Balzac and the Daguerreotype

When the word spread that two inventors had just succeeded 
in fixing every image presented in front of them onto silver plates, there was a universal stupefaction that we cannot imagine, so accustomed are we, after so many years now, to photography, and so inured to its popularization.¹

There were some who stubbornly refused to believe that it was possible. A usual phenomenon, since by nature we are hostile to everything that disconcerts our received ideas and disturbs our habits. Suspicion, hateful irony, the “eagerness to kill,” as our friend Sand used to say,² arise immediately. Wasn’t it just yesterday, the furious protest of that member of the Institute invited to the first demonstration of the phonograph? With what indignation did the distinguished “professor” refuse to waste one more second with this “ventriloquist hoax,” and what a scene he made as he stormed out, swearing that the impertinent charlatan would have to deal with him …

— “How!,” Gustave Doré—a clear and free mind if there ever was one!—asked me one day while in a bad mood, “How is it possible that you don’t understand the enjoyment one has in discovering the chink in the armor of a masterpiece?”

As the “Sublime always produces the effect of a riot,”³ so the unknown strikes us with vertigo, and shocks us like insolence.

The appearance of the Daguerreotype—which more legitimately should be called the Niépcetype⁴—therefore could not fail to provoke considerable emotion. Exploding unexpectedly, totally unexpectedly, surpassing all possible expectations, diverting everything that we thought we knew and even what could be hypothesized, the new discovery indeed appeared as, and still is, the most extraordinary in the constellation of inventions that already have made our still unfinished century
—in the absence of other virtues—the greatest of the scientific centuries.

Such is in fact the glorious haste of photography’s birth that the proliferation of germinating ideas seems to render incubation superfluous: the hypothesis comes out of the human brain in full armor, fully formed, and the first induction immediately becomes the finished work. The idea runs to the fact. Scarcely has steam reduced distance, when electricity abolishes it. While Bourseul⁵—a Frenchman, the first humble employee of the Post Office—points to the telephone and while the poet Charles Cros⁶ dreams of the phonograph, Lissajoux,⁷ with his sound waves, makes us see the sound that Ader transmits beyond our range, and that Edison recorded for us for all time; Pasteur, simply by examining more closely the helminths intuited by Raspail, imposes a new diagnostic that throws away our old codex; Charcot opens the mysterious door of the hyperphysical world, intuited by Mesmer, and all our secular ideas of criminality collapse; Marey, who had just stolen the secret of rational aeronautics held down by weights from birds, reveals to man in the immensities of the ether the new domain that will be his from tomorrow on—and, a simple fact of pure physiology, anesthesia elevates itself, with an almost divine aspiration, to the mercy that lifts physical pain, which is henceforth abolished from humanity … And it is this, indeed, all this, that the good Mr. Brunetière calls: “the failure of Science”⁸ …

Here we are well beyond the remarkable accomplishments of Fourcroy, at that supreme hour when the genius of a nation in danger would order discoveries, beyond even those of Laplace, Montgolfier, Lavoisier, Chappe, Conté, and of all the others, so well beyond that, in the face of this set of events, of almost simultaneous explosions of Science in our nineteenth century, its symbolism also must be transformed: “the Hercules of antiquity was a man with the full force of his age, with powerful and large muscles; the modern Hercules is a child leaning on a lever.”⁹

But all these new wonders, have they not been erased by the most astonishing and disturbing one of all: the one which finally seems to give man the power to create, he, too, in his turn, by materializing the impalpable specter that vanishes as soon as it is perceived, without leaving even a shadow on the crystal of the mirror, or a ripple in the water in a basin? Was it not possible for man to believe then that he actually was creating, since he seized, apprehended, fixed the intangible, preserving the fleeting vision, the flash, engraved by him today in the hardest bronze?

In short, Niépce and his fine accomplice were wise to have waited to be born. The Church always has shown itself to be more than cold toward innovators—when it was not too warm toward them—, and the discovery of 1842 seemed mostly suspect.¹⁰ This mystery smelled devilishly like a spell and reeked of heresy: the celestial rotisserie had been heated up for less.

Everything that unhinges the mind was gathered together
there: hydroscopy, bewitchment, conjuration, apparitions. Night, so dear to every thaumaturge, reigned supreme in the gloomy recesses of the darkroom, making it the ideal home for the Prince of Darkness. It would not have taken much to transform our filters into philters.

