The Green Muse (3 page)

I craved the bitter, almost unbearable taste of absinthe now, which rested unsugared in a silver flask in my inside coat pocket. But Theo was greedy, and I would have it for myself.

There was a family of six in front of us, obviously up from the country, the Morgue being a standard listing in any Cook's tour of Paris. Listed between the Tuilleries gardens and Nôtre Dame.

Only the husband seemed to be embarrassed by his surroundings. He kept stepping away from the queue and back to it, too acutely aware of its destination. The wife's eyes were shining, and the four children, two boys and two girls between the ages of six and fourteen, were wild with anticipation. The oldest boy whispered in the six-­year-­old's ear, making her cry. The wife wore a long white apron and a white cap, and carried a basket filled with greens. The children carried cooked shrimps and sausage in greasy paper from the cookshop on the corner. The father gulped his beer and did not wipe the foam from his mouth. The older daughter caught my eye. She simpered, as if I would even hold her gaze. She flushed and took a furious bite of her sausage.

And with a lurch the queue began to move. The women screamed coyly, and the men took the opportunity to clutch their arms, to touch their waists. But her expression did not change even as the press of the crowd grew. She was sure-­footed and walked as though she were the only one there. I followed her hat. I was tempted again by the warm green in my vest pocket; Leonard caught my eye, and we both began to laugh. When she turned again it was toward my wide smile.

A flicker of amusement passed over her lips, and she walked into the Morgue smiling.

 

I
N MY DARKROO
M
I stood quiet and still for a moment, as I always do before developing photographs of the dead. It is one of my rituals; I do not pray. I do not know why, really, as I pray nightly and attend church regularly at Our Lady of the Fields. I suppose the process of development itself, the careful undertaking of each step in the process, is in a way my prayer for the dead. And I suppose my moment of stillness is also a putting on of armor against what I am about to see.

My darkroom is nothing but the bathroom of my apartment. I cannot afford to rent a studio, but I am comfortable with the space I have. My needs are modest: running water, room for creating exposures, a dry place to put finished pictures, and just the right amount of darkness.

If I owned my own home I would put red-­glazed glass in the bathroom window; but since the plates and papers involved in developing an exposure react only to ultraviolet, violet, and blue light, it is sufficient to cover any sources of natural light with a warm yellow, amber, or red hue. As it is I have covered the bathroom window with several sheets of different-­colored paper in reds, oranges, and yellows. But not so many layers that I cannot see; it is said, after all, that if you cannot read a newspaper in your darkroom, it is too dark. I cannot yet afford the cost of red or amber for the globe of an oil lamp, so when it was already dark outside, a simple candle suffices for my needs. And I had the requisite tray for the developing of the exposures, a wooden box lined with thin sheets of zinc. And as I have said, there is sufficient space on the counter to dry the developed prints.

I love my darkroom. It is my refuge. There I escape the everyday while doing work that I consider important and satisfying. Here in the quiet of my darkroom, as I light my candle against the setting of the sun, I am alone with both my thoughts and the poor creature whose photographs I have come here to bring to life.

I grew up wanting to be a doctor. I wanted to help my fellow man. But I dreamed over my studies; I read poetry instead of Hippocrates. I particularly loved to look at things. The way a certain drop of water hung upon a leaf, the way a certain shaft of sunlight lit the corner of the kitchen hearthstone. I didn't seem to have an aptitude for anything. But I was lucky: My mother was kind and, although my father beat me for laziness, she saw in me an artist. I was ashamed; I was no artist. But I loved her so fiercely (and do so fiercely still) that I wanted to live up to what she saw in me.

I just didn't know how. All I really remember of my school years is the games I used to play with my friends, and staring out the classroom window when I should have been paying attention to the schoolmaster. I loved clouds and birds, and all the different colors a field could turn in the course of an autumn morning. I tried drawing and had no knack for it; I tried painting, and although I loved mixing the colors and preparing canvases, I had no talent for rendering nature, or fruit, or my little sister's pretty head.

My mother, however, never despaired. She seemed to be waiting for something, so much so that when I was thirteen and suffering an excess of nerves about my future I asked her about this feeling I got from her that she was always looking for something, but without fear or weariness.

“What you are to do with your life is out there, Edouard,” she'd say to me, cupping my face in her hands, which were always cool. “And when the time is right you will find it—­or more likely it will find you. You do not have to be impatient, my darling. It is there, I feel it. And it is beautiful.”

