Great Books of 2019: The Matter of Troy Revisited

2019 has been an unusual year, in that the short-lists for major literary awards have included a number of novels which take their inspiration, directly or indirectly, from one of the oldest stories in the European literary canon: that of the Siege of Troy, and its immediate aftermath. This story may well have its origins in the intertwined realities and mythologies of the Aegean Bronze Age, and finds its earliest literary manifestation in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, thought to have been written down for the first time in the mid-8th Century BC. These foundational texts have already influenced writers over more than a hundred generations, from Aeschylus & Sophocles; through Vergil and Ovid; to Shakespeare, Milton, and James Joyce (they even influenced Dante and Chaucer, who could read not a single sentence of Homer, but rather relied on the versions of the story recorded by the later Latin writers). For a writer of the 21st Century to situate himself or herself in this tradition is to make a bold claim, but also to take on a great challenge. What can such a writer possibly add to a story that has been constantly reworked in the course of 2800 years?

Vase, found at Thebes, possibly depicting the abduction of Helen by Paris. Photo: British Museum. This vessel, dated c 735 BC, may have been made during Homer's lifetime.

Detail of the vase above.

Homer and Vergil were epic poets, not historical novelists, and the novelist, unlike the poet, is almost invariably concerned with viewpoint, since that, arguably, is what makes the novel a novel. The default viewpoint of the epic poet is that of the rhapsode himself, even if he narrates through his protagonist (Odysseus, for example): he is omniscient; party even to the deliberations of the gods; and inevitably male. For Pat Barker, in The Silence of the Girls, and for Natalie Haynes, in A Thousand Ships, the point, then, is to tell the old story from new (and specifically female) viewpoints. Both of these novels take their lead from Homer's Iliad, and neither takes any great liberties with the story itself.

Barker takes (for the most part) a single female viewpoint: that of Briseis, the enslaved woman from a city allied to Troy, over whom Achilles and Agamemnon quarrel. She follows most of the conventions of the realist novel, and paints a vivid picture of life, in slavery, in an enemy camp. Barker is not the first novelist to narrate the story from Briseis's point of view (Judith Starkston does so in Hand of Fire, and with a good deal more historical attention to the cultural context of the Anatolian Bronze Age), but she does so with great humanity and compassion, and with an understanding of the realities of war that she has honed over years of writing about more recent conflicts:

"The hospital hut filled with men tossing and turning in sweaty sheets. The few brave enough to visit their friends carried lemons stuck with twigs of rosemary and bay, but nothing could keep the noxious fumes out of your lungs. This was not the coughing plague so some of those who fell ill did survive, but many didn't. By the end of the first week, men were dying in such numbers that funerals could no longer be dignified rituals honouring the dead. Instead, bodies were transported under cover of darkness t a deserted part of the beach to be disposed of as swiftly and secretly as possible. Corpse fires were visible from Troy and nobody wanted the Trojans to know how many Greeks were dying, so often five or six bodies would be thrown on to a single pyre."

Barker does, at times, depart from Briseis's viewpoint and narrates, either omisciently, or from the viewpoint of other characters (Patroclus, for example), but I found these departures distracting, rather than enlightening, given the clear focus of the novel as a whole.

Haynes, on the other hand, makes a virtue of her frequent switches in viewpoint: Briseis is one of her protagonists, but so is Calliope (the Muse of Epic Poetry), Creusa (the wife of Aeneas), Iphigenia (the daughter of Agamemnon), Penelope (the wife of Odysseus) and "The Trojan Women" as a group. Her descriptions of the squalor of the Greek camp were, for me, less vivid than Barker's, but this is balanced by the delightfully poignant humour of some of her viewpoints, notably Penelope's. Haynes draws, not only on Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, but also on Euripides's Trojan Women and Hecabe, Vergil's Aeneid, and Ovid's Heroides.

"Sing Muse, he says, and the edge in his voice makes it clear that this is not a request. If I were minded to accede to his wish, I might say that he sharpens his tone on my name, like a warrior drawing his dagger across a whetstone, preparing for the morning's battle. But I am not in the mood to be a muse today. Perhaps he hasn't thought of what it is like to be me. Certainly he hasn't: like all poets, he thinks only of himself. But it is surprising that he hasn't considered how many other men there are like him, every day, all demanding my unwavering attention and support. How much epic poetry does the world really need?"

It is surely a misfortune, both for Barker, and for Haynes, that they embarked upon these projects at more or less the same time. They are very different writers, with very different approaches, and rather different backgrounds, but they have chosen the same material, the same events, the same characters, and I wonder how many readers will have the appetite for both? I read them both because the "reception" of Greek classics by later writers, including my own contemporaries, is one of the topics that I teach; but perhaps what is missing, in both cases, is something more than merely a different viewpoint (or set of viewpoints) to distinguish these works from all the reworkings that have come before?

