The
Ghosts of the Day.
Charles Bitry de Brullioles
considered himself a connoisseur in all things, but he liked to keep distinct the
varied compartments of his life, savouring the joys of each in its proper time
and place. Generally in the mornings, when he left his apartment on the Place
des Vosges, he would walk through the narrow, dark and crowded streets of Paris
towards the Greek and Egyptian Museum in the palace of the Louvre, where he was
engaged in the copying and translation of hieroglyphic inscriptions. On this
June morning, however, he had agreed to do a favour for a friend, and he
therefore made his way in the opposite direction.
His route took him along the broader boulevards towards a quartier that he normally visited only
in the evenings, or on Sundays after Mass. The night’s soft rain had left a
film of water on the pavement, which shimmered like quicksilver in the light of
the ascending sun. The light dazzled him, momentarily, as he crossed the Rue
Froissart, and he was grateful for the shade of the plane trees on the
Boulevard des Filles-du-Calvaire. One of his ancient great-aunts had spent her
life as a “girl of the calvary,” a Benedictine nun in the convent that had once
stood thereabouts. Thoughts of other girls, however, now intruded on his mind. He
wondered how he would feel if he were to encounter, at this unaccustomed hour,
one of the actresses or circus-girls with whom he had only recently spent an
evening. He wondered, also, how they would respond to him.
The new market was crowded with people, and the
costermongers were in full-cry. “Old clothes for sale!” “Who’ll buy a bonnet
for eight sous?” “Pencils, sir,
pencils!” “Sealing wax, wax, wax, wax!” Crouched on the pavement, a blind man
with a parrot on his shoulder begged for alms. Charles reached into his pocket,
took out a few sous and dropped them into the man’s lap. The bird squawked its
thanks.
Charles quickened his pace as he walked past the theatres
on the Boulevard du Temple. The Funambules, the Cirque Olympique, the Lazzari,
the doors to all of them were firmly shut. Although there was a steady stream
of people walking in both directions along the pavement, and noisy processions
of phaetons, carts and barouches clattering over the cobbles of the road, the
side-shows were all closed up and their barkers silenced. No stilt-walkers
picked their way between the people gazing in fruiterers’ windows. No dancers
peered down from the taut rope stretched high above them between buildings on
either side of the road.
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| Theatres of the Boulevard du Temple, c 1862 (image is in the Public Domain). |
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| Theatres of the Boulevard du Temple, c 1862, by Adolphe Martial Potemont (image is in the Public Domain). |
What was new, however, was the smell of freshly baked
bread. Charles felt someone brush against him. He looked around, and there was
the queen of the rope-dancers, Madame Saqui herself, both feet planted on terra firma, and without her gaudy
costume, her feather headdress or her make-up. She had just come out of a
baker’s shop with a baguette in one hand and a basket of vegetables in the other.
He had never been so close to her, and she was much older than he had imagined,
her face wrinkled and eyes downcast.
 |
| Madame Saqui, from P. Ginisty (1907), Memoires d'une Danseuse de Cord, Private Publication (image is in the Public Domain). |
He glanced beyond her, and his heart almost stopped. In the
queue for the bakery were two younger women with whom he had enjoyed a much
closer acquaintance, Arlette and Amandine, the two dwarves from the Funambules.
Arlette smiled at him, but it was a quick, discreet smile, and she turned away
immediately to talk to her sister, who seemed not to have noticed him at all. He
hurried on his way.
Beside a water-pump on the street corner, a boot-black polished
a man’s shoes. Charles checked his
pocket watch. It was five minutes to eight. He waited until the boy had
finished and the man had paid. Then he approached the boy, who looked up at
him.
“Do you want your shoes polished, Monsieur?”
Charles glanced down and saw a splash of white paint on the
pavement beside the boy’s box. He nodded, and tapped the box twice with the tip
of his cane. The boy’s mouth opened in a broad grin that revealed a missing
front tooth. Charles put his right shoe up for the boy to polish.
“You don’t live round here, do you sir, but I have seen you
before. Was it last Saturday?”
