by Anne Rice
There was no caution at this moment. That no decent well-bred girl of either color should speak so to a man, Anna Bella knew, but it did not enter her mind. Cheapen herself in his eyes? She didn’t care. Monsieur Vincent knew Dolly, had quarreled with her, enough people had told Anna Bella this, and she was imploring now as she said, “She’s nothing but trouble for a colored man, Michie! She’s the meanest woman I ever knew.”
But never would she forget the seriousness of his expression as he took her outstretched hands, the immediate comprehension in his eyes. “Don’t you upset yourself a moment longer,” his voice had been hushed as he went to the door. “I shall see to this, rest assured.”
It was the next afternoon before she saw him again. She had just come up the stairs to find him watching her from the door of his room. “You must not worry anymore about your schoolteacher,” he had said to her softly, gravely. “He has only his grief to trouble him now.”
“Oh, Michie,” she had smiled, breathless, and utterly trusting. And silently he had stood before her, his hands at his sides. Behind him the snow-white bed with its great drifts of netting seemed a cloud in the late afternoon sun. He cut a black figure against it, except for his pale face, his pale hands. But something flickered in his black eyes as he watched her so that she stopped, at a loss. Slowly he turned and shut the door.
That night he asked Madame Elsie if he might speak to her, and she was quite surprised to see them both enter her little upstairs parlor, to see Madame Elsie nod and withdraw.
Vague speech followed, so proper, so veiled that finally, very frustrated, he stopped. “A flat was what I had in mind,” he murmured, looking out the window. He turned his back to her. His meaning was just dawning on her. She stared at him with wide eyes. Then he said a strange thing. “I would like very much to have one of those flats along the Rue Royale, with the high windows, to have a fern in the window on a marble-topped stand. I’ve always admired those windows with the lace curtains drawn back, and the ferns on the marble-top stands. Do you like such things?” He turned toward her, his face open, seemingly innocent. He looked like a boy.
“It would be lovely, Monsieur,” she said.
“But Madame Elsie insists that I purchase a small house. Of course I have no objection, the house would be in your name. She knows of a likely cottage…If you were to have a look…” He stopped.
She was crying. She had put her fingers to her temples.
He was shaken. “I have to go home now, back to the country,” he murmured. “It will be November, after the harvest, before I return. You can give me your answer then. And if that answer is no, I won’t trouble you after that. You won’t see me again.”
“Yes,” she whispered through her tears, nodding her head. “Let me think, Monsieur.” She couldn’t flatter him, even say good-bye. She was thinking of Marcel, and a little key had turned in her heart.
But on the day she left Marcel’s yard, smarting to feel the eyes of Monsieur Philippe on her as she passed the cottage door, she came home to strike a bargain with her whole soul.
Vincent was breakfasting with friends in the vast dining room, and only rose to come to her in the boardinghouse parlor when they were completely alone. It was that hour when the slaves would change the linen tablecloths, sweep out the corridor and begin the preparations for Sunday dinner, the week’s most sumptuous meal. He shut the double doors. November rain flooded the alleyway along the house, and the steam rose on the panes around them till there seemed no place but this one empty room. He soon gave up as he stood behind her, murmuring respectful assurances. He had discerned from her bowed head that the answer was no.
“Will you be gentle with me, Monsieur?” she whispered, turning suddenly.
“Ma belle Anna Bella,” he breathed as he drew close to her. She felt in his vibrant fingers the first glimmer of the passion that had motivated him all along. “Ma belle Anna Bella,” he sighed, touching her cheek. “Just give me the chance.”
IV
MARIE LOVED HIM. Marie loved him. Marie loved him! Not Fantin Roget who had brought her flowers this very afternoon, nor Augustin Dumanoir who again, and in vain, invited her to the country, nor even Christophe, yes, Christophe, who stopped in at the little soirees with amazing frequency, always with some small gift for the aunts though he gazed at Marie as one might at a work of art, and bent with a peculiar poise to kiss her hand. No, Marie loved him, Richard Lermontant, and it was not impulsive, it was not passing, it was not subject to change! He was dreaming as he moved through the crowded Rue Royale, vaguely annoyed by the traffic, vaguely annoyed by the insistent Marcel who repeatedly tugged at his arm.
