Notes
Introduction: Nadar’s Photographopolis
1. Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. and ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 59.
2. Walter Benjamin, “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History,’” trans. Edmund Jephcott and Howard Eiland, in Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 405. For the original German, see Gesammelte Schriften, 7 vols., ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972), I, 1238. The internal quotes within Benjamin’s passage are from André Monglond’s 1930 Le Préromantisme français (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 2000), xii; and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Der Tor und der Tod (1894), in Gesammelte Werke, ed. Herbert Steiner (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1952), III, 220.
3. David Ferris, “The Shortness of History, or Photography in Nuce: Benjamin’s Attenuation of the Negative,” in Walter Benjamin and History, ed. Andrew Benjamin (New York: Continuum, 2006), 20.
4. Walter Benjamin, “Convolute N,” in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 456. Further references to this text will be indicated parenthetically by AP, and page number.
5. Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, trans. Howard Eiland et al., ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 27. Further references to this text will be indicated parenthetically by ML, and page number.
6. Rosalind Krauss, “Tracing Nadar,” October 5 (Summer 1978), 29.
7. The one exception is Jérôme Thélot who, in the third chapter of his book Les inventions littéraires de la photographie, argues for the theoretical and performative character of Nadar’s writings. See “Photographie homicide, par Nadar,” in Les inventions littéraires de la photographie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2003), 53–69.
8. See “La première épreuve de photographie aérostatique,” in Quand j’étais photographe (Paris: Seuil, 1994), 104.
9. See Benjamin, “Excavation and Memory,” trans. Rodney Living-stone, and Berlin Chronicle, trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 576 and 611.
10. Cited in Stephen Bann, “‘When I Was a Photographer’: Nadar and History,” History and Theory, Theme Issue 48 (December 2009), 97.
11. Ibid.
12. See Nadar, Quand j’étais étudiant (Paris: E. Dentu, 1881), 303.
13. Marcel Proust later expands this suggestion by claiming in Time Regained that: “A book is a huge cemetery in which on the majority of the tombs the names are effaced and can no longer be read.” See Proust, Time Regained, vol. VI of In Search of Lost Time, trans. Andreas Mayor and Terence Kilmartin (New York: Random House, 1993), 310.
14. The two citations here from “1830 and Thereabouts” can be found on pp. 204 and 224 of the present translation. Further references to this translation will be indicated parenthetically by W, and page number. These two citations can be found in Nadar’s original French in his Quand j’étais photographe (Paris: L’école des lettres, Seuil, 1994), 331 and 367. All subsequent references to this complete French edition of the memoirs will be registered parenthetically by Q, and page number, and will follow the English reference.
15. The French original reads: “Quand le bruit se répandit que deux inventeurs venaient de réussir à fixer sur des plaques argentées toute image présentée devant elles, ce fut une universelle stupé- faction dont nous ne saurions nous faire aujourd’hui l’idée, accoutumés que nous sommes depuis nombre d’années à la photographie et blasés par sa vulgarisation” (Q, 9).
16. See Berlin Chronicle, in Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2, 613. There, Benjamin writes “of images that, according to the teachings of Epicurus, constantly detach themselves from things and determine our perception of them.”
17. See Lucretius, De rerum natura: A Poetic Translation, trans. David R. Slavitt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 140–141.
18. I am indebted here to Eric Downing’s excellent reading of the role and place of Lucretius’ discussion of images within Benjamin’s photographic reflections. See Downing, “Lucretius at the Camera: Ancient Atomism and Early Photographic Theory in Walter Benjamin’s Berliner Chronik,” Germanic Review 81.1 (Winter 2006), 21–36. On the relation between Democritus’ theory of the eidola and photography, see Branka Arsic’s essay, “The Home of Shame,” in Cities without Citizens, ed. Eduardo Cadava and Aaron Levy (Philadelphia: Slought Books and Rosenbach Museum & Library, 2003), 36.