“No,” said Charles. “I don’t come here on Saturdays. I go
to confession on Saturdays. I come here sometimes in the evenings, and on
Sundays after Mass.”
The boy applied the polish, and then went to work with his
brush. He was, Charles judged, about sixteen, with tanned skin and a mop of
dark, wiry hair. His clothes were old, and did not fit him well, perhaps passed
down from an older brother, but they were clean and unpatched.
“Have you always lived here?” Charles asked.
“No sir. We lived at Toulon, but my father was killed in
the war in North Africa. That was when I was eight. My mother brought us to
Paris to live with our uncle. At least it’s easier to find work here than it is
at Toulon. If I ever go back it will be to join the Navy.”
The boy paused. “I think I’ve finished this shoe, sir.”
Charles bent down and whispered, “No, carry on.” Then he
straightened his back and looked around him. Men and women passed close on both
sides, brushing against his own back, and against the boy’s. One man stopped, and
seemed to be looking at them. He whispered something to a dirty-faced boy. Charles
had seen this man before. He had been dining at the Café Vincent with Estrella,
one of the riders from the Cirque Olympique, and the man walked in. He
remembered the look of fear on her face when she saw him. She had whispered his
name, Barentin he thought it was, involved in extortion and the like. Charles
felt his skin prickle.
“Shall I polish the other shoe now?” asked the boy.
Charles nodded, and shifted so that his left foot was on
the box, keeping Barentin in view as closely as he dared without allowing his
gaze to become obvious. He forced a smile and looked back at the boy. “Does
your mother work?”
“When we first came she found work in a café, but then she
fell sick, and after that she couldn’t find work. My sister and I have to take
care of her now. Anne-Marie goes out to the market and buys some meat, she and
mother make it into pies, and I sell them outside the theatres in the evening.”
That must have been where the boy had seen him. There were
often pie-sellers hanging around as people left the theatre. He was always
escorting someone to dinner, so had never bought one.
An old woman leaned across the boy to draw water from the
pump. “Stupid place to set up your stall,” she muttered under her breath.
She threw water in the boy’s face, and he recoiled. Charles
shooed her away with his cane. He turned again to the boy. “How many pies do
you sell in an evening?”
The boy shrugged his shoulders. “Twenty on a good night,
less than half of that if it’s raining.” He paused. “I think your shoes are
done now.”
Charles checked his watch. Twenty minutes past eight. He
searched around for Barentin, but he was nowhere to be seen. He looked down at
his shoes, now polished as perfectly as a cuirassier’s boots. “Thank you.”
He took two silver écus
from his pocket and placed them into the boy’s hand. The boy’s mouth fell open.
“Put them away,” Charles whispered urgently.
The boy put the coins into his trouser pocket and Charles
turned to walk away, but the boy picked up his box and followed him, tugging at
his coat. “Please sir, I’m afraid. I
don’t know what to do with coins like these. Someone will steal them.”
Charles seized the boy’s shoulder. He was about to tell him
to pull himself together and get lost when he saw in the boy’s eyes the same
look of terror that he had seen in Estrella when faced by Barentin. “Follow
me,” he said, releasing his grip.
The cafés were not yet open for business but the door of
the Café Vincent was ajar. Peering in, Charles saw the waitress, Colette,
setting the tables. “She knows me well enough,” he thought. He turned to the
boy. “In here.”
Colette walked towards them. “I’m afraid we don’t open
until nine o’clock…oh, Monsieur Charles, I didn’t expect to see you!”
He doffed his hat to her. “Can we sit down in a corner? It’s
important.”
“Yes, of course,” she said, pointing to a table at the back
of the room.
The boy looked around in apparent amazement at the green
marble columns and the large silvered mirrors hanging on the walls.
“Can I get you something to drink?” Colette asked.
“Two coffees, please,” said Charles then, looking at the
boy, “I think he could do with something stronger. Can we have two cognacs as
well?”
“What is your name?” Charles asked, hoping to put the boy
at his ease.
“Gaston, sir.”
“Well, Gaston, let me have those coins back for a moment.”
