Sidetracks

Especially in these early days, photography gave rise to a host of questions and suspicions. Was the photographer an artist, or a scientist? Would he destroy painting? Would his portraits somehow dehumanize nature, and banish the soul? And how was it that photography, with all its mechanistic and chemical crudeness, had suddenly created a golden age of the human image? As Nadar himself put it with typical trenchancy: ‘Photography is a fantastic discovery: a science which engages the most advanced intellects, and an art which provokes the most profound minds: and yet its use lies within the capacity of the shallowest idiot.’

The story of Nadar’s early career is a reflection and to some extent an explanation of many of these issues. It is also a kind of comic-epic, continuously larger and more colourful than life, like his own person. For the Nadar who eventually occupied the boulevard des Capucines was 6 feet 4 inches tall, with blazing red hair once described by the poet de Banville as ‘comet’s fire’, and having for his motto the untranslatable Parisian shrug in the face of an intractable universe: mais, quand même!

In fact Felix Nadar created himself. As he was born in 1820, he was merely Felix Tournachon, the eldest son of a provincial printer and publisher from Lyons. After a long but unsuccessful attempt to establish a business in Paris, selling translations of radical texts by Diderot, d’Holbach and Lamennais, his father Victor Tournachon went bankrupt and returned to die at the Lyons asylum in 1837. Felix, forced at seventeen to assume responsibility for his mother and his younger brother Adrien, worked in the local Lyons journals and studied medicine at night. One story persisted in the memory about his father: he was once said to have swum the Rhône for a dare, carrying an open book in one hand, and a hunting horn – which he blew occasionally – in the other. A Byronic gesture perhaps; but also something more à la mode, a brilliant act of self-publicity.

Within a year Felix Tournachon had taken his mother and his brother back to Paris, his heart set on the grand conquest his father had attempted, but failed. He had no métier, but many schemes. Between 1838 and 1844, the years of the bourgeois monarch with the furled umbrella, Tournachon plunged into the life of the Left Bank. His story became that of Henri Murger’s Scènes de la Vie de Bohème (1849), the sloping attics of the sixth arrondissement, the cheap cafés round Notre Dame de Lorette, and the laundry girls and golden-hearted grisette of the quartier Breda.

A bewildering assortment of bad jobs and good contacts followed: stenographer, bookshop assistant, coalseller, pipeseller, cub reporter, private secretary, editorial hack. While writing theatre reviews for an ephemeral journal, he met Jean Duval – later Baudelaire’s mulatto mistress – stealing the show in a bit part at the Porte-Saint-Antoine, and they became friends. His newspaper work brought him into touch with Gautier, Nerval, de Banville, Murger himself (who frequently shared his attic and his purse), Baudelaire, Dumas père, Champfleury, and even Balzac, hiding out from creditors in a chamber hung with gentian wallpaper in the rue de Richelieu.

A somewhat weary police dossier was opened on him. ‘Yet another of those dangerous people sowing highly subversive doctrines in the Quartier Latin – he makes speeches about the Lamennaian socialist theory.’ He was also notorious for his wild, unbourgeois-like generosity.

Tournachon cut a remarkable figure in the narrow, cobbled streets – huge, gangling, red-headed, with long twitching fingers and staring impudent eyes. But it was some time before he settled upon his public image, a concept of singular importance to him. The journalist Charles Bataille first met him climbing down, with ostentatious stealth, from a fifth-floor attic in the rue Neuve des Martyres by the outside ‘like a huge scrawny cat’, presumably to avoid the concierge. Having reached the relative safety of terra firma, he arranged an eye-catching ‘bull’s blood’ jacket round his shoulders, pulled on an elegant pair of gloves and, carefully neglecting to button cuff or cravat, loped off with a boyish grin to impress his new editor. This mixture of craft and sartorial naïveté always remained: at the height of his fame he attended a Fancy Dress Ball with Gustave Doré, dressed as a baby with orange beads and a cotton bib.