Madeline Miller, in Circe, takes her inspiration from The Odyssey, rather than The Iliad. Again, the emphasis is on a different (and female) viewpoint, that of the witch, Circe, who turns Odysseus's men into pigs, and delays his return home. Circe, however, is immortal, and this creates a difficulty for a novelist. When I tell my students that the novel, as a literary form, is fundamentally concerned with viewpoint, I take for granted that the viewpoint is a human one, and that there is much that can remain unsaid, simply on the basis of our shared humanity: this includes our mortality, our sexuality (the fact of it, rather than its specific nature), our embededness in institutions and relationships that existed before we were born, and will continue to exist after we are dead. Circe is not human, and there is therefore much about her existence that cannot remain unsaid, that must rather be explained. I found these explanations a good deal more distracting than Barker's occasional shifts of viewpoint, precisely, in this instance, because I already understood the concepts that were being explained:

"The fury did not bother with  lecture. She was a goddess of torment and understood the eloquence of violence. The sound of the whip was a crack like oaken branches breaking. Prometheus' shoulders jerked and a gash opened in his side long as my arm. All around me indrawn breaths hissed like water on hot rocks. The fury lifted her lash again ... The wounds of gods heal fast, but the Fury knew her business and was faster ... I had understood gods could bleed, but I had never seen it. He was one of the greatest of our kind, and the drops that fell from him were golden, smearing his back with a terrible beauty."

Miller does not confine herself to Homer's account: being immortal, Circe exists before Odysseus, and continues to exist after him (his departure from her island is, in a sense, the tipping point of the novel); like Haynes, she draws on other sources (one could almost believe that she has read the lost - or perhaps, mythical - Telegoniad, as well as the Iliad and Odyssey), and there is a twist in the tale of Circe's relationship with Odysseus. The twist, however, comes before the end, and that means that "the end," when it comes, is something of an anti-climax.

The Sophilos Dinos, in the British Museum, made c 580-570 BC, and depicting the wedding of Peleus and Thetis (the parents of Achilles).

Chigozie Obioma's An Orchestra of Minorities is a very different sort of novel: it is not a work of historical fiction, and does not share characters with, or recreate the events described in, Homer's Iliad or Odyssey. The Odyssey is invoked, but only a few times, and in passing (the protagonist has read a version of it a long time ago). What is shared with the Homeric epic is its broad themes and structure (a man leaves his homeland with a clear purpose in mind; he undertakes a long, arduous, and perilous journey; and ultimately returns, a changed and damaged man, to find that the realities that he thought he was coming back to have changed utterly).

The wanderer is not Greek, but Nigerian, and he travels, not as a warrior to Troy, but as a student to Northern Cyprus, where he finds that he has been deceived and defrauded by someone he had thought of as a friend. Like the other books here, Obioma's novel is bound up with mythology, but it is the mythology of the Igbo people of Nigeria, and it is only partially explained, which, for me, made the book more, not less, exciting. The viewpoint of the novel is not that of the protagonist, Chinonso, himself, but rather that of his Chi, a sort of guardian spirit, accountable, not to its human "host," but to the Igbo pantheon of deities and ancestral spirits.

"Chukwu, it struck him now, in this distant country of sky and dust and strange men, that what she feared that day had no happened to him. A poultry farmer named Jamike Nwaorji, having groomed him for some time, having plucked excess feathers from his body, having fed him with mash and millet, having let him graze about gaily, having probably staunched a leg wounded by a stray nail, had now sealed him up in a cage. And all he could do now, all there was to do now, was cry and wail. He had now joined many others, all the people Tobe had listed who had been defrauded of their belongings - the Nigerian girl near the police station, the man at the airport, all those who have been captured against their will to do what they did not want to do either in the past or the present, all who have been forced into joining an entity they do not wish to belong to, and countless others. All who have been chained and beaten, whose lands have been plundered, whose civilisations have been destroyed, who have been silenced, raped, shamed and killed. With all these people, he'd come to share a common fate. They were the minorities of this world whose only recourse was to join this universal orchestra in which all there was to do was cry and wail."