Gaston placed them on the table and, when Colette came back
with the drinks, Charles asked if she would exchange them for bronze coins.
“How many are there?” Gaston asked when she brought them to
the table in a bowl.
“Two hundred and forty sous
in total,” said Charles, “but these are two-sol
coins, so a hundred and twenty. Now put some in each of your pockets….” he took
a cotton handkerchief from his pocket, “and wrap some in this and put them in
your box, and take them all home. Don’t walk around with them any more than you
have to. Buy enough polish to last you a year, and buy some laces to sell to
people. Shoelaces always break at the most inconvenient moment. You could buy
other things to sell, too. Combs, for example, dog collars, I don’t know….”
Gaston beamed at him over the table.
Charles lifted his brandy glass in a toast. Gaston clinked
his glass, then took a large gulp and spluttered.
“My God, that’s no way to drink cognac,” said Charles.
“Russians drink like that, Frenchmen don’t! Sip it, like this.”
Imitating Charles, Gaston twirled his glass, then took a
sip, smaller this time, and smiled. “Is this what gentlemen drink?”
Charles laughed. “You don’t have to be a gentleman to drink
it, but be careful. It’s strong, and the more you drink the more you want. I’ve
seen men drink their way through more écus,
in the space of a single evening, than you have sous in your box and pockets.”
He did not say, as he might have done, that he had occasionally done so
himself.
When they had finished their drinks, Charles settled the
bill and shook hands with Gaston, and they went their separate ways, Gaston to stash
his money safely, Charles hoped, and he himself towards the Louvre and his
inscriptions. He had not walked more than a few metres, however, when he caught
sight of Estrella on the other side of the road. There was no mistaking her
sleek, black hair. She was walking arm in arm with one of the strongmen from
the circus, an absurd caricature of a man, Charles thought, with biceps that
seemed to have a life of their own, and a moustache and sideburns without a
beard. At first he was shocked, but he realised quickly enough that he had neither
right nor reason to be. They appeared to be deep in conversation, and he walked
on quickly, hoping that she had not spotted him, or at least that she might not
have realised that he had noticed her.
A dark shadow of guilt descended on Charles as he walked
away, and he was not sure why. It was not about the way he had treated the
people of the Boulevard. After all, he had treated Gaston kindly, plied Estrella
with Champagne fit for a queen, practically drowned Arlette and Amandine in the
finest vintages of the most noble wines. Perhaps it was more a sense that, on
this particular morning, he had impinged upon their world at a time when he had
no business being there, seen into corners of it that they had not chosen to
show him. It felt like spying on a woman through a keyhole. He knew very well
that he would not welcome them strolling into the Louvre when he was discussing
inscriptions with Monsieur le Comte de
Forbin, or taking their places next to him at the table d’hote at the Brussels Hotel. He quickened his pace, anxious
to return to his own daytime world.
Charles spent the rest of the
day with his inscriptions, had a brief conversation with Monsieur le Comte, and took lunch, as usual, at the Brussels Hotel,
where he enjoyed the convivial company of a retired colonel who had fought for
the emperor in the shadow of the pyramids themselves.
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| Le Musee de Louvre (in the background are the ruins of the church of St-Louis-de-la-Louvre, destroyed during the French Revolution), by Etienne Bouhot (1822), Musee Carnavalet (image is in the Public Domain). |
He walked back to his apartment on the Place des Vosges and
was not surprised when his valet handed him a note from his friend, the artist,
Louis Daguerre, inviting Charles to call on him later that evening. Charles had
done a small favour for this friend, though he did not quite understand what it
had all been about, and he was intrigued to know more. Louis was as much a
showman as he was an artist, and enjoyed his little secrets and surprises. Charles
read the letter once more. Louis would send a hired carriage to wait for him at
seven o’clock.
When the carriage arrived, Charles asked the driver not to
go along the boulevards, but to take the longer route past the church of St
Elisabeth of Hungary. The “Boulevard of Crime” had, at least for the moment,
lost its lustre in his eyes. Louis’ house in the Rue des Marais was scarcely
more than a stone’s throw away from it, yet it was in a different world.
