The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre

by Dominic Smith

  “No. I didn’t want your support. Not after what happened with Richard.”

  “I admit I didn’t want you to marry that man. He had no way of supporting you.”

  “When Father offered him money to stay in England, you never spoke up for me.”

  “He didn’t have to take your father’s money. But he did, and you never forgave him for not coming back.”

  “No, I never forgave you and Father.”

  They came to a stand of oaks and walked the edge of the marsh. Neither of them looked up from their feet.

  Chloe said, “I was already old when I met Richard, Mother. He may have been my last chance.”

  Isobel could hear their footsteps on the ice-laden grass.

  Chloe said, “After Father died, you wanted me to be a spinster. You wanted someone to get old and lonely with.”

  “That’s unfair,” Isobel said.

  “Is it?”

  They stopped walking. Their breath smoked in front of them.

  “You failed at love, and you wanted me to fail,” Chloe said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” Isobel took off her woolen gloves.

  “Well, you’ll be happy to know that I gave up on love many years ago.”

  “You have your whole life ahead of you. There are plenty of good men in society.”

  Chloe looked back at the fog. It was everywhere; the world was edgeless. “I am almost forty, Mother. What kind of man would want me now?”

  A long silence. Birds in a tree.

  “Who is that man inside my house?” asked Isobel.

  “Don’t worry. He would not have me. He’s in love with something only he sees in his photographs.”

  “He’s a photographer?” asked Isobel.

  “Yes.”

  “And there’s nothing between you? Because he’s old enough to be your father.”

  “He could have been my father.”

  The fog buried sound, tamped their voices.

  “What?”

  “I said he could have been my father.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  Chloe waited for the force of the revelation to make its way from her stomach to her throat. She knew she was about to shatter her mother’s life in some way. She felt it the instant she’d walked inside the stone cottage and seen the crates arranged like furniture. She’d recognized it in the herbarium, with the world’s plants arranged and labeled like so many museum specimens—the pharmacopoeia of loss. It was not the result of idle hands but the passion of an idle heart.

  “The man sleeping in your bed is Louis Daguerre. He says he has loved you his whole life. If it weren’t for him I never would have come.”

  Isobel looked down at the ground several times, then out into the thicket. She felt herself go white. She looked back at the house. It rose bleak and amorphous as a sloop through the fog, the veranda aslant, the windows darkened. The past had rapped on her door, white-knuckled. “I did not ask for this,” she said.

  “He told me he might be the reason you stopped believing in love.”

  “The man is clearly insane.”

  “Is he?”

  “I stopped believing in love when your father died.”

  “You’re saying you loved him with all your heart?”

  Isobel’s lips grew thin and tight. In an instant she aged bitterly; there was the pull of an unspoken rant about her mouth. She said, “I didn’t have my whole heart to give.”

  “Why?” asked Chloe. She stood her ground. Her mother’s eyes scattered and drifted. “Why, Mother?”

  “Let’s go inside and eat breakfast. I’ll tell you about Louis Daguerre as best I can.”

  They walked back towards the acreage. On the front stoop of the cottage lay the dog, dead and dusted with snow. It lay there, its eyes open and glaring, frozen with the menace of a griffin guarding a tomb.

  The story unraveled over endless tea and brandy, broken here and there by the stoking of the fire or the braids of silence that wove themselves into a story that had eight beginnings and no real end. It was a lifetime ago. The time of the glade. Louis was a delicate but wild animal brought into Isobel’s care. She loved him fiercely. It was the rawboned love a mother has for her child. But sometimes it wasn’t, and she would lie on her bed in the servant quarters and picture herself receiving his breathy kisses. She laughed at the thought of Louis in buckskins and a topaz cravat, so earnest and hungry for passion of every kind. They lived at the quiet edge of the world; outside Orléans, life was waiting to sweep them along. The revolution meant nothing to them. Then it all changed in a day. A new era began with the burning of the old mansion. The time after the estate consisted of lonely nights in the desolate vineyard, Isobel’s hands calloused at the wine press. She was awakened to pick grapes at midnight during harvest. She fell asleep standing. “When I met your father, I was very tired. He was kind to me. He’d lost his first wife and was deeply wounded by it. He was very sweet and kind. But then we grew to see we had nothing together. We were mostly friends.”