At fourteen I took a job helping the local portrait maker develop his plates. I fell in love with photography. I even fell in love with the word.
Writing with light.
I had been waiting all my life to discover that it was possible to write with light.

My mother was right. My destiny had found me, and it was beautiful. M. Martillon, my boss, reveled in his power. He was a force in our little town because he stood for both Progress and Art. He dressed in the Parisian style and talked a great deal about the refinement of his craft. He was a symbol of another life, and although he was fat the ladies sighed over him. His hands were always greasy, but he knew about the latest Paris fashions; he made trips to the capital several times a year and claimed the acquaintance of both Nadar and Charcot.

Although he was kind to me, I did not like him. He equated photography with power and an entrée into society, and he had no reverence for his work. I could not pretend indifference to his connections: Nadar, the Parisian photographer who had made intimate portraits of Sarah Bernhardt in a studio that contained a cascading waterfall; who went down into the Paris sewers to take the first flash photographs. And Charcot! The man many called the Father of Neurology, which was less important to me than the fact that he was promoting the use of photography to document the symptoms of his hysterical patients in the Hôpital Salpêtrière, in Paris. But I suspected, even then, that M. Martillon had scant reverence for the great men Time and Fortune had given him the privilege of knowing. And in spite of his connections and high standing, I felt his world was small, and I looked with burning anticipation to the days when such opportunities as he had had might open up for me, that I might show my mettle by my manner of taking advantage of them.

After a year of running errands and developing portraits, I became intensely curious about the ­people on the other side of the camera. I knew how faithful the camera was, and yet I wanted to see these ­people in the flesh, to see their eyes and hands before the light captured them. I wanted to be the one in back of the lens. I was fifteen years old.

Of my own initiative I took a job with M. Bousson, the town's only other professional photographer. He did less business than M. Martillon, and so he paid me less, but I liked him better. He preferred the colloidal method of photography, which involved working with materials as diverse as mercury vapor, beer, and honey. He made portraits for those who could not afford my former master, but although he did excellent work his heart lay in two very different places: Nature, and the deathbed. On Saturdays we would go out into the woods, I without pay, and photograph the natural world in all its raw glory. M. Bousson could make a paltry tumble of water, hardly worthy to be called a fall, look like a ladder to heaven. Colloidal slides must be developed immediately, and they must be developed using water. There were photographers who carried along huge complex darkroom equipment and portable rooms that they can set up wherever and whenever they needed them.

Our needs were simpler. A large jug of water, a shallow pan, the appropriate chemicals, a collapsible tent that could be set up in a few moments anywhere we chose, While my master decided on what angle and aspect of his subject he wanted to photograph, I coated glass photographic plates with collodion, a thick liquid composed of nitrated cotton, alcohol, and ether, which had been sensitized to light with potassium iodide salts. After just the right amount was applied (my master being very particular in his needs), the plates had to be developed before the mixture dried. I would hurry the exposed plates to our makeshift darkroom and develop them using ferrous sulfate, then rinse and fix the image with a solution of potassium cyanide. The method was considered outdated by the Eighties, but the pictures produced were lovely indeed.

And the keepsake portraits he made for the parents of children who had just passed away—­often free of charge—­were works of great beauty and caring. I was so frightened the first time we took such a photograph! An adolescent girl had died of consumption and, although I did everything I could to hide it, I was afraid to enter the bedroom in which she lay. M. Bousson saw my fear and dismissed it—­one of the many kindnesses he did me.

“Bring me my plates, Edouard,” he said curtly, and walked into the room without waiting to see if I would follow.

The dead girl lay still against white sheets. She lay in a kind of swoon, her head sunk into her downy pillow, her hair in a cloud around her, her arms straight along her body atop the blanket and her palms up in supplication to something we could not see.

M. Bousson went about his business quietly and with reverence. I think I loved him that day, as a mentor and a friend. He showed me how to create a living memento. Many photographers relied on mountains of flowers and sentimental backgrounds to create the kind of feeling they think necessary to evoke memories of the dead. M. Bousson captured the loved one's essence. I heard the bereaved say it again and again: “That's our Nana exactly! Her expression! Her eyes! How did you do it?”

He never told me.