19. See Nadar, Exposé de motifs pour la revendication de la propriété exclusive du pseudonyme Nadar, et Supplément au mémoire (Paris: Dondey-Dupré, 1857), 14–16. On the centrality of the portrait in general for Nadar, see “À la recherche de la ‘ressemblance intime,’” in Stéphanie de Saint Marc’s recent biography, Nadar (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2010), 140–166.
20. On the citational character of photography, see my Words of Light (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), xvii.
21. While I wish to take advantage of the allegorical resonance of Hérald de Pages’ name, Pages (1815– ?) was indeed a journalist and poet, and one of the founders of Le Petit Journal. There is a photograph of him taken by Nadar in the photography collection of the Bibliothèque national de France. See: <http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b530506520>.
22. See Thélot, Les inventions littéraires de la photographie, 54. I am indebted to Thélot’s summary and analysis of this episode in much of what follows. What interests me most, however, is what the story tells us about the itinerancy of the image in general.
23. Nadar incorporates this earlier version into his memoirs, which itself confirms his sense that the story is linked to the moment “when he was a photographer.” In other words, what happens in the story tells us what is true of photography in general.
24. The text even seeks to account for the pharmacist’s murderous intentions by recalling that the “avenging trio” comes from a “sinister zone” where violence is the order of the day, and is even inscribed within the very landscape and fauna surrounding them there:
Let us not forget, in order to understand well and to understand everything, that this avenging trio, from a reality more dramatic in its perfect agreement than that of Don Juan, comes directly from the sinister zone whose provinces are tinted totally black on the criminalist maps and on those of public instruction. It is the country where people kill the little old man by dragging him under the nasal sound of the organ, the land of the widow Bancal and of Bastide-le-Gigantesque, where the rocks endlessly return the echo of “the lament of “Fualdès.” In this region inherently, naïvely scelerate, the sun, which intoxicates like a strong wine, releases vapors that smell of blood. The viper’s bite is more deadly there; the plants with exasperated colors, wolfsbanes or foxgloves, exude more acrid, more subtle poisons. The rattle of the cicada becomes obstinate in order to cover the step of the murderer, and, from the Pyrenees to the Abruzzi, the knife naturally seems to push the fingers, as if to extend and perfect the hand that kills. …
In a good judicial system, where everything counts, this in its turn will not be forgotten. (W, 47; Q, 80–81)
25. In a self-portrait that he famously took in the Paris Catacombs, sometime between 1861 and 1862, Nadar appears seated against a wall of bones and surrounded by bottles of photographic chemicals. He has his arms crossed and, next to his head, and parallel with it, is a skull and bones, with its two bones crossed in a kind of visual echo of Nadar’s pose. This identification between the photographer, his chemical laboratory, and death also registers the photograph’s relation to survival, since the photograph—taken at a particular moment, even if we account for the long exposure time necessary to produce it—continues to circulate. This is why every photograph is always about both destruction and survival.
26. On this point, see Thélot, Les inventions littéraires de la photo- graphie, 59.
27. Ibid., 61.
28. Ibid.
29. See Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1981), 92.
30. Thélot, Les inventions littéraires de la photographie, 65.
31. See Gabriel Tarde, “Preface to the Second Edition,” trans. Elsie Clews Parsons (New York: Henry Holt, 1903), xiii–xiv. Tarde’s Lois de l’imitation was first published in 1890 by the Félix Alcan editorial house in Paris, and reprinted with a new preface in 1895.
32. We could even say that, in a certain way, Nadar is simply following out the consequences of “Gazebon Avenged,” which is a story that, among many other things, suggests that we always live “within quotation marks.”
33. See Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal, trans. Richard Howard (Boston: David R. Godine, 1985), 78 (English), 252 (French).
34. I am indebted in this discussion of Paris’s catacombs to Christopher Prendergast’s Paris and the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1995), especially pp. 74–101; David L. Pike’s Subterranean Cities: The World Beneath Paris and London, 1800–1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), especially pp. 101–128; Shelley Rice’s Parisian Views (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), especially chapter 5; and Caroline Archer’s Paris Underground (New York: Mark Batty Publisher, 2005).