In the twenty-eight centuries since the death of Homer, his stories of the fall of Troy have been retold many times. Take, for example, the Ephaemeris Belli Trojani of Dictys Cretensis (c 350 AD), or the Roman de Troie of Benoit de Ste-Maure (c 1160), or the Historia Destructionis Troiae of Guido delle Colonne (c 1287): these texts are historically important, in that they kept those stories alive in a world in which Greek was no longer understood, but, in literary terms, they hardly rank as canonical. Those reworkings of the "Matter of Troy" (in Medieval Europe, it became subsumed under the "Matter of Rome," which, even before Vergil's time, was believed to have been founded by the descendants of Trojan refugees) that have really counted, that have shaped the development of European and World literature, have been those that have transformed, rather than those that have simply retold those stories: Vergil's focus on the journey of a refugee, rather than that of a conquering hero; Dante's elision of Classical and Catholic ideas of the afterlife; Milton's Protestant epic, which grants real agency to the universal anti-hero; and James Joyce's adoption of the epic idiom to the daily realities of life in early Twentieth Century Dublin.  If we are looking, in this young century of ours, for an heir to this great tradition, my money would be on Chigozie Obioma. 

Roman Republican coin of C. Mamilius Limetanius (c 82 BC), depicting Odysseus.

Mark Patton is a published author of historical fiction and non-fiction, whose books can be purchased from Amazon.

The Ghosts of the Day: A New Short Story

As we approach the end of 2019, and to mark the 180th anniversary, this year, of the birth of photography, I am releasing this short story, which I wrote a few years ago.

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.

Theatres of the Boulevard du Temple, c 1862 (image is in the Public Domain).

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.

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.

View of the Boulevard du Temple, by Louis Daguerre, 1838 or 1839 (image is in the Public Domain).

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.”

Outside, in the Rue des Marais, a single star shone brilliantly in the fading violet light of the 

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.

The Story of London in 50 Novels: 13 - "The Giant O'Brien," by Hilary Mantel

London's seasonal fairs, of which Bartholomew Fair was the best known, had, since Medieval times, been a focus for public entertainment, as well as social interaction and commercial transactions. Storytellers and performing bears, jugglers, musicians, and fortune tellers, all vied for the attentions of stall-holders and revelers. Later, as "London" became more than just "The City," and as burgeoning theatres and shopping arcades attracted increasing numbers of people to "The West End," entrepreneurs from across the British Isles, and from further afield, began to think in terms of "curiosities" that they could "exhibit" for the entertainment of an eager (and sometimes gullible) public.

Throughout the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, there were "sapient pigs," trained to perform calculations, spell out words, and even tell fortunes, by picking up cards with their mouths; "mermaids," created by stitching together the desiccated torsos of monkeys with the tails of fish; and a whole host of bearded ladies, hermaphrodites, and "freaks of nature."

Advertisement for "Toby the Sapient Pig," 1817 (image is in the Public Domain).

Often suffering from disabilities or serious illnesses, the living "exhibits" were mercilessly exploited for the profit of others. Some "exhibitions" were overtly racist, as in the case of Sara Baartmans ("the Hottentot Venus"), a woman from southern Africa, who was exhibited in London and Paris between 1810 and 1815.

Caricature by William Heath (1810), of Sara Baartman, with the politicians, Richard Sheridan (in green), and Lord Grenville (image is in the Public Domain).

Charles Byrne (1761-83), the "Irish Giant," was born in County Tyrone, and arrived in London in 1782. He was 7'7" (2.31 metres) tall, the result (we now know) of the pituitary tumour that would take his life just a year later. He was exhibited at Spring Garden-gate, Piccadilly, and Charing Cross, and, on his death, his body was acquired, contrary to his own wishes (he had asked to be buried at sea), by the surgeon, John Hunter. Despite recent attempts to secure a burial for his remains in accordance with his wishes, his skeleton is still on display in the Hunterian Museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields (the remains of Sara Baartman, by contrast, were returned to South Africa for burial).

Charles Byrne (centre), flanked by the Knipe brothers (twin giants), by John Kay, National Portrait Gallery D14755 (image is in the Public Domain).

The Hunterian Museum, with Charles Byrne's skeleton at the end. Photo: Paul Dean (StoneColdCrazy) - licensed under GNU.

John Hunter, portrait by John Jackson (1815), after a lost original (1786) by Sir Joshua Reynolds: National Portrait Gallery 77 (image is in the Public Domain).

Hilary Mantel's novel, The Giant O'Brien is based on Byrne's life story, but, by changing the name, she gives herself free license to invent the many details that history has not remembered about the real man (we know almost nothing of Byrne's background, character, or life in London beyond his public appearances).

