The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre

by Dominic Smith

  Very sincerely,

  Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre

  Seventeen

  Winter left for a week in early 1848, a grace period of sun and shirtsleeves. Louis and Pigeon rode out into the countryside to take more portraits, not just of Pigeon but also of Louis’s remaining list items. There were horses and birds still to render. They rode through small, indolent towns where the houses sagged, out along country roads with the farms all run out, wintered to brown and sod. These were towns of young girls and garrisons, of men lost to the revolution.

  There were now two documents on Louis’s person: the doomsday list and the letter, both fondled to the crepe of old maps. Sometimes, when not taking portraits and still lifes, he put them out on a café table and looked at the words. The loom and arch of his ink-work was infinitely fascinating to him; it seemed to be the hand of a man he was still yet to meet. Neither document was perfect, but both would serve. The letter would force him to make his reconnaissance with Pigeon more pointed. He needed, in short, the address of her mother. The End was upon them, all around, like the breath of a dog. And yet he did not want to reveal his place in her mother’s life, both for some fear of involving the daughter in the sorrows of the past, and to avoid the awkwardness of the revelation.

  Paris fell away. They passed pine houses flanked by meadow, a district of privacy, of stone walls and shuttered windows. There were woodlots where farmers presided with axes; there were provincial squares and public houses with low doorways. Sometimes, as they rode through these satellite towns, Louis saw a daguerreotype hanging within a parlor or a lobby. He couldn’t help judging each rendition—summing up the concentration of mercury, the thickness of the silver coating—and pronouncing to Pigeon where the artist had made error.

  “That one there misses the point entirely,” he said, pointing to a grocer’s window. A portrait of an old man behind the counter, presumably the owner, hung in the window next to canned meats and hand brooms. It seemed to be an advertisement of ownership, an incentive for street trade—herein lies the owner, as portrayed in the window.

  “What’s the matter with it? The old man looks sweet,” Pigeon said.

  “The artist has skimped on the silver coating. I look at that portrait and think cheapskate. I would never shop there. He probably hollows out the bread.”

  “You are sometimes convinced the world is pursuing you with some special vengeance.”

  “That sounds suspiciously like Baudelaire. Have you been in his company?”

  “Maybe I have,” she said, looking to the side of the road.

  Louis felt the reins tighten in his hands; the horses began to trot. “I have warned you about Baudelaire. The bohemians say a woman is ambergris and wine, when they really mean pork and potatoes.”

  “He wrote me a poem.”

  “May I see it?”

  “Certainly not. He said my hair holds an entire dream, filled with sails and rigging.”

  “Good Lord.”

  “He says he’s dying of loneliness.”

  “Poets die of loneliness; the rest of us die of cholera and old age.”

  Pigeon looked away and studied the bend ahead. The little town, a village, really, gave way to low hills, a solitary windmill churning above an empty field. Louis scouted for more horses for his list. He had captured summertime mares and foals but wanted something darker, a wintering nag surrounded by patches of snow. It was not just beauty he wanted to capture, but decrepitude, nature gone to rot. There were no horses, but he saw a stand of bare elms where a lone crow hopped between the branches. He stopped the carriage. “I should like to take a portrait here.”

  Pigeon looked out into the barren field. “Of what?”

  “The tree crowns and the crow.”

  “But up ahead there is a windmill. We could climb it. Imagine the view from up there, Louis. These fields extend in all directions from up there.”

  “A friend of mine climbed Notre Dame and took a picture up there of a man suspended in a hammock between the gargoyles. You know what it looks like?”

  “What?”

  “A man taking a nap.”

  “What is your point?”

  “I open the eye of the camera to something I sense is there but cannot fully name or see.”

  “But surely there is a difference between a daguerreotype of horse dung and a picture of a naked woman.”

  He laughed. “Yes, the naked woman is more expensive to photograph.”

  “You delight in baffling me.”

  “That is the privilege of the old and dottery.”