35. See Prendergast, Paris and the Nineteenth Century, 80–81.
36. On this point, see ibid., 81.
37. For the original French, see Quand j’étais photographe, 155–156.
38. Cited in Shelley Rice’s Parisian Views, 173.
39. Ibid., 177.
40. Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal, 90–91 and 268–269.
41. See Eric Fournier, Paris en ruines: Du Paris haussmannien au Paris communard (Paris: Éditions Imago, 2008), 18.
42. For an excellent and early account of the use of microscopic photography during the siege, see Galton Tissandier’s A History and Handbook of Photography, ed. J. Thomson, F. R. G. S. (London: Sampson, Low, Marston, Low, & Searle, 1876), 235–248. There, he writes: “During the war of 1870–71, when Paris was invested by the enemy, photography succeeded in reducing the size of the messages sent by carrier-pigeons, so as to render them almost invisible to the naked eye. No philosopher could have imagined this use of photography, called forth by the dire necessities of war” (235).
43. See Nadar, Sous l’incendie (Paris: G. Charpentier, Éditeur, 1882), 11. All further references to the dialogue will be inserted parenthetically in the text by SI and page number.
Translators’ Note
1. Stephen Bann, for example, in his essay “‘When I Was a Photog- rapher’: Nadar and History” [in History and Theory, Theme Issue 48 (December 2009), 101], asserts that the memoirs were published in 1899, as does Mia Fineman in her wonderful catalog Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012), 260.
2. See Maria Morris Hambourg, “A Portrait of Nadar,” in Nadar (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1995), 10.
3. See Charles Bataille, “Nadar,” Diogène, no. 17 (November 30, 1856), 4.
4. See Kiki Dimoula, “Thoughts of an Awkward Immigrant to a Foreign Language,” in The Brazen Plagiarist: Selected Poems, trans. Cecile Inglessis Margellos and Rika Lesser (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), xi.
5. See Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux parisiens,” trans. Harry Zohn, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), 260. Further references to this essay will be referenced parenthetically by TT, and page number.
6. Dimoula, The Brazen Plagiarist, xii.
Balzac and the Daguerreotype
1. [The two inventors to whom Nadar refers here are Nicéphore Niépce (1765–1833), who discovered photography in 1822, and Louis- Jacques Daguerre (1787–1851); but the invention was not made public until 1839, after its acquisition by the French state.]
2. [George Sand, born Amantine-Lucille-Aurore Dupin (1804–1876), was a French novelist and memoirist and a close friend of Nadar’s. He photographed her often during the 1860s.]
3. Charles Baudelaire, Aesthetic Curiosities [“The Salon of 1846,” in Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists, trans. P. E. Charvet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 87; any notes, or even parts of notes, that are not enclosed within brackets are by Nadar].
4. [Nicéphore Niépce is recognized as one of the earliest practitioners of photography. He captured “negatives” using a camera obscura and paper sheets coated with silver chloride. In 1829 he associated himself with Louis-Jacques Daguerre, who discovered the process for developing and fixing images in the 1830s, and after whom the first photographic reproductions were named. They were then called “daguerreotypes” despite the fact that—Nadar argues—the very first photographic experiments belonged to Niépce. Nadar here evokes the debate about photography’s origins, a debate that remains very much alive today.]
5. [Charles Bourseul (1829–1912) was one of the first experimenters with the telephone. Although no prototype was built then, he had already described the transmission of the human voice by electrical currents in 1854.]
6. [Charles Cros (1842–1888), French poet, inventor of the phonograph, as Nadar notes here, but also the inventor of color photography.]
7. [Jules Antoine Lissajoux (1822–1880), professor of mathematics, was interested in sound waves and developed an optical method for studying vibrations. His experiments were exhibited at the Paris Universal Exhibition in 1867.]