  “And then I came along?” Chloe said.

  “I took you as a sign that I was meant to marry your father.”

  “But you never loved him.”

  “I loved him as best I could.”

  “Because you loved Daguerre?”

  “It was more complicated than that. I couldn’t love Louis because he wasn’t real.”

  “He is real, and he’s asleep in the next room, Mother.”

  Isobel looked towards the windows. “I have read about him all these years, wondering…When I saw his name in the papers, I felt a rush of pride—quite ridiculous. I felt somehow responsible for his success, wanted to tell people I’d been his maid when he was a boy. I felt sure he hated me after our falling-out.”

  “He never married. You obsessed his life.”

  “Impossible.”

  “If he ever wakes up, you can ask him yourself.”

  They spoke into the afternoon. The house was warm and quiet. They retired before dinner, Isobel to her plants and Chloe to a nap. In the dead quiet of a winter afternoon, Isobel left her tending and went into the room where Louis Daguerre slept. The day outside the bedroom window brightened a little before dusk. The fog had lifted and the sun hung a low, pale orange. Isobel stood beside Louis’s prone figure. He seemed to have battled with his covers in the course of the day. She fixed his bedding and stood staring at his face. He had a civic aspect; his silvered hair and the strong line of his jaw suggested more a member of the judiciary than an artist. Certain features were familiar—the unlined forehead, the full, feminine lips. The veracity of him lying there, sick and helpless, stunned her. The boy in buckskins had become an old man.

  Twenty

  Isobel and Chloe restored Louis Daguerre one sense at a time. They filled the room with aromatic herbs, linden blossoms, gingerroot. Isobel rested poultices of arnica and rainwater on the wound. They washed him, shaved his face with a straight razor and a paste of soap and aloe. During his convalescing sleep, the mercury damp lessened in his lungs. They massaged his body with rose oil, not the entire body but the arms, legs, and torso, to keep them supple. Isobel recognized his flat hairless chest, his thin arms and looped shoulders. But despite this corporeal ease, neither she nor Chloe could bring themselves to clean his genitals. They cleared the bedpans without looking. Then, at the end of the third day, they sent for the town doctor. He arrived, gouty with the weather and bundled in a fur hat. He criticized Isobel’s stitches as “cross-stitching where loose thread would suffice” and left a phial of smelling salts by the bed. “Use these in case he doesn’t wake up by tomorrow,” he said, latching his leather bag.

  “There is one thing more,” said Isobel. She looked over at her daughter, who was looking down at the floorboards.

  “What is it?” the doctor said.

  “He needs his manly parts cleaned, and neither of us will do it.”

  The doctor scowled, his day ruined. He instructed the women to provid
e him with cold water and a cloth and leave the room.

  “Cold?” asked Isobel.

  “The man will not die from being bathed with brisk water. It may even help invigorate him.”

  “Very well,” said Isobel. She fetched a pan of well water and some torn cloth. After handing it to the doctor, she left the room and closed the door behind her. She and Chloe stood in the hallway, waiting.

  The doctor emerged a short time later and said, “Rest assured, ladies, your man is clean.” He left his invoice on a lamp table in the hallway and walked out into the blustery day.

  Under Isobel and Chloe’s aromatic care, Louis Daguerre slept the sleep of the dead. The world had not ended, but it was full of turmoil. In Paris fifteen hundred battlements had sprung up overnight. The air smelled of tar smoke and gunpowder. Peasants read petitions atop bronze statues. The National Guard had defected. King Louis-Philippe had been ousted. Revolution spread through Europe like apple blight—Vienna, Venice, Berlin, Prague, Rome. Monuments toppled and the foundries gave over to the manufacture of guns. Louis Daguerre slept, oblivious to what had started.