“But aren’t you even curious about it, actual pictures of people and things as they appear? Why, this is the most marvelous invention to come out of Paris, and only from Paris could such a miracle have come, I tell you, Richard, this is something which will change the course of history, the world…”
“But Marcel, I haven’t time…” Richard murmured. “I should be at the shop now. And frankly, sitting still for five minutes with my head in a clamp, well…”
“You had time to see Marie, didn’t you?” Marcel pointed to the door. A small and dingy dormer was fixed next to it with an ornate sign:
PICARD, MASTER OF THE DAGUERREOTYPE
MINIATURES IN FOUR SIZES
Upstairs
Richard was stopped, staring at the small collection of pictures on display, all of them monstrous actually, the people staring from their silvery background as if dead. “No, I simply see no reason…” he turned, resolute, his shoulders rising in a shrug.
Marcel pressed his lips together angrily, there was something of desperation in it as he searched Richard’s face. “We never do anything much together anymore, do we?” he asked. “We never even see each other, you don’t come to school but two days a week.”
“That’s not true,” Richard said, the voice now softened with its intensity, “we see each other all the time.” But this lacked conviction, Marcel’s words had the real truth to them, and why they were growing apart just now Richard didn’t know. “Listen, come home with me for supper, come on, you haven’t been home with me in weeks.”
“I will if you come upstairs now with me,” Marcel answered. “Richard…” he bent his head to one side, elongating the name. “Richaaard, suppose I told you that I brought Marie here last week, and that she had a beautiful picture made, of course she’s not going to be the one to suggest an exchange…” he raised his eyebrows with a slight shake of the head, a smile. “Come on!” he started up the hollow wooden stairway at a run, and Richard sighing, went after him. A picture of Marie, she hadn’t even mentioned it, but surely, no, absolutely not, she would never have given it to anyone else.
“But what maddens me,” Marcel was saying over his shoulder as he turned on the landing, “is that you don’t care about this, and it’s utterly remarkable, Richard, that you have no curiosity, that you don’t even want to see the camera and how it works for yourself.” Richard didn’t bother to answer, and it seemed they had had this very same conversation two years ago, only then it had been furniture, stairways, aren’t you even curious about how these things are made, how wood is joined together, lacquered to bring out the beauty of the grain? No!—he had shrugged his shoulders then and NO!—he was shrugging them now. Suddenly, on the second staircase, he drew up, catching his breath.
“Mon Dieu!”
“Oh, those are just the chemicals, come on,” Marcel said impatiently, and he rushed up and into the waiting room, a foul blast of warm air hitting Richard as he followed. He drew out his handkerchief quickly and placed it over his nose. It was an ugly room, the carpet looking somewhat ridiculous on the poorly painted floor, the few fine chairs obvious remnants from some more harmoniously decorated past. And here again on the walls were the Daguerreotypes, dead people, except for one very remarkable picture of a church, beautifully detailed, that did startle him and draw him to it, just as Marcel was rea
ching to take it right off the wall.
“Marcel,” Richard whispered. “Don’t do that!”
But the Daguerreotypist had already poked his head through the velvet curtain, a white-haired Frenchman with very pink skin and octagonal spectacles, “Ah, it’s you,” he said to Marcel. “I should have known.”
“Half plate for my friend, Monsieur, please, if you want to start preparing it,” Marcel answered, but he was staring at the picture so that his lips slurred the last few words.
It was the St. Louis Cathedral taken obviously from the center of the Place d’Armes, and looking over Marcel’s shoulder, Richard could not help but be impressed. It was extraordinary the clarity of it, the details down to the cobblestoned street, the blades of grass in the square and the leaves, the individual leaves on the trees. “Did you do this, Monsieur?” Marcel called after the man.
“No!” came the deep disgusted reply from behind the curtain. “It was Duval, and he took twenty plates to do it, at least!”
