The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre Read Free Page A

Fournier?”
    “A woman from the past.”
    “Lost love and all that—how tiresome.”
    Louis took a bite of his egg and refused Baudelaire the eye contact he wanted. Isobel Le Fournier was his first and only substantial love; she had occupied his thoughts and longings for forty-four years, six months, and eleven days—ever since that day she had kissed him in a wine cave outside of Orléans.
    Baudelaire said, “Don’t look so glum. After we eat, we’ll go walking in the Latin Quarter in search of our Madonna. We’ll trawl the streets. And I’ll think of some names as well. I must know some nudes.”
     
    People stared at Baudelaire as he tapped out with a Malacca cane, his bald head tilted, shouldering into a headwind. Wooden barrels belched tar smoke, men shoveled horse manure into potholes, flanks of meat hung marbled and sinister in the darkened doorways of butcher shops. But what Louis noticed was a cabaret festooned in yellow paper lanterns and bunting, an outdoor bookstall towering with hundreds of green and vermilion clothbound volumes. The mercury poisoning was beginning to filter out the unsightly. He was growing blind to the squalor of the dying days of King Louis-Philippe’s reign. He didn’t see the plank-board alleys in the Carousel District, the dark rows of bird-seller shacks, the mud-daub shanties of the tooth pullers and the dog clippers. He saw only the markets full of honey and tulle, ladies in poplin sitting for open-air concerts under a Nile-blue sky. The world, it seemed to Louis Daguerre, was drowning in plenty.
    As they walked through the serpentine streets of Montmartre, Louis mentally auditioned the women as nudes—maidens in two-wheeled charabancs, ladies in bonnets and cashmere shawls, wives and daughters displaying the subtle inflections of the body beneath calico and merino.
    Baudelaire said, “See anything you like? How about that Botticelli in the blue brougham?”
    Louis reeled and looked at the compact carriage. Sitting high was a woman with pinned raven hair and the raised chin of nobility. She looked as if she were being borne aloft, floating above the hubbub of the street.
    “A little haughty,” said Louis.
    Baudelaire stopped beside a fruit and vegetable cart. “Do you have any plums?” he asked the vendor.
    “No plums yet this year,” replied the man. “But I have some oranges from Spain.”
    Baudelaire’s face filled with infinite regret. Louis looked down the street and noticed a woman stepping across the flagstone pavement in front of a restaurant. She was wearing a merino dress and carrying an apple-green parasol at her side. She sat on a wooden bench in front of a fountain, impatiently waiting for her driver to fetch her.
    “Why are there so many queens in the Latin Quarter today?” Louis asked.
    “The charm of the uncivilized,” said Baudelaire. He took Louis’s arm and led him towards the bench. “Good day, mademoiselle, may we impinge upon you for a moment? You see, my friend and I—surely you know him—the esteemed inventor of photography, Monsieur Louis Daguerre, well, he has been commissioned by the king to find a lady of refinement to pose for a new series of daguerreotypes.”
    “How splendid,” the lady said, her eyes darting over the approaching traffic for her man and carriage.
    “May we sit awhile?” Baudelaire asked.
    Louis bowed and said, “Madame, you must forgive my colleague’s conduct, he is a little brash in these matters. I’m sorry if we’ve troubled you.” The woman smiled curtly, then stood and walked down the street. Her green parasol flashed open and shielded the back of her neck. Louis watched her disappear into the throng of people, her parasol floating through the multitudes like an apple bobbing downstream.
    “Friendly,” said Baudelaire.
    “You lack all manners.”
    They sat on the bench and Baudelaire took out his pipe and lit it. He stared into the bowl of the pipe, at the pulsing orange eye of the tobacco plug.