By 1842, Tournachon had landed his first regular job, as Letters Editor on Le Commerce (he wrote them himself), and he began publishing short stories of Bohemian life, and finally a novel, La Robe de Déjanire (1846). These showed his lifelong understanding of poverty, and a characteristic combination of fulsome sentiment and black humour. He had also found his name: from Tournachon to Tournadard, an obscure, epistemological gallic joke, referring either to his satirical sting, or else to the tongue of flame (also dard) above his brow; and thence to the more economical and generally more marketable, Nadar. This signature now began to appear below little matchstick drawings, and at the age of twenty-seven, Nadar published a first caricature on the inside page of Charivari, the celebrated illustrated journal edited by Charles Philipon. Pictures, not words, suddenly began to flow from his pen.

The revolutionary events of 1848 precipitated Nadar into perhaps the most quixotic adventure of his entire career. It was nothing less than the liberation of Poland from the Prussians, by a volunteer column of 500 ultra-red republican Parisians, inspired by the rhetoric of the ageing Lamartine and the exiled Mickiewicz. Nadar proudly showed his falsified Polish passport round the cafés: ‘Age 27 years, height 1.98 metres, hair rust red, eyes protuberant, complexion bilious.’ The expedition ended in a prison near Magdeburg, but Nadar, irrepressible, was soon back in Paris looking for work with a Polish astrakhan cap perched proudly on his wild locks. Gérard de Nerval introduced him to a friendly editor: ‘This is Tournachon; he’s got lots of spirit, but he’s very crazy.’ The poet and the ex-Pole worked night shifts together, discussing ballooning – a shared enthusiasm – and politics, and sleeping on top of the warm printing presses. All the time, Nadar’s long fingers were drawing.

In the following spring, the editor Charles Philipon began to use Nadar’s caricatures regularly for his new illustrated magazine, Le Journal Pour Rire. Nadar’s professional friendship with the forty-three-year-old editor was to be the most influential of his life. A collection of eighty manuscript letters, which lies in the archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale, still unpublished, vividly traces the growth of a fraught but chaotically fruitful partnership. Philipon appears always thoughtful, severe, appreciative, fatherly; while Nadar is rumbustious, multifarious, and ceaselessly late with copy. Like Emile de Girardin of La Presse, Philipon belonged to the first great generation of mass-circulation editors in Paris, and Nadar rapidly became his star. By 1851 Nadar was being asked to produce as many as 100 separate caricatures a month.

It was thus that sheer pressure of demand created the first atelier Nadar, a vital cooperative formation which was to extend subsequently to his photographic work. Up to a dozen fellow craftsmen were soon employed on Nadar’s inimitable sketches and ideas, and transferring them to the wooden blocks sent for printing all over Paris. The atelier became a kind of syndicate, and his ubiquitous spidery N changed from an artist’s signature to ‘marque de fabrication’. In a press now forbidden, by Imperial decree, all direct political commentary, Nadar spawned an entire world of grotesque little homunculi, a myriad croquetons, in which all the famous writers, actors and painters of the day danced and gibbered in manic processions across the tabloids of Paris. ‘So then, we are lost’, sighed the frères Goncourt, ‘Nadar has now learnt to draw.’

But for Nadar himself, drawing remained the means only, not the long-sought object. The image, the outward physical projection of the inner, private, spiritual man, still obsessed him. How to capture it? And especially, how to capture it in that most elusive of creatures, his fellow writer? ‘How to draw out, for example,’ he asked himself, ‘in the wonderfully sympathetic face of Dumas père, the hints of exotic blood, how to press the simian analogy in a profile which seems a living proof of Darwin, and yet to emphasize above all the predominant note in his character, his extreme and inexhaustible generosity … without ever forgetting, as a final detail, the increased reduction of the conch of his already microscopic ear.’ Of Gautier, he wondered, ‘how not to travesty that oriental beauty, that Olympian serenity’; and of Baudelaire, how one might trace the fantastic combination of ‘strangeness and perfect sincerity’ in that ‘native from the land of the Griffin and the Chimera’. Always it was this good-humoured, but relentless search for the ressemblance morale of his subject.

Nadar’s files in the atelier now contained over 800 studies, including even interview notes and daguerreotypes. From this massive repository of images, Nadar created – with Philipon’s aid and advice – his first distinctive masterpiece, in 1854. This was his celebrated ‘Pantheon Nadar’, a vast single-sheet lithograph cartoon, showing a spiral cortege of over 240 contemporary writers and journalists, each minutely transformed into a jostling gargoyle of the creative spirit. With a printing investment of 200,000 francs, Nadar sold out; the sensation of the season.