In the novel, the life-stories of the giant, Charles O'Brien, and that of the surgeon, John Hunter, are juxtaposed. Both are outsiders in London, but, whilst the dour Scot is a calculating man of science; the Irish giant is a man steeped in traditional story-telling and folklore, a generous and engaging character with an original perspective on London life. Whether this reflects the personality of the real Charles Byrne is open to question (he is unlikely to have had much learning of any kind, and may have suffered from mental impairment as a result of his condition), but what is certain is that London in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries was a meeting place for people from many different backgrounds, and with sharply contrasting outlooks on the world.

"London is like the sea and the gallows. It refuses none. Sometimes on the journey, trapped in the ship's stink and heave, they had talked about the premises they would have at journeys end. They should be commodious, Vance said, and in a fashionable neighbourhood, central and well-lit, on a broad thoroughfare where the carriages of the gentry can turn without difficulty. 'My brother has a lodging in St Clement's Lane,' Claffey said, 'I don't know if it's commodious.' Vance blew out through his lips. 'Nest of beggars,' he said. 'As to your perquisites and embellishments, Charlie, they say a pagoda is the last word in fashion'  ... 'Will you have a story?' the Giant soothed them. For the time must be passed, must be passed" ... The Giant did not stop to ask what kind of story they would like, for they were contentious, like fretful children, and were in no position to know what was good for them. 'One day,' he began, the son of the King of Ireland journeyed to the east to find a bride.' 'Where east?' Vance asked, 'East London?' 'Albania,' the Giant said. 'Or far Cathay.'" 

"Seventeen forty-eight saw John Hunter, a set-jawed red-head astride a sway-backed plodder, heading south towards the stench of tanneries and soap-boilers. He came to London across Finchley Common, with the gibbeted corpses of villains groaning into the wind ... At the top of Highgate Hill he came to the Gatehouse Tavern, and observed London laid out before him. The evening was fine and the air mild." 

"London is ringed by fire, by ooze. Men with ladders carry pitch-soaked ropes in the street, and branched globes of light sprout fro the houses. Pybus thinks they have come to a country where they do not have a moon, but Vance is sure they will see it presently, and so they do, drowned in a muddy puddle in Chandos Street." 

"That summer the Giant grew rich. He washed in Castille soap, and made the purchase of some decanters. His followers ate green peas and strawberries. Joe Vance played with the writing set, and Pybus, Claffey, and Jankin haunted the skittle-alleys, the cock-fighting, the prize-fighting, the dog-fighting, and the bull-baiting. 'If we go on so,' said Claffey, grinning, 'we will have tamboured waistcoats like the quality, and silver buckles to our shoes.' 'What do you mean, if we go on so/ I am not likely to shrink.'

Mark Patton is a published author of historical fiction and non-fiction, whose books can be purchased from Amazon.

The Story of London in 50 Novels: 12 - "The Quality of Mercy," by Barry Unsworth

Eighteenth Century London was the hub of a continually expanding network of global contacts. At its wharves and quays, ships arrived bearing lacquer-ware, porcelain, and tea from China; cotton fabrics from India; tobacco from North America; chocolate from Mexico; coffee and spices from Indonesia; and sugar from the Caribbean; smaller ships brought coal from the north-eastern ports of England, which was increasingly burned as a fuel in London, in preference to wood, the nation's forests having been depleted for the building of ships. The new commercial system was underpinned by innovations in banking, insurance, and corporate governance; but it was also underpinned by something more tangible, yet less visible to most Londoners: the trade in human beings.

Coal merchant's advertisement (image is in the Public Domain).

The Pool of London, by John Wilson Carmichael (image is in the Public Domain).

Advertisement for a coffee house in London (image is in the Public Domain).

Almost every spoonful of sugar consumed in London, and every tot of rum carried on the ships for the benefit of their crew-members, had been produced on plantations in colonies such as Jamaica or Barbados, on the basis of slave-labour. The slaves were Africans, who had been shipped to the Caribbean, often on British ships, with British captains; they were the property of British plantation owners; yet very few of them ever came to Britain itself. Although tens of thousands of ordinary Britons owned shares in companies that formed part of the supply chain, slavery itself was largely out of sight and out of mind.

"Slave Dance," by Dirk Valkenburg, Dutch Brazil (image is in the Public Domain).

May Morning," by John Collet, 1770: Museum of London (image is in the Public Domain). A black servant joins the celebrations: under English law, he would not have been a slave.

From the mid-Eighteenth Century, movements emerged in Europe, committed to the abolition of slavery. Within Britain, these campaigns were often led by Evangelical Christians, and by religious dissenters, including Quakers and, later, Methodists. In 1777, a key ruling at the Old Bailey determined that a fugitive slave who had arrived in England, was a free man, since English law included no provision for the institution of slavery, and that, in the words of Lord Justice Mansfield,  "[slavery] is so odious that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law" (in other words, an Act of Parliament, which never actually came to pass).