  “All the same, I don’t see what there is to capture out there except dead-looking trees and a mangy old crow.”

  “When you look at a funeral, you see cakes and a sweet kind of grief, isn’t that so? It is a beautiful thing to you, but try to explain that to a baker’s son, and he’ll call you the devil. I have spent my life trying to understand light and this I know…”

  “What?”

  “I am being dramatic. The pause is dramatic.”

  “Stop.” Her face flushed.

  “There are two requirements for a powerful image: good light—by which I mean dynamic, strong in some regard, however fleeting—and composition, which lends itself to the light. If there were a beautiful mansion standing in that light, I would keep driving. It is the crow, the blue-black of its plumage, the ribbons of shadow and snow at the base of the trees, the way the clouds have gathered behind the hills in the distance. Look out into that field, Chloe. Do you see the way the shadows are weak?”

  “Yes. Because it’s late in the afternoon in winter.”

  “Correct. But look at the blueness in the snow; the shadows are fuzzy because they are essentially resting on top of water. I cannot fully capture that in the daguerreotype, but the facsimile will evoke the effect. There will be a slight brilliance in the coat of the crow.”

  She folded her arms. “Unless it flies away, which it might, if you keep yammering.”

  “It has a nest there. Crows can possess an entire field if they want.”

  “Oh, of course, you are also a bird expert.”

  He carried some equipment over into the field and began setting up. The sun moved in and out of cloud cover. Pigeon took a blanket and brought it out to him. “You should set your things on the blanket.”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  Louis adjusted the tripod. The sun was in the southwest quadrant and would shine almost perpendicular to the crow and the hem of trees. From this distance of about twenty feet, he would include the hills and the uppermost branches in the frame. The snow patches would be daubed across the hilly background. He polished a plate and inserted it into the back of the camera. They sat on the blanket, watching the clouds funnel around the pale sun.

  “What are we waiting for?” asked Pigeon.

  “The mercury moment.”

  “Which is?”

  “When the image says, Steal me now.”

  “But the sun is only growing weaker,” she said.

  “When the light and composition are mutually in balance, I will take the image. We also call that the kiss.”

  “The kiss?”

  “When light kisses the object in a way suggested by its nature.”

  “So much philosophy!”

  Louis lost a strand of patience. “Dear girl, are you so inclined to think that sunlight and love are not inexorably connected? That kisses do not happen in nature? That light upon a pond at dawn is not the sweetest form of lovemaking?”

  She looked out at the windmill, the slow whorl against the snow. “Have you ever been in love?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who was she?”

  “She was a friend I fell in love with. There was a material discrepancy in our ages, and she, I think, disregarded her love for me on that basis.”

  “Then we have both lost the love of our lives. We are good pals on that front.” She placed a hand on Louis’s shoulder and began a series of concentric ci
rcles with her finger. Louis felt his breaths shorten. He could imagine kissing her and was appalled by that—it seemed like a desire to lie facedown in an icy stream, to burrow inside the very marrow of her youth and beauty and somehow indemnify himself against Armageddon. He looked down at his shaking hands, at the cordage of vein and tendon, at the sun splotches and freckles, at his own material surrender to the sun’s chemical blackening. He felt impossibly old. He stood up, thereby interrupting the finger reverie at his shoulder, and went to tend his camera.

  “The light is changing,” he said.

  “Is it?”

  “Dusk is a kiss between night and day.”

  “You have an eye for romance, but perhaps no heart for it. Otherwise you would have married.”

  He ignored this comment. He tightened the tourniquet screws and sat back down on the blanket. “I’m an old man with a mission,” he said. He looked down at the camera.

  “I am a young woman with no mission at all.”

  He stepped back from the camera and looked at her. “You imagine you have some fondness for me,” he said.

  “I wasn’t aware placing my hand on a man’s shoulder indicated fondness.”

  “What, then?”

  “Pity.”

  “Pity?” There was gall in the word when he said it.