  When he woke on the fourth day, he smelled lavender-scented water and thought for several moments that this was the fragrance of heaven. He lay in a feather bed, beneath a down quilt, his face perspiring. He could hear the sound of women’s voices outside the window. Sitting up in bed, he pushed his covers down and immediately became aware of a gripping pain in his back. He put his right hand to it and felt a corrugated welt. With one hand at the bedpost, he set his feet onto the floor and stood. He ambled towards the window and saw, out in a sodden field, a woman chopping wood while another woman placed the cut logs into a basket. He watched the older woman raise the full-length ax over her head and arc it towards a piece of gnarled oak. The younger woman stood by with her hands on her hips. Something about the way the younger woman moved, some physical certitude, made Louis recall Pigeon’s rooftop portrait, then her name, and finally that the woman standing with the ax was the very person who had ruled his mind for half a century.

  “Isobel,” he said, one hand against the windowpane.

  After another moment he tapped on the glass, and both women looked up at him. He couldn’t make out what they were saying, but Isobel dropped the ax and they both rushed towards the house. He saw them move, through the warped perspective of the mottled glass, as if underwater. Isobel stopped short of the house and looked up at him. Something moved between them in that short distance of chilled air and glass. Their eyes locked for a fraction of a second, in the interval it takes to haul another human being out of the broth of memory.

  The women ran into the room while Louis continued looking out the window.

  He heard them come up behind him, and before seeing Isobel up close, he could smell the camphor liniment, the herbage of her skin. He turned slowly and looked into her jade-colored eyes. Her face had aged, but there was something unchanged about her countenance; it had retained the sulky insolence of youth. She was not sullied by time so much as etched deeper into a more resolute version of herself. He would have recognized her instantly in the street. Now he realized those recent sightings in Paris were encounters with phantoms, shards of someone else’s life. He was staring and making her self-conscious. He looked down at his shoes and then at the floorboards.

  Isobel came forward and embraced him. Her hands touched the back of his shoulders. He closed his eyes; her smell was all around him.

  After a moment he said, “Are we all dead?”

  She released him and stepped back to take him in.

  He saw a flurry of images from the night of the shooting, the magnesium flare of musket fire.

  Isobel said, “You were shot.”

  “Angels,” Louis said.

  “He’s delirious,” Isobel murmured to Chloe.

  “A peasant on horseback,” Chloe offered.

  Louis crossed to the window and looked for signs of the post-apocalyptic order. A plume of smoke rose from a distant house, but nothing suggested carnage. “Are we spared?”

  “They’re going to get rid of the king forever. That much looks certain,” said Isobel.

  “A reprieve, perhaps,” said Louis.

  “Have some water.” Isobel poured him a glass from the jug. He drank it and asked for another. The water tasted soft and artesian, as if from a mineral well.

  “I’m very thirsty,” he said.

  There were still glasses of water to be drunk.

  “How long have I been asleep?” Louis asked.

  “This is the fourth day,” said Chloe.

  “We were about to resort to the smelling salts,” said Isobel, a note of humor in her voice.

  Louis looked down at his hands, at their blunt existence. What happened to the righteous fury? Something hooked in his chest and he heaved a mercurial cough. He saw flashes of silver in his peripheral vision. He doubled over and held on to the windowsill.

  “Oh, dear,” said Isobel, putting a hand on his shoulder. He waved her away and regretted it before his hand had left his side. He’d waited a lifetime for the touch of that hand.

  To take away some of the sting, he said, “I’m an old man. I’ve had this cough for years.”

  Isobel stood with her hands in front of her. Louis could see in her eyes that he was a patient, not a man.

  “You’re not that old,” said Chloe. “I’ll fetch some food. You must be starving.” She left the room, leaving her mother just a few feet from the love of her youth. Louis rested his eyes on Isobel’s. He felt another undulation of pain. He reached a hand around to the wound.