Nadar was now thirty-four. He bought a house at 113 rue Saint-Lazare, married, and gave dinner parties for his Bohemian friends, many like him now distinguished. Meanwhile the decisive discovery of his ideal medium occurred almost unnoticed. A painter friend left a second-hand photographic apparatus in the corner of the atelier. Mais, quand même … With predestined ease, Nadar learnt to prepare the wet-collodion glass plates; and his friends, long accustomed to his vagaries, learned to sit unselfconsciously under the hard, searching exposures – between 30 and 120 seconds – in blazing sunlight. From the garden he moved to the attic, which was soon fitted with glass tiles. Nadar’s strange combination of artistic and commercial gifts, and his flair for the new craft of publicity, found its instant culmination. At last the image could be trapped. In the spring of 1855, with the ‘Pantheon’ still fresh from the lithographic stone, Nadar set up as a photographer.

By 1856, with dazzling speed, he had temporarily transformed himself into ‘Nadar et Cie’ to capitalize the business, and he won the grande medaille d’or for photography at the Brussels Exhibition that summer. A legal battle with his younger brother, Adrien, finally won him, in 1857, exclusive right to the ‘marque de fabrication’ of Nadar. Significantly, it was the first time in France that an artistic pseudonym had been disputed as a commercial property. Felix Tournachon’s transformation was now complete: he was ‘Nadar Photographe’.

Within the next fifteen years, the atelier Nadar produced one of the greatest sets of contemporary portraits ever made. From 500,000 or so remaining glass and emulsion negatives, perhaps some 300 prints compose the chef d’oeuvre of the collection. For the most part these are of writers. They cover the whole panorama of mid-nineteenth-century French literature: Baudelaire, Gautier, Nerval, de Banville, Lamartine, Hugo, Dumas père et fils, George Sand, Du Camp, Daudet, Verne, Scribe, Murger, Champfleury, the freères Goncourt, Sainte-Beuve, Michelet, Charles Philipon and Emile de Girardin, and literally scores and scores of others. But there are many musicians as well – Berlioz, Rossini, Offenbach; and painters – Delacroix, Corbet, Corot, Monet. There is also a set of Sarah Bernhardt, and a charming nude study of Henri Murger’s mistress, the original Musette of the Bohemian stories. It is, in effect, a second ‘Pantheon Nadar’, except of infinitely greater human penetration. The best photographic portraits should be, wrote Nadar, ‘ample like a Van Dyck, and elaborate like a Holbein’.

Nadar’s portraits, in fact, owed much to painting, especially Ingres (who in turn used Nadar’s photographs for his own studio work). The monumental simplicity of their presentation, the subtle use of their advancing and retreating shadow, and the bold play with the texture of a jacket, blouse or cape, to offset the flesh of face or hands, all are constant marks of Nadar’s work. His best period, up to 1874, coincided with the use of the wet-plate collodion process: this rarely required poses of less than twenty seconds, and emphasized the sense of an intense, prolonged, revelatory gaze deep into the subject’s psyche. After 1872–73, gelatine emulsion brought exposure times down to less than a second, and the subject could be ‘snapped’ without his cooperative effort in the process of capturing and holding the fugitive image.

Nadar defended the autonomy of his art, with force and pride.

The theory of photography can be learnt in an hour, and the first practical steps in a day … But what can be learnt far less readily is the moral nature of your subject; it is the rapid reflex which puts you in touch with your model, makes you grasp and judge his habitual style and ideas, and allows you to produce – not some superficial or lucky shot, some indifferent and tasteful reproduction within the range of the meanest laboratory assistant – but the most familiar and the most favourable likeness: la resemblance intime.

It was an assertion that expressed the effort and experience behind an entire career.

In 1860 Nadar moved to the address which he consecrated for French photography, on the boulevard des Capucines. He charged 50 francs for a half-plate portrait, and joyfully spread the old ‘bull’s blood’ insignia across his whole decor, even down to the wrapping paper. He always continued to scorn Emperor and Court, leaving royal clientele to the Mediterranean beach-photographer Disderi, in the suitable vulgarity of the boulevard des Italiens. At the grand piano under the open studio windows, Jacques Offenbach was encouraged to play variations on the revolutionary Marseillaise, while the Imperial Guard – martial but tone-deaf–trotted in glittering ranks towards the Place de l’Opéra.