“I’ll buy it!” Marcel followed him, and Richard tightening the handkerchief entered the studio cautiously, the stench of the chemicals positively sickening him so that he felt weak. The light from the undraped windows was garish, and showed a bare floor at the far end of which was a small stage as if set for a play, with a chair, table, wallpapered board propped behind it, and just enough drapery to suggest a window where there was none.
“…And what should we charge for it!” Picard, the Daguerreotypist, was grumbling as he wiped frost from the panes, “With all the chemicals he wasted, it’s priceless!” Heat from the roaring stove brought out the moisture on the top of his balding head.
“And Monsieur Duval, is he here, will he sell it?” Marcel asked. He was carrying the picture about with him as he made a nervous circle on the floor. “Sit there, Richard,” he said offhandedly pointing to the carved chair. And then a voice came from beneath a small tent of black muslin saying, “Yes, I am here, Marcel, I won’t sell it.”
“You know, it’s one in a thousand that captures this quality,” Marcel said to Richard revealing the picture again as Richard moved to sit down. If it wasn’t the chemicals, it was heat, he was going to be ill. “I mean most of them are merely pictures, but this is more than a picture…” Marcel went on.
“And twenty plates to do it,” said Picard again. But Marcel, as if jerked by a string, had put the picture down on a work table against the wall and advanced suddenly on the small muslin enclosure from which the voice had only just come.
“Monsieur,” he spoke to the black cloth, “let me in?” A laugh echoed from inside, “Come in.”
“Your friend is mad for the Daguerreotype,” the old man said. He reached over Richard’s shoulder to make some small adjustment of the velvet drape. The chair was short for Richard, naturally, and he had to stretch his legs to the limit of the stage. “I tell you he brings us a new customer every few days.”
“Monsieur, you don’t think you could open a window, do you, just a little, perhaps?”
“I’m sorry, my boy, the dampness, it’s impossible. But you’ll get used to it, just take a deep breath, and put your head back against the brace, you won’t be here very long.”
“Five minutes?” Richard grimaced, removing the handkerchief. He felt his stomach was rising to his throat.
“That was last year, my boy, forty seconds at the most,” Picard said. “A small price to pay for a work of art.”
“Ah, so you believe it’s art, then,” Marcel’s voice rang out from the tent of black muslin. And there came a low laugh from this invisible person, Duval.
“I said to you sometimes it’s an art!” Picard pointed a didactic finger at the tent. “I said to you sometimes, when a man has nothing better to do than destroy any plate which doesn’t meet with his personal approval or stand for two hours in the Place d’Armes making a spectacle of himself to get a picture of the St. Louis Cathedral in the proper light. But not when a man has to keep clothes on his back and food on the table, it’s not an art then.” He stalked toward the camera, and for the first time Richard observed it, a wooden box on an ornate pedestal with three legs.
“Art, art,” murmured Picard, “with people complaining every day about the fact that it renders them precisely as they look. ‘Go to a painter, then’ I say, ‘if you’ve got the money!’ ” The camera was large and in the front of it was a rimmed aperture with the glint of glass. The man adjusted this now, cranking the stand to get the camera higher and then, staring with a bit of visible irritation at the tall boy in the chair, picked up the entire apparatus to move it back.
What if it were halfway decent, what if he could give it to her, Richard was thinking, what if it didn’t look like a corpse? He felt the most profound humiliation on that point, he would never, never entrust it to her if it had the slightest hint of his profession, he clamped the handkerchief over his mouth again and convulsively held his breath.
Beneath the muslin of the little enclosure, Duval, a lean white Creole in a threadbare coat, was whispering confidentially to Marcel, “But don’t tell the proportions, I feel strongly this influences everything, and I do not want it known…”
“Of course not,” Marcel whispered, his eyes intent on the plate which had just been lifted from the first of the coating boxes to be placed into the next. “I would not tell anyone,” he said. Light leaked upon them from the seams of the tent, it sparkled in the loose weave of the fabric.