  “I appear to be alive,” he said.

  “You will take some time to heal. You should lie back down while we get your food ready.”

  Louis edged back towards the bed and sat. Isobel smoothed her skirt, then turned for the door.

  Louis, suddenly very weary, reclined against the feather pillows. They smelled of illness, of night sweats. The pain throbbed in his knuckles and shins, bright and pure. There was a hollow feeling in his stomach, a bronzed taste in his mouth. Outside, a horse whinnied; the wind blew under the eaves. The thought tapped, relentless and inexplicable: The world has not ended.

  Twenty-One

  The next morning at dawn, Louis lay in bed, scalded by his false prophecy. So much for portents of the apocalypse. He wondered if the startled solemnity he’d seen in his portrait subjects—alarmed men presiding over mantel and wife, omniscient-looking dukes on their deathbeds, their eyes grave and lucent—was actually physical discomfort. The early portraits had required the subjects to sit motionless for an hour. The look of foreboding, an omen of The End, might have been simply men waiting to scratch themselves.

  He felt betrayed, part of some larger misunderstanding. Does God exist? He lay there, stunned, and felt the rawness of his back wound. Perhaps he was dying, and not the world. Had he walked the streets of Paris a marked man? Was this an apocalypse for one? Perhaps God was indifferent to human endeavor and bored by cataclysm; He preferred to let men dwindle a good while before cutting them down one by one. He granted a man his passions, allowed him to make images as delicate as nets of smoke, allowed him to capture the rill of a lunar valley on a copper plate, then snuffed him like a tallow candle.

  Louis took the room in. First he became aware of objects—the joints in the rafters, the windowsills, the wooden jewel boxes on Isobel’s dresser—then he thought of the human labor embedded in each thing, how the hours of men’s lives were tallied all around him. What was the point of all this? Was the world just an assemblage of blunt objects? Was a man no different than a hobnail on the Day of Judgment? He got out of bed and went to the window. It was an ordinary winter morning, midway through the nineteenth century. Snow was on the ground. Everything seemed exactly like itself. A catalog of mundane and exquisite beauty stood on the other side of the glass. He did not want to die.

  Isobel entered the room with his breakfast. He returned to the bed and got under the covers.r />
  “How are you feeling?” she asked.

  “A little disoriented.”

  “That’s to be expected.”

  Louis looked at her. She looked away. She looked back. It was not flirtation so much as a visual verification of the person with the memory, the old man with the boy in the topaz cravat, the sullen-faced widow with the girl in the tuberose crown.

  “You make a fine widow,” Louis said after an interminable silence.

  “I don’t know that I should thank you for that remark,” she said.

  “I mean to say that you have aged with grace.”

  “Like an old hen.”

  Louis nodded. “And you’ve still got your humor.”

  Isobel looked out the window. “Widowhood suits me.”

  “How so?”

  “I have the means to cultivate my plants, and nobody bothers me.”

  “Life still raps at the window now and then, surely.”

  “Don’t think me unhappy.”

  “I know loneliness, and I smell it in this house. It’s everywhere, choking up the chimneys, fuming in the kitchen.” He lifted his head from the pillow, like a final exclamation point.

  “You’re impossible—that hasn’t changed. I am quite happy, thank you. Loneliness is an indulgence of the artistic and the privileged.”

  The return of the silence. She was still beautiful. It was as plain as the fact of the ceiling above him. But there was something unapproachable about Isobel in her sixties. She possessed a devoutness, a matronly vigor in her gestures. Louis wondered if she believed in God. As a girl, she’d believed in nothing but nature harnessed—the palliative effect of certain herbs, the fortitude of rainwater, the soundness of walks before bedtime.

  “Your dog has died,” she said. “We found it on the doorstep the morning after you arrived. I think perhaps it froze to death.”

  “I see,” he said. There was something inscrutable now about the idea of death; he could not grasp it. The wind rattled at the windows. “I ran over that dog in Paris. I took it in because I thought I should do the world a good deed.”