8. [Ferdinand Brunetière (1849–1906), French writer and critic, was known as a rationalist, free-thinking scholar until, in 1895, he published an article entitled “Après une visite au Vatican,” in which he writes of the failure of science to provide a basis for social morals, and declares his return to Catholicism. See Revue des Deux Mondes, 4e période, tome 127 (1895), 97–118.]
9. Louis de Lucy [“Le Problème de l’Aéromotion” (L’Aéronaute, no. 4), cited in Nadar’s The Right to Fly, trans. James Spence Harry (London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, 1866), 40].
10. [Nadar most likely means to refer to 1822, not to 1842. This could be a typographical mistake; we cannot be certain, however, since he sometimes has a rather playful and even whimsical vision of the history of photography.]
11. [The word “recul” here also can refer to the distance necessary to take a photograph.]
12. [Nadar here refers to Gerolamo Cardano (1501–1576), a physician, mathematician, astrologer, and philosopher who published the solutions of the quartic and cubic equations. He was also an accomplished gambler, and his book on games of chance, Liber de ludo aleae (Book on Games of Chance), contains the first systematic treatment of probability.]
13. [Paul Gavarni, pseudonym of Hippolyte-Guillaume-Sulpice Chevalier (1804–1866), French lithographer, painter, and illustrator, whose work often appeared in Le Charivari. He illustrated, among others, novels by Balzac and Eugène Sue; Camille-Léon-Louis Silvy (1834–1910) was a French photographer who lived in London and photographed many members of the British royal family. According to Nadar, he was one of the “Primitives of Photography”; Charles de Spoelberg de Lovenjoul (1836–1907), great Belgian collector and writer. Heir of an old aristocratic Belgian family, he put together an impressive library of nineteenth-century French writers.]
14. [The two protagonists of Molière’s 1659 play Les Précieuses ridicules. Having come to Paris in search of love, the two women scorn their first two suitors and then suffer the suitors’ revenge. The two characters in this play of hidden identities and mocked pretensions are here evoked by Nadar to impugn the poses taken by Paris’s “elite minds.”]
15. [Léon Gozlan (1803–1866), French novelist, secretary of Balzac, wrote a biographical essay on him, Balzac en pantoufles, 2nd ed. (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1856).]
16. [Théo, abbreviation for Théophile Gautier.]
Gazebon Avenged
1. [Sophie Risteau, Mme Cottin (1773–1807), French writer; wrote sentimental romances, one in particular, Mathilde (1805), set in the historical period of the Crusades.]
2. [Indented and presented as a citation, Nadar’s line here could be referencing any number of biblical passages in which oxen are slaughtered, sacrificially or otherwise, but he is perhaps more directly evoking Jeremiah 11:19: “But I was like a lamb or an ox that is brought to the slaughter.” What is interesting here and elsewhere in this vignette is the section’s rampant citationality, something that helps Nadar suggest that we never truly speak in our voice and we are, in this way, always divided from ourselves: motifs that are staged throughout this section, as characters continually become someone else.]
3. [Gustave Trouvé (1839–1902), French engineer and inventor, researched various modes of communication, including telegraphy and microphones, and developed different means of transportation, including outboard motorboats and electric cars; Paul-Gustave Froment (1815–1864), inventor and instrument maker; in 1851, he built the pendulum arrangement for Léon Foucault’s famous experiment, and was known for developing motors that could wind clocks; Marcel Deprez (1843–1918); French electrical engineer, known for his experiments devoted to the transmission of electrical power across long distances; and Clément Ader (1841–1925), French inventor and engineer; effectively realized the first flying machine thirteen years before the Wright brothers. He also established the first telephone network in Paris in 1880.]
4. [Giovanni Caselli (1815–1891), Italian physicist; the first scientist to solve the problem of autographic telegraphy, which permitted an exact facsimile of a message, drawing, or signature to be reproduced across a distance. An early version of a fax machine, the apparatus is pertinent to the young man’s claim of taking photographs of subjects beyond his field of vision.]