  “Yes. Sometimes I think I would kiss you out of a sense of pity. I want to rescue you, Monsieur Daguerre, and I cannot say from what. From the way you sometimes suddenly look in the street, like the cold hand of death is at your back. I would take you into my bed and give you a passing hour of joy just to make you forget whatever burden you think you carry on our behalf.”

  “Our?” He was near speechless. Pity? No one had ever pitied him, least of all a whore. He had a medal of honor from the king.

  She continued, “Us. The living. Those feeling pleasure and making errors of judgment. I would sleep with Baudelaire, and do you know why?”

  “Do I want to know?”

  “Because when he had finished, I would have a moment when he would be mine, and he would say something I would not otherwise have heard. I would grant him permission to feel whatever he wanted. I do it for the money, but these men do it out of need or lust or weariness. When I grant them permission, it ceases to touch me. I could make love to the devil and be unscathed as long as I could look him in the eyes afterward. I do not love them individually. But sometimes I think I love them as a whole. Sometimes I imagine there are soldiers going into battle and getting killed with my name on their lips. We do not pretend it is love. But it is honest, Louis, and I will not be ashamed for what I do.”

  “Do I shame you?”

  “In a manner, yes. By your money, by your silly knighthood, by your old-world manners that seem to pretend I hatched out of a salmon egg. I am the product of a marriage of convenience. I am a whore. I have chosen this life. I don’t know myself to be capable of loving one man anymore.”

  Louis looked out into the fields, at the apparition of veined cloud and the transom of sunbeams west to east. He knew the mercury moment was coalescing, and he felt an urgency in his chest. He put his finger to his lips and Pigeon fell silent, drawn in by the quietude of the scene and the intensity of his expression. They sat motionless as it unfolded, as the cloudscape grew backlit and the trees gave off the shimmer of ice granules trapped in bark. The snow shadows gained definition in a sunburst, blued and deepened by a rise in contrast. Louis stood and moved slowly to the camera. He made a few adjustments to the angle and looked out at the radiant sky. Here was the way the vault of heaven would crack open on the final day, with those dazzled and portentous clouds, with shunts of granulated light. It resembled nothing so much as a sea of glass. He imagined saints driven through with sabers, chariots of righteous angels, a red dragon rising through coal smoke.

  He became aware of standing in a field at dusk, of his life uncoiled. He felt the wind on his ankles. The light seemed to recede.

  “Did you take the picture?” Pigeon asked.

  He was suddenly light-headed, run through with grief. The era did not deserve this penalty. Men plucked theorems from the night sky, discovered new planets, proved the rotation of the earth. This was a spiteful God. He sat on the cold earth, his head between his knees.

  Pigeon came and knelt beside him. “Are you all right?”

  “The image got away,” he said. He could feel the cold in his teeth.

  “There’ll be others.”

  “I need to sit for a spell.”

  “As long as you like.”

  She placed her coat around his shoulders and he was too weak to protest. In silence, they watched the crow guarding its nest and the dog-tooth line of stone fences. Then the darkness fell very rapidly. The sunset blackened to night, as if someone had lowered an awning over the day.

  Eighteen

  Louis walked the city adrift, lost against the small munitions of the sensory world. His emotions were erratic. He felt a wave of fraternity when he saw a man being measured for a suit within a tailor’s shop, fabrics laid out like so many striped walkways. The smell of verbena and green coffee made him maudlin; the colors of hempen sacks of winter vegetables made him hopeful, then dashed.

  Signs were everywhere now. Men read poetry in the squares before bands of moved and cheering peasants. Funeral processions marched along the riverbanks with open coffins. People woke with cold fevers and came out onto the curbstone to look up at the stars. Crows flew into chimneys and windows. The fishmongers sold nothing but eel and herring. A woman leaped to her death from a town hall window. Somewhere in Paris a man was shooting dogs.