He showed me. In the room with the dead girl, I stood at the ready, slide in hand, hovering over the elements of the darkroom we had by necessity set up in one corner of the room. I readied the materials and watched my master go about his work.

First he stood and gazed at the body a long time. The girl looked to be about thirteen. M. Bousson moved to the bed and caressed her face—­at least I thought he did. But when he moved away I saw that he had gentled her mouth, which had been turned down and slightly twisted. He passed his hand again over her, turning her face so that she seemed now to be looking directly above her instead of to the side. The photographer continued to move around the body, gently touching and arranging it as if he had known the girl in life, and wanted to make sure she looked in death as much like her natural self as possible. But when he was done I saw nothing strikingly different; I would not want a picture of this thing in the bed, I thought, if it had been my daughter. But the photographs, when I developed them, were exquisite: The dead girl did not look as if she were sleeping—­but she looked as if she were dreaming, and might wake. It was the first time I had seen beauty in death. Suddenly I wanted to render death lovely, as my master did, to give the grieving a truth they could hold in their hands, a picture that would bring the loved person to them whole and palpable every time they looked at it, for years to come, for the rest of their lives.

So I learned to love death, because an artist cannot photograph any subject without real love and respect.

After some years with M. Bousson, it was M. Martillon, after all, who gave me the opportunity to go to Paris. There was an opening, he told me, at a tintype studio near the Tuilleries. I would be only one of many young men, but Paris was full of opportunities, and full, to my young mind, of possible dreams. I ended up one of a cadre of young men whose job it was to develop the seemingly endless series of photographs taken at the studio, mostly portraits of families, young men and women on the Grand Tour, and old generals. It was tedious work, but it made my hands careful, fast, and sure. But I found that I had learned more of human nature photographing the dead and dying than I ever would from the stiff and formal photographs taken at the studio. At least all the expressions of death are natural ones, and the expressions of the dying are true and clear. But these ­people, young and old, tourists or girls making their first debut, stood as frightened and frozen in front of the camera as ­people did fifty years ago, when they had to stand immobile fifteen minutes for the creation of a daguerreotype.

Although a single photograph took only a matter of seconds to shoot, each person looked somehow almost identical. Whether the subject stood or sat in front of the most lifelike setting of trees or waterfall, only rarely did the spark of individuality light the eyes. It is intimidating to most ­people to have their picture taken. I have read that the savages in Africa fear that the camera, in taking their pictures, will steal away a part of their soul, and it seems that there is some vestigial fear of such a thing even in civilized societies! The vast majority of subjects stare at the camera lens with a blankness more blank than death's.

But I can still remember one young girl because of her insistence on the breaking of this pattern. From the back room where I sat with a dozen other young men churning out portraits, I suddenly heard cries emanating from the studio proper: Renée, Renée, you must sit quietly! Renée, Renée, that is not an expression proper to a young lady! And I knew Renée when I saw her. She sat defiant on a papier-­mâché rock next to a painted stream, her head tilted back, her eyes bold. This is a girl made for adventure, I thought, and I think of her still. She was not beautiful, but her eyes held such promise, such passion, such will often I have wished Renée well, when passing a midinette or other young thing on the street. Often I have wondered for what adventures Renée was fated, even where she is now. For a week I was half in love with her, I think. And perhaps I will always think of her now and again. Linked as we are by glass and image, perhaps I will always wonder, and wish her well. And that is the very magic of photography, that we can look, and wonder, and care, long after the documented moment has passed.

After perhaps six months of toil at the studio, I was moved into the front room to begin photographing subjects myself, a blessing not unmixed, as I had often to reject my natural urge to prod my subjects into life. It was not my business to do more than arrange the subject in proper relationship to whatever background was chosen; mine was not the pleasure of a Nadar. No Sarah Bernhardt lithe and lively even in stillness, no great advancements to my art. But I found satisfaction in the almost abject gratitude of my subjects, as though each time I clicked the button I had performed some complex and quite amazing feat of magic.

After another six months I was granted the great good fortune to photograph for the newspapers one of the officials of the Prefecture of Paris Police, Capt. Henri Bezier. He was as stiff as any other who sat for a portrait, but he talked more, and loudly. He was insistent that he needed, with the utmost urgency, to hire a young photographer of sound physical and mental constitution and a steady hand and eye in the face of death. I was to find out later that the most important requirement for the job was a finely honed sense of the absurd.