In 1862 Charles Philipon died, and thereafter Nadar’s energies were increasingly expended in madcap projects. He pioneered flash and aerial photography, and founded a Society for the Promulgation of Heavier Than Air Machines. It was now Daumier’s turn to caricature him, suspended in a balloon with his camera over the Arc de Triomphe, ‘at the height of his art’. He squandered his resources almost to bankruptcy in his own immense scarlet publicity balloon, Le Géant, which the Scientific American stonily reported as capable of carrying eighty persons, a printing press, beds and lavabos, and of course a photographic laboratory. But in a night crash-landing near Hanover, Le Géant nearly killed both him and his faithful, long-suffering wife, and Victor Hugo was moved to propose a relief fund. The Secretary of the Heavier Than Air Society, the young Jules Verne, canonized Nadar as the hero of De la Terre à la Lune – the astronaut Michel Ardan, a final anagrammatic transformation of the fiery nomenclature. ‘He was a dare-devil, a Phaeton driving the Sun’s chariot at break-neck speed, an Icarus with replaceable wings.’

To the end of his life, Nadar always remained fascinated by the rapport between writers and the photographic image. In calm old age, in 1900, he recalled how Balzac refused to be photographed because he held a Lucretian theory of spectres (like the Sioux Indians), believing that each exposure dissolved some vital layer of life through the malign alchemy of the Dark Room. Nerval and Gautier had proposed a more gothic hypothesis, that each photograph somehow released a fiendish doppelgänger, who might pursue them across the ether until death. Nerval in fact was only ever photographed once, by Nadar in January 1855; it was about a fortnight before the poet committed suicide in the rue de la Vieille-Lanterne.

But it was Baudelaire who had led the most sustained attack on early photography, in his scathing, salon review of 1859. Pressing home a diatribe against the vapid popular taste for ‘realism’ in art, he thundered prophetically: ‘A revengeful God has answered the supplications of the multitude. His Messiah was Monsieur Daguerre. And the multitude said: “… Art means Photography”. From this moment forth, our vile society, like some Narcissus, rushed to contemplate its own trivial image in the metal plate. A madness, an extraordinary zealotry seized these new worshippers of sunlight. And strange abominations were brought forth.’ It must have seemed ironic in retrospect. For Nadar’s photographic series of Baudelaire between 1854 and 1862 is one of the most expressive documents available about the self-destructive force of the poet’s own life. As it is also one of the triumphs of Nadar’s art.

Before he died, Baudelaire in turn enshrined Nadar, the photographic witness of the doomed Empire, in one of his own superb images from the late prose poems.

In a vast plain of glowing embers, he saw Nadar who was collecting salamanders.

Salamanders: those darting legendary ephemerae, who feed upon a flash of light, and flourish in the fiery heart of destruction.

GAUTIER IN LONDON

AS HE WALKED DOWN the Strand one surprisingly sunny morning in March, examining the patriotic engravings of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert smiling domestically from the royal tilbury, Théophile Gautier came upon a barrow boy selling waterproof mackintoshes. It was a matter of generally received knowledge that the imperméable, like those other viscous phenomena, the English glass of stout, the English fog, and the English phlegm, contained something of the philosophical essence of Britain. So Théophile Gautier, poet, litterateur, and – more practically – regular columnist for Paris’s leading daily newspaper La Presse, drew aside to observe.

It was March 1842. Gautier’s first and most brilliant ballet Giselle had just opened to packed houses in Her Majesty’s Theatre. The manager, Mr Benjamin Lumley, had remarked that the piece was ‘admitted to be vastly pretty’, a judgement which Gautier, who spoke little or no English, received as a generous compliment.

In the peculiar absence of rain, the barrow boy was obviously anxious to demonstrate that his mackintoshes were genuinely waterproof. To Gautier’s perplexity, he proceeded to nail the circumference of one of the sacred garments to a horizontal wooden frame, suspended alongside the stall. Into the shallow canvas depression thus formed, he emptied a large enamel jug of water. Into the water he tipped a bowl-full of engaging goldfish. He then produced a handful of small fishing lines and, flourishing them, inquired whether any of his customers would care to go fishing.