  There were mercury chills, agues that scalded his eyelids. Louis lay in bed in his rooftop belvedere, surrounded by the brandied twilight of his portraits. He got drunk inside the husk of the fever. Faces brindled, boulevards receded, the room shimmered. I may rise. The mind has mountains. He could feel himself on the verge of great knowledge. The photographic record, the catalog of creation. Nothing was denied him. Then sleep, long hours in the pale afternoons.

  Civil unrest was in the papers. The anti-royalists were organizing an outdoor banquet to protest the government’s policies. Louis read about the dinner plans and thought of bunting, of paper lanterns strung between chestnut boughs. The workers’ struggle—strikes, marches for higher wages—were an abstraction, a dinner story to tell grandchildren. It wasn’t until he read about the fiscal crisis that he took it personally; his life’s savings were in the National Bank.

  The next day at noon, he went to close his bank account. He had no delusions that he could take his money into the afterlife, and neither did he want to spend it before the final day. He simply wanted to hold his accumulated funds in his hands. Here was fame made manifest, watermarked and bundled, secret codes lurking in the treasury inkwork. The bank gallery was a procession of bespectacled tellers behind mahogany and brass counters. Louis waited on the marble floor. Men in suits sidled as they filled out their withdrawal requests—is there a run on the bank? He filled out a withdrawal form for fifty thousand francs and presented it to a pink-faced teller. As Louis waited, he looked down at his own feet and noticed he was wearing a pair of mismatched shoes—on the left, a black English brogue; on the right, a brown Italian slipper. He stood looking down, baffled.

  “Going on a trip, are we?” the man asked.

  Louis paused, looked up. “Yes, a trip.” The man’s solicitousness and his skin, ruddy as a winter apple, bothered Louis.

  “I will, of course, need the manager’s signature,” the man said. He gave Louis another look and went to the manager’s office in the back. Louis looked around the bank. The vault door—a lead portal with lock-wheels at the end of the marbled gallery—stood serene. It emitted a power over the bank customers, Louis thought, like the tomb of a virgin saint. People kept their distance, regarded it sidelong. The teller returned, pinker, more officious, and informed Louis that this amount of cash was not kept in the drawers and that the manager was organizing
to have the vault opened. Louis took a step back from the counter and unleashed a torrential cough. The teller winced, then the two of them looked on as the manager, a balding man with a monocle, and two guards marched to the vault. A curtain was drawn while the manager administered the combinations and key locks. Louis heard the vault open. The smell of money—something clothbound, like hymnals in an old church—wafted into the bank gallery. After a moment the guards emerged with a metal box and they carried it to the pink-faced teller. The teller counted the money, and Louis presented him with a carpetbag. He watched the stacks mount.

  “What is your name?” Louis asked. It suddenly seemed important.

  The teller puzzled this for a moment—perhaps no customer had ever asked—then said, “My name is Antoine Cousier.”

  “Godspeed, Antoine Cousier,” said Louis. “May you die in peace.” He carried his bag outside and strode home in his mismatched shoes.

  Apocalypse came on February 22, 1848, the same day that the government canceled the reformists’ outdoor banquet. The sound of bronze convent bells rallied in the streets. A wintry twilight settled over the river and pushed up against the tavern windows, giving the glass an obsidian polish. Quietude as well as a particular Parisian rot consumed the air—the offal of the abattoirs spilled across patches of snow; perfume factories funneled expired ambergris and musk into the gutters. Louis knew it was happening when the calm was ripped apart by cannon fire. The high-caustic smell of gunpowder rose from the garrets. He awoke from an afternoon nap in his bedroom, where he slept beneath the accusing burnt-almond eyes of his daguerreotype portraits. He dressed with some measure of calmness, putting on a silk cravat, a woolen suit and waistcoat, a top hat. In front of the silver-backed mirror, he resembled—for the first and last time—his father. His parents had passed away some years before, his father leaving Louis a gold-tipped pen, a watch and a compass, and half a century’s worth of ledgers that balanced, month to month, down to the last hobnail. That this fatherly resemblance bloomed on the final day seemed both ironic and appropriate. This is the day we become our fathers.