frame with a flannel cloth and set it aside. Charles went to the workshop without the customary dismissal from his father. Louis came to the rear of the shop and sat at the work-table.

  “Monsieur Daguerre, must be a new season if you have come for a new effect,” said Vincent.

  “What were you fellows just looking at?” Louis asked.

  Vincent winced slightly, as if this were the highest indiscretion imaginable. “We are not at liberty to say.”

  “Vincent, come. You’ve become my opium merchant. How can I be denied?”

  “I mustn’t.”

  “And why, may I ask? People are dying in the streets. Let’s out with it.”

  “Sworn to secrecy. We have this here just for safekeeping while Monsieur Niépce goes to London.”

  Louis squinted at a display of reading spectacles. “Niépce. I know that name.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “An inventor and natural philosopher of some kind.”

  Vincent nodded and looked sidelong at the cloth-covered frame.

  “Vincent, you can trust me.”

  “It is not a question of trust but of my word. Our word.”

  “Solemn as a pact,” called Charles.

  “You gentlemen disappoint me greatly,” Louis said. He could sense the magnitude of this thing, and there arose in him the same determination he reserved for replicating nature. “How much business have I brought you in the last four years?”

  “A good deal, monsieur,” said Vincent.

  “Let’s see, the old ladies from the diorama, my fellows artists who want new effects…I have even given you a plaque outside my building acknowledging your contributions to my double-effect diorama. I imagine that has brought you a tidy amount of commerce.”

  Vincent took a sip from his coffee. He held it in his mouth for a beat, letting it settle over him. “Monsieur Niépce has developed something called heliography.”

  Louis could feel a biting pain between his shoulder blades. He played dumb. “Really? What is that?”

  “It’s still very cursory, but he’s found a way to use the sun to etch a picture.”

  “Ah.” Louis’s voice came out dry, uninflected.

  Charles came from the rear, reveling in his father’s violation. “Niépce is off to London to present some findings to the Royal Society. Thinks the English might enlist him. But he was afraid this might get stolen or damaged on the trip over the channel.” Charles gestured towards the covered frame.

  Louis felt the words in the back of his throat for a long time before he allowed them to come out. “May I see it?”

  Charles looked to his father for guidance. Vincent took another swallow of coffee and gave his son a slight nod. The hair on Louis’s neck bristled; the heliograph was as good as shown.

  “You must not mention this to anyone,” said Vincent. “We imagine others may be working towards this same end, and poor Niépce would die if his technology were stolen.”

  “I understand,” said Louis. “You have my word that I will keep this to myself.”

  Charles reached down and picked up the picture. He leaned it against a ladder-backed chair and removed the cloth. It was a pewter-plate depiction of a view from a high window, perhaps a dormer, and the composition was of a barn, a pigeon house, and a pear tree. There were scratches and a brownish effect, as if someone had rubbed the entire picture with dirt, but the reality was undeniable—this was a still life painted by the sun. There were no brushstrokes, no errors of proportion. The artist’s hand was invisible. Louis stood involuntarily and leaned close to it.

  “Niépce says he had to let the image cure for an entire day,” said Vincent.

  “Is that so?” Louis held out his hand with a slight tremor and saw that there were two sets of shadows lengthening on either side of the barn, as if two suns of equal strength were swimming across the heavens. The image registered a day’s worth of sunshine.

  “How does Monsieur Niépce make such a picture?” he asked.

  “That we do not know,” said Vincent. “But I know he uses the very same camera obscura you use for your diorama pictures. Amazing how the same instrument can yield such different results.”

  “Yes, amazing,” said Louis. He looked closely at the picture, tried to ascertain a smear or wrinkle that might give the origin of execution. He recognized that it was not the definitive thing he’d been seeking—it was transient. The image was still rather crude, and the long exposure gave it a surreal quality, an ethereal suspension. Nonetheless, it was closer than anything he had produced.

  “Niépce is a funny old bird,” said Vincent. “Retired he is, though from what, nobody can recall. Comes in here, and we make him camera obscuras and lenses, and then he does the rounds of the neighborhood. Goes across to the apothecary and the grocer and bundles home in a carriage to Chalons-sur-Saone and pays everybody with small franc notes and coins, like he’s an old miser raiding his coin jar.”

  “That is strange,” said Louis. An intuition rose up in him, a startled hunch. “Gentlemen, please excuse me. I must be on my way.”

  “No lenses for you today, then?” asked Charles hopefully.

  “No, thank you, Charles.” Louis was already out the door and heading into the neighborhood. He ran across the street to the apothecary and entered. It was a maze of ceiling-high shelves with small wooden boxes lined out, each of them labeled.

  “Morning,” said the puglike man behind the counter.

  “Hello,” said Louis. “I wonder if you can help me.”

  “Are you sick?” asked the man, resting his fleshy hands on the counter.

  “No, no. I have a friend who comes in here quite often. Monsieur Niépce.”

  The apothecary gave a quintessentially French shrug.

  “You don’t know him?”

  “Not from a wheel of cheese.”

  “He comes in here perhaps once a month, and he always has a lot of coins about his person.”

  Now the man nodded, chuckled. “And he keeps a purse around his neck on a lanyard?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about him?”

  “Well, he can’t come to town just at the moment, and he has sent me for his usual supplies.”

  “I thou
ght he was off to London.”

  “Delayed,” said Louis.

  “How much of it?” The man sniffed the air, relishing the simplicity of small commerce.

  “Ah, let’s see, what does he usually get?”

  “A jug.”

  “Well,” said Louis, all levity, “a jug it is.” He could feel his hands mist the counter with sweat as the pugish fellow moved around. He returned and placed a heavy ceramic jug on the counter.

  “Thirty francs, that is,” said the apothecary.

  Louis placed fifty francs on the counter. “What is the name of this stuff, anyway?”

  “Can’t you smell it? They say oil of lavender will raise poets from the dead.”

  “Of course.” He lifted the cork and took a heady whiff. What came to him was not poetry but the lavender-scented water Isobel used to soak her poultices in when they had lived outside of Orléans. So this was Niépce’s fixing agent—perfumed flower oil. It seemed too romantic to be true. He replaced the cork, picked up the jug.

  The apothecary tapped at the counter. “Don’t you also want the bitumen of Judea?” he asked.

  Louis stood in place, nodding. “Yes. How silly of me. Niépce would be very cross.”

  The man placed a cloth bag of the powder on the counter. Louis took his change, a colossal smile on his face, and left the store. Outside, the wind had died and the light was dazzling.

  The letters between Niecéphore Niépce and Louis Daguerre were perfectly cordial—full of phrases like in conformity with your aspirations…our mutual gain…with the certitude of science and goodwill. It was Louis Daguerre who wrote the first letter, galled after a series of failed attempts to duplicate the pewter-plate helio-graph. He had confessed to the Chevaliers of his experiments and asked for Niépce’s address. The brothers gave out the address and within a week had briefed Monsieur Niépce, recently returned from London, on Louis’s work. It was no coincidence that Vincent and Charles Chevalier invented the Parisian spyglass that year.