Portrait of Lord Mansfield's nieces, Dido Elizabeth Belle and Lady Elizabeth Lindsay, Scone Palace, Scotland, 1778 (image is in the Public Domain). Dido was the daughter of a slave mother and a planter father, and lived as a member of Lord Mansfield's household.

Design for an Abolitionist medallion, by Josiah Wedgwood, 1795 (image is in the Public Domain). 

The first book published by an African author in English, 1782 (image is in the Public Domain). Direct testimony by individuals with first-hand experience of slavery played an important part in the Abolitionist movement. 

With so many vested interests, however, the process of abolition was a slow and painful one. Slavery was formally abolished by the newly created French Republic in 1794, but this was revoked by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802. In England, William Wilberforce's act of 1807 outlawed the Transatlantic Slave Trade, but British plantation owners continued to make use of slave labour until 1833.

Illustration from Voltaire's "Candide" (widely read across Europe). His protagonist meets a maimed slave in Surinam: "it is at this price that you eat sugar in Europe," the caption reads. Image: Jean-Michel Moreau, 1787 ((image is in the Public Domain).

Barry Unsworth's novel, The Quality of Mercy, is based around an imagined conflict (though closely based on historical circumstances), between a ship-owner, Erasmus Kemp, whose slave-ship has been taken over by its crew,and run aground in Florida; and the abolitionist, Frederick Ashton, who accuses Kemp of insurance fraud (in claiming for the value of slaves allegedly thrown overboard on the orders of the Captain), and seeks to demonstrate, in the courts, that, as human beings, the slaves had never been Ashton's lawful property. The situation is complicated by a love-interest between Kemp and Ashton's sister; and by the position of Sullivan, the ship's Irish fiddler, one of the few men who might actually know what happened on the ship, and who is, unbeknown to Kemp or Ashton, making his way on foot to a mining community in County Durham, with a message for the family of a murdered ship-mate.

"On finding himself thus accidentally free, Sullivan's only thought was to get as far as he could from Newgate prison while it was still dark. Fiddle and bow slung over his shoulders, he set off northwards, keeping the river at his back. In Holborn he lost an hour, wandering in a maze of courts. Then an old washer-woman, waiting outside a door in the first light of day, set him right for Gray's Inn Lane and the northern outskirts of the city ... An hour's walking brought him to the rural edges of London, among the market gardens and brick kilns north of Gray's Inn Road ... At a junction of lanes here was a huddle of houses and a small inn. He was hungry but he did not dare to stop. One way led to Watford the other to St Albans. He took a shilling from his new purse and tossed it. It came down heads. St Albans then."

"'I had hoped the business might be settled privately between us,' Van Dillen said. 'The outcome must be doubtful in law and if we go to the extent of a hearing there are costs to be thought of. Why should we fatten the lawyers, Mr Kemp?' He was not finding the interview easy. He was physically uncomfortable, for one thing; the seat of his chair was too small for a man of his bulk, and the weather was unseasonably hot. The room had only one window, and the morning sun, strong despite the clogging air of London, slanted through it and lay directly on him. He felt overheated in his bob-wig and broadcloth suit ... He felt an itch on the side of his neck, some insect crawling there ... the windless days and early heat had produced a plague of small black beetles that flew about blindly, getting tangled in wigs and snared in the corner of eyes, copulating and dying, leaving a scurf of corpses ... 'What can be predicted are the legal costs,' Van Dillen said. 'My good sir, the facts are not in dispute, at least as regards the central fact of the Negroes being cast overboard and the necessity thereof.' 'It is precisely the necessity of it that the insurers will dispute if it comes before a court."

"Slavers throwing overboard the dead and dying," by J.M.W. Turner, 1840, Museum of Fine Art, Boston, 1840 (image is in the Public Domain). Slavery was already illegal in British territories at this time, but Turner was campaigning for its global abolition.

"The insurance claim on eighty-five African slaves, cast overboard while still alive from the deck of the 'Liverpool Merchant' on grounds of lawful jettison, was heard at the Guildhall, Justice Blundell presiding. In contrast to the long course of postponements and delays that preceded it, the hearing itself was brief, occupying no more than three hours of the court's time. The insurers were represented by an elderly lawyer named Price, who had a large experience of such cases. Kemp's lawyer, Pike, had wished to hold his fire for the criminal trial at the Old Bailey, which was due to be held at a date not yet specified; he had recommended a young barrister named Waters to represent the ship's owner."      

Mark Patton is a published author of historical fiction and non-fiction, whose books can be purchased from Amazon.