Camera Obscura - Brian Doswell (grave mercy TXT) 📗

moment of excitement during the late summer of ’97 when the wrath of the venerable City Fathers of Paris descended upon them for selling such depraved pictures from a market stall, within sight of the cathedral of Notre Dame. Fortunately for René and Jean-Paul, the morning journal on the day of the tribunal, declared that most of Paris lay within sight of Notre Dame and that included the Academy des Arts, in which hung the original ‘Déjeuner sur l’herbe, which, by popular opinion on the day, lacked at least two ladies. For one night only, the elated pair became the toast of the Moulin Rouge and queues formed at their table to buy copies of the postcard in question. But, as is the way of these things, on the following morning, nothing remained of their encounter with Madame Fame save a few unspent sous and a splitting headache.

During this time, Juliette, who had no home as well as no family, virtually lived in the apartment on rue Cavallotti. The arrangement suited Jean-Paul admirably given the tacit agreement between the three of them that she would never bring any of her ‘occasional friends’ into apartment 17b.

Conversely, René had been known to frequently relax this rule with regard to his own modest studio, two streets away, across the park in rue Lepic. In fact it had been at that address that he had stumbled upon Juliette giving herself enthusiastically to a surly looking German by the name of Adolf Miethe. In all of their time together, it was the first occasion that he had actually seen her at work, in her ‘evening’ role, and he was more than alarmed to see her face so smeared with rouge and her eyes bulging such that he thought she might be having a convulsion.

There was of course no way that René could have known at the time that the male body bouncing so vigorously on top of Juliette was Adolf Miethe, although the fact that he was still wearing highly polished riding boots did suggest that the man was German.

René withdrew from his apartment to the café across the road, where he sat on a bentwood chair, nursing a cup of coffee and a glass of Armagnac into which he mindlessly stirred a cube of sugar. From his table in the window of the café, he could see the flickering lamp behind the lace curtains of his single room, and he waited for it to dim, the signal that Juliette had concluded her business. When at last the lamp went out, he waited a moment or two for them to emerge before finishing his glass. The heavy street door opened, emitting the pair, arm in arm like lovers into the night and René watched them exchange a few words, eager for them to part, so that he could retire to the warmth of his recently used bed. But then Juliette spotted René in the window of the café and, grabbing Adolf by the elbow, she steered her bewildered client across the road and into the café.

Tidier, but still smudged with rouge, Juliette’s face glowed with excitement as she dragged the reluctant German towards René’s table.

“René, may I present Adolf Miethe. He is also a photographer and he is desperate to meet you.”

René, unable to avoid the meeting, stood and extended a hand. “Bonsoir monsieur.”

The formal German clicked his heels in salute but declined René’s hand, clearly still more than a little embarrassed by the notion that he had so recently been observed in the act of making love to Juliette - in René’s bed. Juliette pushed Adolf into an adjacent chair and gestured to the waiter to bring more Armagnac.

Adolf remained silent, mainly because he spoke very little French but also as he was exceedingly unsure of whom he might be addressing. He knew nothing of René or his business, indeed his name had not been mentioned, until now. Juliette, who made it her business to speak enough of every language as she might require in order to conduct her business in a capital city such as Paris, took control and explained as best she could.

It transpired that she had met Adolf earlier that evening in the Moulin Rouge, where he had been expounding to a group of bored gallants, the theories of his amazing new discovery, which he called ‘Blitzlichtpulver’. Needless to say, Herr Miethe was the only one in the entire establishment who cared to know about Blitzlichtpulver, being as you can neither drink it, nor take it to bed with you. Also, being the consummate German, this minor fact did not inhibit his need to continue to explain its virtues to all and sundry regardless of their attention at the time. Only Juliette realised the significance of this invention and, for the want of another to pay for her drinks, she lent on his arm and allowed him to relate the whole story into her pretty pink ear.

It is said that an animated Adolf was an amazing sight to behold. Somehow his exuberant pronunciation of the compound German word caused him to salivate excessively on the first syllable and to spray the rest of the word in every direction, with the assembled listeners saved only by the heavy moustache that adorned his upper lip. The more he explained to Juliette, the more she became convinced that he should meet with René and Jean-Paul. Admittedly it had taken several minutes of obscure translation and a quite remarkable series of gestures, but she was now convinced that Blitzlichtpulver was exactly what was needed to save her from the torture of having her body, invariably naked and on the verge of freezing, locked into iron frames to immobilise her for sufficient time to imprint her image on the glass plate inside Jean-Paul’s camera. Quite simply, if Adolf were to be believed, this new ‘flash-light-powder’ would create sufficient intensity of light in a fraction of a second to activate Rene’s chemical brew, thereby relieving her of the agony of posing for hours on end.