It is not surprising, then, if, at first, even admiration seemed uncertain; it remained unsettled, as if bewildered. Time was needed for the Universal Animal to make up his mind and approach the Monster.

In front of the Daguerreotype, things went “from the lowest to the highest,” as the popular saying goes, and the ignorant and the illiterate were not the only ones to have this defiant, almost superstitious, hesitation. More than one of the most beautiful minds suffered the contagion of this first recoil.¹¹

To mention only one from among the very highest, Balzac felt uneasy before the new marvel: he could not defend himself against a vague apprehension about the Daguerreian operation.

He had found his own explanation, for whatever it was worth at the moment, returning somewhat to fantastic hypotheses à la Cardan.¹² I think I remember well having seen his particular theory explained by him in detail in a corner somewhere in the immensity of his work. I do not have the time to research it, but my recollection is very clear and precise because of the prolix account that he gave me in one of our meetings and which he repeated to me another time, since he seemed to be obsessed with the idea, in the little violet apartment that he occupied at the corner of rue Richelieu and boulevard Richelieu: this building, famous as a gambling house during the Restoration, still was called at that time the Hotel Frascati.

Therefore, according to Balzac, each body in nature is composed of a series of specters, in infinitely superimposed layers, foliated into infinitesimal pellicules, in all directions in which the optic perceives this body.

Since man is unable to create—that is, to constitute from an apparition, from the impalpable, a solid thing, or to make a thing out of nothing—, every Daguerreian operation would catch, detach, and retain, by fixing onto itself, one of the layers of the photographed body.

It follows that for that body, and with every repeated operation, there was an evident loss of one of its specters, which is to say, of a part of its constitutive essence.

Was there an absolute, definitive loss, or would this partial loss repair itself consecutively in the mystery of a more or less instantaneous rebirth of the spectral material? I suppose that Balzac, once he began, was not the kind of man to stop along the way, and that he would walk until the end of his hypothesis. But this second point was never brought up between us.

Balzac’s terror before the Daguerreotype, was it sincere or simulated? If it was sincere, Balzac had only to gain from his loss, since his abdominal abundances, and others, permitted him to squander his “specters” without counting. In any case, it did not prevent him from posing at least once for that unique Daguerreotype that I owned after Gavarni and Silvy, and is now in the possession of Mr. Spoelberg de Lovenjoul.¹³

To claim that it was simulated would be rather tricky, without forgetting, however, that the desire to shock had been for a long time the most fashionable sin of our elite minds. These originals, so real, of such genuine frankness, seem to enjoy so thoroughly the pleasure of presenting themselves paradoxically in front of us that we had to invent a name for this disease of the brain, “the pose,” the pose that, with their moribund look, the hunched, consumptive Romantics have transmitted perfectly in the same way, first under the naïve and brutal allure of the naturalist realists, then up to the present rigidity, the fixed and thrice-locked posture of our current idiographic and self-centered decadents—the punctilious themselves more annoying than all the others together, eternal token of the imperishability of Cathos and Madelon.¹⁴

Be that as it may, Balzac did not have to go far to find two disciples for his new parish. Among his closest friends, Gozlan, in his prudence, immediately got out of the way;¹⁵ but good old Gautier and the no less excellent Gérard de Nerval immediately followed suit to the “Specters.” Any thesis beyond verisimilitude could only agree with the “impeccable” Theo,¹⁶ the precious and charming poet, floating in the vagueness of his oriental somnolence: the image of man is prohibited, after all, in the countries of the rising sun. As for the sweet Gérard, forever mounted on the Chimera, he was already predisposed: for the initiate of Isis, an intimate friend of the Queen of Sheba and of the Duchesse de Longueville, every dream would arrive in the form of a friend … —but talking of specters, both the one and the other, and without any qualms, were among the very first to pass before our lens.

I could not say for how long this cabalist trio resisted the entirely scientific explanation of the Daguerreian mystery, which soon passed to the domain of the banal.

It can be assumed that our Sanhedrin had the same end as everything else and that, after a first very lively agitation, we very quickly finished up not speaking about it. As they had come, so the “Specters” had to leave.

Never again did they come up in any other meeting or visit of the two friends to my studio.