Gautier walked on towards Trafalgar Square, where Lord Nelson’s column was gradually arising from a primal chaos of scaffolding and publicity hoardings. He passed the Duke of Northumberland’s house, where a sculpted lion guarded the portal with its tail raised vertically in the air. ‘It is the lion of Percy’, Gautier noted with unaccountable irritation, ‘and never has heraldic lion so grossly abused its right to affect fabulous shapes and forms.’ The English were not only an unreliable and eccentric nation, they were positively bizarre.

It was Gautier’s first visit to London. He was thirty-one, the esteemed author of an erotic novel Mademoiselle de Maupin, and an arbiter of French literary fashion. In the next twenty years he was to make some five more trips to the British capital, reporting for his newspaper, or simply for his friends, on a variety of national peculiarities, including the Ascot Races, methods of surviving ‘incendiary’ turtle soup, the paintings of Hogarth, the depressions of Sunday afternoon, the camels of Regent’s Park Zoo, Covent Garden, and the Great Apotheosis at the Crystal Palace. Gautier came both as a private citizen of Paris, and as a public representative of civilization, roles that were not easily to be distinguished. Though he could not therefore, on principle, admire – he found himself by rapid turns amused, charmed, distressed, perplexed, outraged. But he never lost that original sense of strangeness, of the obstinate shadows clinging to that metropolis of the northern isles, like the ubiquitous soot which, he recorded with gallic frankness, made one blow black into one’s handkerchief.

It had struck him, in the larger perspective, even as his steamboat the Harlequin first swung west into the yellow waters of the Thames Estuary at sunset, and a forest of dark chimneys gathered along the low banks, sculpted like colossal towers and obelisks, ‘giving to the horizon an Egyptian air, a vague profile of Thebes or Babylon, of an antediluvian city, a capital of enormities and rebellious pride, something altogether extraordinary’. It was an impression that anticipated another European’s, Joseph Conrad’s in the opening pages of Heart of Darkness, by some fifty years.

Gautier saw the evidence of Empire in the jostling host of merchant craft, running between the lightships with their great lamps and scarlet paintwork: ships from India, reeking of oriental perfumes and with Lascar crews crowding the rigging, ships from the Baltic and the North Sea with crusts of ice still frozen to their bulwarks, ships from China and America freighted down with tea and sugar cane. But among all that vast fleet, ‘you always recognise the English ships: their sails are black like those of Theseus’s galleon departing for the Isle of Crete, a sombre livery of funeral mourning, rigged by the sad climate of London’. Gautier caught at the dominant motif, hanging there, mute, unexplained. ‘London! –’ he exclaimed almost with enthusiasm, ‘– la ville natale du spleen’.

Yet returning from that first brief encounter, he was nonchalant, even rather knowing. He recorded the following dialogue at a family dinner table in the rue la Boétie. ‘Did you see the Tunnel? – No, I didn’t see the Tunnel. – And Westminster? – No, indeed. – And St Paul’s? – Oh, no. – Then what on earth did you do in London? – I wandered about town observing Englishmen and, more particularly, observing English women. One cannot find their description in any guidebook, and they seemed to me quite as interesting as stones arranged one upon the other after a certain fashion.’ Gautier added with some pain: ‘since this occasion the good bourgeois have regarded me as somewhat mad, suspecting me vaguely of harbouring cannibalistic tendencies, and send their children up to bed when I come to call. I am seriously afraid that this will prejudice my marriage prospects.’

The Tunnel in question was Monsieur Brunel’s tiled passageway between Wapping and Rotherhithe, and could not strictly be classed as a British marvel. Gautier later reported in La Presse that a friend, presumably English, was working on plans for a Tunnel beneath the entire Manche, connecting Folkestone with Calais, and containing railway carriages fired along by compressed air. He remarked that he had, as a conscientious journalist, already reserved his seat for the first crossing, scheduled to take place four years hence, in 1847.

But Gautier was in no sense, as he frequently pretended, and as Henry James later brashly assumed (‘the broad-eyed gaze of a rustic at a fair’), an innocent abroad. As drama critic for La Presse, whose feuilletons ran on the front page beneath the political and business leaders of his exacting editor, the publishing magnate Émile de Girardin, he was normally tied to his regular evening descents upon the Paris boulevards. But in the formula of his lifelong friend and collaborator on La Presse, Gérard de Nerval, he was ‘a traveller by instinct, a critic by circumstance’.