It also quickly became apparent that the more closely Juliette demonstrated her interest in Blitzlichtpulver, the more Adolf became interested in Juliette’s own saleable assets. Never one to miss the chance of earning a pfennig or two, Juliette persuaded Adolf to accompany her to René’s apartment in the hope of finding her friends and business partners, after a half hour of business conducted on her own account.

Having now completed her own transaction and made the introduction to René, Juliette set about explaining her understanding of the new powder, speaking alternately in French and German as necessary. Three heads locked together over the stained marble table-top as the two principals grew more and more excited about the possibilities of Blitzlichtpulver. At length, just as the waiter was about to deliver three glasses of Armagnac to the table, Adolf could resist no longer. He delved deep into his coat pocket and produced a rolled paper tube about the size of a small cigar, which he placed onto a saucer and, with a flourish characteristic of a circus ringmaster, struck a sulphur match and lit it.

The ensuing chaos would have played well in any of the theatres on rue Pigalle. Three glasses of Armagnac helped to fuel the fire and the recoiling waiter is reported to have turned two consecutive somersaults without touching the ground. Of the three at the window table, there was no sign as they were now all fixed to the floor as if nailed there by the unseen hand of the master carpenter himself. For the record, René, Juliette and Jean-Paul, who had not even been there at the time, were instantly barred from drinking in the café on rue Lepic, for life.

The few days that followed that evening, proved to be among the most exciting in the whole of René’s life, save perhaps for that very first time he set eyes on an original Daguerreotype in the Academy. It was a frantic period during which Adolf readily demonstrated the flash light properties of the lycopodium powder mixture while steadfastly refusing to share the formula for its composition. For three days the team set about solving the secondary problem of synchronising the ignition of the flash-powder with the opening of the camera aperture. Their best result was to open the lens, fire the powder and replace the lens, each action being conducted by hand and therefore producing a somewhat random outcome. Sadly, even their best results served only to make them strive for something better. During this period, Juliette worked alternately as photographic model and caterer which meant that the four enthusiasts existed entirely on bread, cheese and wine, emerging only as the need arose, for them to replenish the stock of chemicals for the darkroom.

On the fourth day, Adolf announced his imminent return to Leipzig, thereby bringing the series of experiments in apartment 17b.to an abrupt halt. René pleaded with Adolf to share the basic formula with them but the wily German refused, determined to guard the potential future profits for himself. This set-back cast a brief shadow over the partnership of Arnot-La Selles but also served to make them even more alert to the possibility of taking their camera out of the studio and into the pit that was the Moulin Rouge. Visions of a fortune in gold coins hung before their eyes, yet it remained forever a centimetre out of reach, as they laboured to recreate the essential flash-light-powder formula.

René spent many days and nights in the tiny laboratory of apartment 17b, but success continued to elude him and, during the bitterly cold winter of 1897, his health began to fail.

January 1898 passed with René confined to his bed from where he passed daily instructions to Juliette who managed the roles of nurse, model, whore and darkroom chemist with aplomb. Jean-Paul wrote letters to Leipzig and even contemplated making the journey in search of Adolf Miethe but that would have left them with no income and a steady stream of doctor’s bills to pay. He started experimenting again, sometimes on his own, and sometimes with assistance from the ever available Juliette.

*****

Thus it was, on one of his rare visits to apartment 17b, René found himself clutching the naked, soot smeared body of Juliette and gazing at the wreckage that signified the latest failed attempt to control the volatile flash powder mixture.

*****

Jean-Paul the failed artist and René the failed chemist are now both lost in obscurity. Had luck been on their side in that fateful year, their names may well have been found in the history books as the fathers of portable flash photography. It would undoubtedly have pleased René’s own father to have seen his son’s name on the wall in the French Academy of Sciences, but it was not to be. The exertion of climbing the stairs combined with the shock of the explosion, and maybe the warmth of Juliette’s naked body in his arms, were enough to send René back to his bed from which he would never rise again.

Jean-Paul scraped a living for several years as a wedding photographer before finding his own obscurity in the dampness of a Parisian jail where he was sent after attempting to sell the photographs of an inordinate number of bridesmaids whom he had persuaded to pose for him after the event.