The door was open, and Louis came out onto the street to
greet him. A squat man with a thick
moustache, and a mass of curly hair falling over his collar, Louis smiled
broadly and held his arms apart to embrace him. With Louis’ hand on Charles’s
shoulder, they entered the hallway.
Madame Daguerre came down the stairs beaming. “Bonsoir, Monsieur,” she said. “My dear
Louis has been pacing up and down for an hour, waiting for you to arrive. We
have a bottle of Champagne on ice he ordered specially.”
“Oh,” said Charles, “and what is it we are celebrating?”
“But of course, I must show him!” Louis held out his hands
to take his wife’s and, gently pulling her towards himself, kissed her on the
lips. “We will join you in a few minutes. I will take our friend down to the
laboratory.” He gestured towards the
spiral staircase leading down to what Charles had always assumed to be the
wine-cellar.
“What need has an artist of a laboratory?” Charles asked.
“You will see, mon
vieux. You will see.”
As they descended the iron stairs, strange alchemical
smells rose up to greet them in clouds so thick they were almost visible. They
had a dizzying effect on Charles. He trusted his friend, but felt like Dante
following Virgil into the infernal regions.
Candles were set around the basement room, by the light of
which Charles could make out shelves of glass flasks, some empty, others filled
with yellow and purple liquids. A large leather-bound book lay open on the
table beside a silver candelabrum.
Louis thrust into Charles’s hand a flat sheet of copper,
the size of a small painting. It shone and shimmered in the candlelight. He
jabbed his finger at it excitedly. “There you are, my friend, trans-fi-gu-ré…like Christ himself!”
Charles leaned over the table, holding the metal towards
the candle-flame. At first he saw nothing but, as he turned it, patterns
emerged, lines and veins, as on polished marble. He looked more closely, and
the patterns resolved themselves into the outlines of buildings. They were not
just any buildings. This was an engraving, or something like an engraving,
showing the view at the top end of the Boulevard du Temple, but the road was
entirely free of traffic and the pavements devoid of people. The Boulevard was
never like that, not even at the dead of night.
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| View of the Boulevard du Temple, by Louis Daguerre, 1838 or 1839 (image is in the Public Domain). |
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| A photographic laboratory of c 1840, reconstructed at the Musee Niepce, Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, Burgundy (image is in the Public Domain). |
He looked at Louis. “How am I ‘transfigured?’ I’m not even
there!”
Louis laughed. Then he reached
into a drawer and pulled out a magnifying glass. “Look more closely, mon ami.”
Charles peered through the glass.
“What do you see now?” asked Louis.
He could now make out the water-pump on the corner of the
road and, beside it, his own image, with one foot placed on Gaston’s box.
Gaston was largely hidden by the pump, but Charles could clearly see his own frock-coat
and low-crowned hat.
 |
| Detail of the picture above. |
“But I don’t understand,” he protested. “The street was
full of people and the road was crowded with carts and carriages. There was an
old woman leaning over to draw water from the pump, and….”
“They are all there,” said Louis, with a flick of his hand,
“but they are ghosts, in broad daylight! You and the boy are the only ones
captured because you were the only ones who remained more or less still for
fifteen minutes, just as I asked you to. But let us take it upstairs and join Louise.
She hasn’t seen it yet.”
A tune was playing on the pianino as they climbed the
stairs, which Charles did not recognise. Perhaps Madame Daguerre had composed
it herself. She stopped playing as they came in, and stood up to greet them.
Louis opened the champagne and poured them each a glass. They sat down around
the table.
“To the new art of…heliography,” said Louis, raising his
glass.
“Were you impressed by this ‘miracle’ he showed you?” asked
Madame Daguerre.
“Very
much so,” said Charles. “He must have been working on this for a long time?”
Madame Daguerre sighed loudly. “Night and day for more than
three years. He hardly talks about anything else, and barely comes to bed at
all!”