5. [François Arago (1786–1853), French mathematician and astronomer; he experimented with the velocity of sound, magnetism, and theories of light. A member of the French legislature, he was among photography’s most enthusiastic admirers. He championed Daguerre in the Académie des Sciences and the Chambre des Députés, securing the inventor a lifetime pension in exchange for the rights to his process. On August 19, 1839, he famously introduced the photographic process, step by step, before a joint session of the Académie des Sciences and the Académie des Beaux-Arts.]
6. [William Woodnut Griscom (1851–1897), American inventor, responsible for introducing electric motors into marine propulsion. He invented a motor that, named after him, brought all in one circuit the motor’s armature, electro-magnets, and battery.]
7. [Isidore Latour de Saint-Ybars (1810–1891), poet, historian, and dramatic author. Best known for his tragedies, Virginie (1845) and Rosemonde (1855).]
8. [Carl August von Steinheil (1801–1870), German physicist, engineer, and inventor. Producer of the first daguerreotype in Germany, he famously experimented with ground electricity; M. Bourbouze, French electrician; during the Siege of 1870–1871, he tried to establish telegraphic communication between Paris and the provinces by using the Seine as a conductor and receiving whatever current could be picked up by a metal plate sunk into the river through a galvanometer.]
9. [Nadar here refers to three members of the Royal Society of London who, in July 1747, tried to use the river Thames as a conductor: William Watson (1715–1787), Lord Charles Cavendish (1704–1783), and the then President of the Royal Society, Martin Folkes (1690–1754).]
10. [Jöns Jacob Berzelius (1779–1848), Swedish chemist, one of the founders of modern chemistry; he discovered and isolated several new elements, and helped develop notation for chemical formulas.]
11. [Adolphe-Philippe d’Ennery (1811–1899), French dramatist, a very prolific and popular author. He became famous for, among other works, Les Deux Orphelines (co-written with Cormon). François Coppée (1842–1908), French poet, whose works in both verse and prose provoked Rimbaud’s irony, due to their intense pathetic tone.]
12. [Jacques Babinet (1794–1872), French physicist and astronomer, well known for his contributions to optics and for his promotion of aerial navigation; Jean-Baptiste Biot (1774–1862), French physicist, astronomer, and mathematician, established the existence of meteorites. Known for his investigations into polarized light and optical rotation, he ascended in the first hot-air balloon ride with Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac in 1804 in order to study the magnetic, electrical, and chemical condition of the atmosphere at various elevations. For a brief discussion of the debate between Babinet and Biot, in which Babinet accuses Biot of superstition, see Abel Hureau de Villeneuve, “Babinet,” in L’Aéronaute, Bulletin mensuel international de la navigation aérienne, no. 11 (November 1872), 182–183.]
The Blind Princess
1. It is truly impossible not to ask a question here: How many years have passed since the day when the balloon of the School of Meudon unexpectedly went, one nice morning, to neighboring Chaville, I think, and returned immediately, profiting in all haste from a brief spell of good weather, that is, gaining the victory over the absent enemy?
It was then that, for the confusion of our country and of human intellect, a Minister of Public Instruction, or rather of Public Igno-rance, dared to declare at the very heart of the Institute (Babinet being dead, Barral set aside, and Marey not yet there), these words that remain, scandalous, in the peroration of his report:
“Glory to the French Army, which has JUST DISCOVERED how to steer balloons! …”
Assuredly—and who would contradict this?—assuredly on this most extraordinary discovery, the richest of human findings, never did the predestined, the admirable inventor tire of affirming and reaffirming again the glory of his conquest, of reducing to nothing all incredulity, all doubt, by a continuous succession of aerial voyages, accomplished daily, with days, hours, and itineraries of round trips announced, proclaimed in advance.
Or how many times, after the so solemn affirmation of Minister H. M., has the School of Meudon only repeated its short hop to Chaville and back?
