Free The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre by Dominic Smith Page A

Louis were dressed in the right style. Despite the revolution and the call for an egalitarian society, gentlemen still favored three or four waistcoats, a lineage of gold buttons, Polish trousers; the women continued to wear barege and merino gowns, gold fringed velvets, their hair up in chignons. So it wasn’t the clothes of the two failed lovers that were amiss. It was their manner that faltered and, on closer inspection, their ages. Isobel walked as sure-footed as a dairymaid, and Louis, the supposed gentleman of the duo, trailed behind like a boy at his mother’s skirts. Inadvertently, he’d given the woolen crotch of his pants an insistent tug as he stood up from the carriage seat. Sensing the scrutiny of the crowd, Isobel took his arm once again and told him to retrieve the tickets she’d given him. Louis rifled through his pockets, his fingers lingering over his good-luck charms: a magnifying glass, several butterfly carcasses, an acorn, and a piece of quartz.
    “Here they are,” he said, thrusting the tickets into the air.
    They stepped up to the brass doors of the baroque theater, and Louis handed the doorman the tickets. The doorman’s face, stern as a magistrate’s, brightened when Isobel asked, “Are we permitted to sit together?” They’d imagined a section for the ladies and a section for the gentlemen. The doorman ripped their tickets in half, then let out a patronizing chuckle and told them not to heckle during the performance. Isobel’s cheeks fumed red, and Louis began fidgeting in his woolen pockets for a favored piece of twine.
    The theater was cast in a low light from candelabras and oil lanterns. The proscenium stage stood covered by a tasseled burgundy curtain. Louis craned up at the gilded ceiling and the cantilevered balconies that jutted above the house seats like great warrior prows. Isobel rustled a little in her gown.
    “Thank goodness it’s dark in here,” she said. “I was about to challenge one of those awful staring ladies to a duel.”
    Louis leaned back in his seat. “They think we’re married.”
    “I hope not.”
    Isobel knew from the silence that she’d said the wrong thing. “Poor boy,” she said. “One day you’ll see this as the hopeless thing that it is.”
    “One day when you marry some gouty old farmer, you’ll remember how elegant I look tonight.”
    “You do look dashing. Perhaps the ladies were staring at you.”
    Louis raised a finger to his lips; he could hear the orchestra coming to the pit. The house lights dimmed and the curtain lifted to reveal a backdrop of canvas. A painted landscape of mountains, forests, and lakes. Pales of soft bluish light threw themselves against the set, giving the appearance of night. Louis looked for the source of the light. Long metal tubes with gas lanterns and glass lenses were suspended from a series of iron railings on the side of the stage. Colored pieces of glass had been placed in front of the light apertures. Now a yellow ball of light rose from the mountain range. As the sun swam into the sky, it banished the pale blue of night, and the sound of birds could be heard. Louis could see a man holding a cage of chirping sparrows at the edge of the orchestra pit. Louis leaned forward, lost to a new devotion.
    The husky sound of a cello opened the score. Actors and dancers came out onto the stage. Violins, mimicking the birds, rose steadily; flutes and the timpani coaxed a brighter day onto the set. The light changes were gradual and each new effect, it seemed to Louis, was tied to some emotional shift. The damask and melancholy morning, the first blues of dawn and the yellowing of tree crowns; a noon of lustrous lakes and white haze; then an afternoon of verdure—the greens darkening, shadows becoming visible in the groves. An entire day spanned, cradled in the palm of the ethereal music. Isobel’s hand found his in the darkness. She held his fingers lightly. He closed his eyes. He could smell her—camphor and