Charles said nothing, but was surprised since, with him,
Louis rarely spoke of anything but painting. The Comte de Forbin considered him one of the greatest painters since
Claude, and his works hung all around the room in which they sat. It is strange
how people have different existences. Louis Daguerre the artist and Louis
Daguerre the alchemist. Charles Bitry the epigrapher and Charles Bitry the
philanderer.
“Well, here it is,” said Louis, handing the plate to his
wife, “and I promise not to talk about it at all tomorrow. We shall dine at Le
Rocher de Cancale.”
As she examined the plate, Louis got up and fetched the
device with which it was created, showing it to Charles. It was a mahogany box
with a ground-glass lens at one end, and a slot for the copper plate at the
other. The “magic,” apparently, lay in the iodine of silver used to coat the
plate before it was placed in the device, and the mercurial vapours, sulphur
and soda to which it was exposed afterwards.
“I didn’t make it here,” said Louis, pointing to his studio
window. “I was across the road, standing on the roof.”
Madame Daguerre put the copper plate back on the table, and
Charles picked it up to look at it again.
“You know,” said Louis, “you are the first person in the
world to be captured in this way.”
“Someday, this will hang in the Museum of Drawings in the Louvre,”
Charles replied, “but I would rather the world didn’t know it was me.”
Louis shrugged his shoulders. “Nobody in the world knows
that except the three of us, and we will not reveal it. People may speculate,
and some may even invent things, but we will take the secret with us to our
graves.”
Charles examined the picture closely. A captive of the
light, he was alone among the invisible ghosts. He saw his coat and hat, yet he
might as well be naked. Alone as he must expect to be on judgement day, and as
small as he would surely seem in the gaze of his creator. Nobody else would be
there to answer or plead for him. Not Arlette, Amandine, Estrella; nobody. How
could they, when he had moved through their lives as swiftly as they themselves
had walked along the boulevard that morning? The light, at least, had revealed
that to him.
“What did you make of the boy,” Louis asked.
Charles laughed. “He’s never had so much money in his
hands, that’s for sure. He doesn’t live in a world of francs and écus, only in
a world of sous. I doubt he’s
literate, but he seems intelligent. He was not dealt a great hand in the casino
of life, but he seems to be playing it well enough.”
A smile spread across Louis’ face. “He polished my shoes last
week, and that’s what I thought, too.” He pointed at the mahogany box. “This is
going to change the world. I’m having breakfast on Wednesday with a man who
thinks we can sell the idea to the government for 300,000 francs. I think we
can make more on our own. But we would need to train people to use the apparatus.
We don’t need literate men who would write it all down and sell it to someone
else. We need intelligent men who have never seen the sort of money that will
come from all of this. I wish I could talk to that boy now. I’m in a position
to deal him an ace if he’s willing to play it.”
Charles picked up the copper plate and examined it once
again. Despite appearances, he was not altogether alone in the image. Gaston
was there, even if he was hidden by the pump. Charles rose to his feet. “I
think I know where I can find him.”
“At this hour?”
“Yes, this is just the hour to find him. He sells pies
outside the theatres.”
“Surely we can leave this until tomorrow?” Madame Daguerre
protested.
“But no, Madame,” Charles insisted, “for your husband has
promised every moment of tomorrow to you, and we must hold him to it! I can’t
teach the boy how to use the apparatus, but I can show him how a picture is
composed. I don’t suppose he’s ever really looked at pictures, certainly not
with the eyes of an artist.” He glanced at the bottle sitting in the ice-bucket
on the table. “I don’t suppose he’s ever tasted Champagne either. Let’s save
him a glass.”
“But we haven’t even offered you anything to eat,” said Madame
Daguerre.
Charles put on his hat. “If I do manage to find the boy, we
may come back with some pies. If we are taking him away from his work it would
be churlish not to buy them from him.”
early evening sky. Charles Bitry de Brullioles strode with purpose towards the Boulevard du
Temple, not to take his pleasures but to offer what help he could.
*****
Mark Patton is a published author of historical fiction and non-fiction, whose books can be purchased from Amazon.
There was sychronicity for me reading this. I had just been to a photographic exhibition at Compton Verney. It's a delightful short story
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