“And I’ll tell you another little secret,” Duval whispered, his eyes as wide, as intense as Marcel’s, “just a bit of grease when I buff the plate, suet, nothing more than suet from the butcher’s, it has a decided effect.”
“Have you ever thought of opening your own…”
“Shhhhhh!” the white man grimaced at Marcel, bent suddenly with the effort not to laugh as his eyes rolled quickly to indicate Monsieur Picard beyond the cloth. “In time,” he made the words silently with his lips. “In time.”
Marcel was gazing at him with an acute case of admiration, the way he often gazed at Christophe.
“Let me take the picture,” he said suddenly. “Just this once.”
“No!” came Picard’s loud voice from outside. “Young man, you go too far.”
“But Monsieur,” Duval emerged, throwing back the flap. He slipped the plate quickly into the camera as Marcel stepped out. “Why don’t you let him take it?” Duval’s face was young, appealing with something of the charm that softens others, and good breeding which provided a certain lubrication to his words. “It’s the preparation, really, and what happens after, that matters, and well, he brings us so many new customers…”
Picard threw up his hands.
Triumphant, Marcel stepped up to the camera and suddenly squinted at Richard in such a manner that Richard was frankly exasperated, Marcel looked as if he were mad. Richard could not possibly know that Marcel was deliberately forcing his eyes out of focus so that he could see the scene before him entirely in terms of light and dark shapes. And Richard was further confounded when Marcel bounded toward him, ripping the heavy velvet drape away. This rendered the outline of Richard’s black coat perfectly distinct against the wallpaper, and his face of deep olive complexion, partially framed by raven hair, was now equally clear. “No, don’t sit so rigidly,” Marcel said now, the voice gentle, slower than usual, “let everything about you soften, even go limp, your eyes, your lids. And think, think of something that is more beautiful to you than anything else,” the grave voice went on, the face utterly intense, “do you have it? Good, then don’t see me at all, see that beautiful thing that calms you and lulls you while I count. One, two, three…”
All the way home to the Lermontant house, Marcel continued to stop to look at the results. He would pull up short as Richard pressed his lips together in exasperation, and pulling open the pressed paper cover stare at the small plate. “Dreadful, dreadful,” he would mutter with perfect sincerity at this image which had positively amazed Richard, flatte
red him, in fact, and had him burning to give it, in spite of his inveterate modesty, to Marie. He would put her picture by his bed, no, under his pillow where no one would see it, no, in the drawer of his chest.
“She’ll think it’s quite fine,” Richard shrugged. His feet were getting numb from the December cold. He was hungry besides. And to be late for supper in the Lermontant house was a mortal sin.
“I overexposed it,” Marcel sighed. “I should have asked Duval before I started counting, I should have stopped when he said.”
Richard laughed lightly. He could not understand the intensity with which Marcel invested the slightest task or experience, and sometimes he felt a vague relief to live devoid of those peaks and valleys himself.
“When you see the picture of Marie which Duval took, then you’ll understand.” Marcel shut the cover for the seventh time and handed it wearily to Richard. “If you want to know the frank truth it would take Marie these days to get you to notice anything.”
“Oh, don’t be so foolish,” Richard said softly. “If you want to know the frank truth, you are simply too young to understand.”
Marcel gave him such an acidic smile then he was startled by it, even a little wounded. “Richard,” he said, “what you know about women could be placed in a thimble, and I’ve just taken you to witness one of the finest inventions in the history of the world and you paid not the slightest…”
“You exaggerate,” Richard said, as they turned into the Rue St. Louis. The house was just ahead. “You have always exaggerated, and you think anything which comes from Paris has to be wonderful, Paris, Paris, Paris!”
“Marie, Marie, Marie,” Marcel muttered. But then he clasped Richard’s hand and said sharply, “Look.”
Both boys came to a halt. There was a small crowd ahead on the banquette before the Lermontant house, there were shouts. And then, clearly, Richard could see two men scuffling, others attempting to stop them and one of them was Rudolphe, to be sure. Richard bolted, easily outrunning Marcel with long strides, so that he reached the scene first.