Read Online The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre by Dominic Smith - Free Book Online Page A

whorls of hydrogen. Then a burn, a scalding in the back of his throat. He looked down at the ground and closed the diaphragm just as the seizure nabbed him by the neck. He knelt, shuddered, fell to the floor. His head hit the wooden planks. Arago was at his side, calling his name as if through a tunnel. The seizure passed quickly and left Louis staring up at the angry white sun. There were spectral colors in his vision, spirals of red and yellow. He made no sound. A bright and throbbing pain swelled up in his mouth.
    “My God, Daguerre, are you all right?” called Arago, bending down. “Did you faint?”
    “No, no, I’m fine. The sun blinded me for an instant.” There was a slight sputter in his voice. He smoothed his tongue against his teeth to investigate. Arago squatted beside him. Louis tasted the sulfur of blood in his mouth, a warmth pooling behind one cheek. At the same instant the two men looked a few feet away and saw one of Louis Daguerre’s teeth on the observatory platform. It was a front incisor, yellowed by age and diet, and with a delicate recess of blood in its crown. Arago looked at it with a mixture of disgust and disbelief. Louis fought a desire to grab it and put it back in his mouth.
    After a long pause, Arago said, “Is that your tooth?”
    Louis took out his kerchief and wadded a portion of it into his mouth. He saw himself as Arago might: the blood on his waistcoat, the maw of some wild animal crouched on the timber boards of the Paris Observatory. Louis gave in to a series of nods designed to control his own astonishment and repulsion at the sight of his tooth.
    “A serious artist must give of himself for the work,” he said. But neither of them laughed, and Louis had no choice but to acknowledge the moment by picking up his tooth with his kerchief.
    “You must see a doctor. I insist,” said Arago.
    “That tooth has been loose for some time,” Louis found himself saying. “The sun saved me a few francs at the tooth puller’s.”
    Arago helped Louis to his feet and called for a clerk, who came hurrying with a chair. Louis recognized him as the reckless man who had unloaded his equipment from the carriage. He felt a burst of anger in his chest. “Get this man away from me. Don’t let him touch me!”
    “He’s trying to help,” Arago said.
    Louis looked squarely at the man. “I remember you. We know each other, you and I.” The man shrugged and Arago gestured for him to leave the chair. Louis reluctantly sat and watched the man withdraw a few paces. Louis mumbled, “No man is safe from the fury of the end.”
    Arago loosened Louis’s neck cloth and unbuttoned his shirt, revealing the large emblem of the Legion of Honor. Arago and the clerk looked on as a single drop of blood spilled from Louis’s mouth onto the nation’s crowning symbol. He looked down at his chest. “On my way to get it resilvered.”
    Arago paused, his eyes locked on his friend’s chest. Louis thought he could see, in that instant, an immense contempt wash over Arago’s face. Was the sight of the cross on his bloody chest an act of desecration? Did he think Louis was an embarrassment to a noble tradition?
    Arago recovered and said to the clerk, “Fetch him some water and a clean shirt from my study.”
    Louis said, “No, nothing from him.”
    The man hauled off. Arago put his hand on Louis’s shoulder. “You’re acting very strangely. You must have really smashed your head.”
    Louis shrugged with elaborate indifference. He put the kerchief to his mouth. “I got the sun. If you’ll leave my equipment set up, I’ll return tonight for the moon.”
    “There will be other full moons,” said Arago.
    “I insist. I feel perfectly fine. That tooth must have been a little rotten. I’m too much with the black-currant brandy these days.”
    The clerk returned with water and the shirt. Louis took the water, imagining it an act of contrition. He made a few tentative swallows. The blood seemed to be