And how much after so many successive years did the unproductive student of these “flying fish”—that do not fly and would never be able to fly—cost, how much does he still add every year to our already heavy costs?
2. [Nadar refers here to the eighteenth-century French poet and romance writer Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian (1755–1794), who was best known for his fables, published posthumously in 1802, of which “The Monkey Showing the Magic Lantern” is among the best. In the fable, the monkey, Jacques, convinces himself that, while his master is away, he can demonstrate the workings of the magic lantern, something he has seen his master do innumerable times. Forgetting to light the lantern, however, he is unable to offer a successful performance for his audience. The fable suggests the folly of pretending to be what one is not, of believing that a copy could be as convincing as the original, and, because he convinces himself that he can imitate his master, the folly of believing rhetoric when common sense suggests something else. A story of the failure of imitation that begins in a story about visual presentation, it would offer rich resources for thinking about photography’s own capacity for reproduction. See Fables de Florian (Paris: Librairie de l’Enfance et de la Jeunesse, 1845), 52–54.]
3. These expenses, like all the others, including the one of the special train provided for us without our asking for it, were paid by us up to the last Silbergroschen—something that the King certainly did not know. We similarly also paid for medical services, except for those provided by the excellent Dr. Muller, who declined all payment and received some days later, from our government at the time, the ribbon of the Legion of Honor.
I have saved all my receipts, adding up to some six thousand francs (I say: six thousand francs) for our weeklong stay … transport, indemnities for damages, etc.
This in order to respond on this occasion to the Prussian newspapers, which—spiteful because of my balloon mail services during the siege, and of an article of mine where I displayed no tenderness for Germany—did not hesitate then for a whole week, and in one voice, to accuse me of ingratitude—for me, the most odious of human perversions.
Homicidal Photography
1. [Nadar suggests that the architect in question is a pseudo-architect with a nice, sonorous play between “architecte” and “architoc.”]
2. [The French here is “La ‘spécialité’ est née trop maligne pour, s’étant laisseé faire, se laisser refaire.”]
3. [The French here is “l’orbite embitumé.” This identification between the woman and bitumen works to suggest a link between persons and the photographic process—something that will occur often in this section of the memoirs—since Niépce famously used a thin coating of the tarlike material on a pewter plate onto which he secured the first camera photograph.]
4. [Nadar here refers to the 1878 “Lebiez-Barré” case, in which two penniless young men, Paul Lebiez and Aimé Barré, murdered an old woman in Paris and, in order to eliminate the evidence of the crime, Lebiez scientifically cut up the body. Soon afterward, Lebiez, one of the most distinguished students of the medical school of Paris, gave a lecture on Darwinism; at his trial, he was also accused of demonstrating the consequences of a theory according to which the strongest always hold sway over the weakest.]
5. The right to use and abuse.
6. All the votes! [The Latin here means: “On every point,” but Nadar translates it as “Tout les suffrages!”]
7. [Nemrod or Nimrod, Noah’s grandson: the Bible says of him: “He was a mighty hunter in the face of the Lord” (Genesis 10:9).]
8. [Antoine Fualdès, French judge who in 1827 was murdered at Rodez in the Aveyron department by the stockbroker Jausion and the latter’s brother-in-law Bastide. His body was discovered floating in the Aveyron river. The trial of the murderers resonated nationwide, and the accident inspired a popular lullaby of grief.]
9. [Here Nadar exploits the various connotations of arrêt in French, which not only include a judicial “judgment” or “sentence” but also “arrest” in a policial sense, and “arrest” as what a photograph does when it captures or freezes its subject.]
10. [This is the first explicit reference in this section to the “Fenayrou Affair,” which serves as the basis for Nadar’s story here, and is referenced again in his postscript to the section. For a presentation of the details of the case, see Henry Brodribb Irving, “The Fenayrou Case,” in A Book of Remarkable Criminals (New York: George H. Doran, 1918), 268–285; and Mary S. Hartman, Victorian Murderesses: A True History of Thirteen Respectable French and English Women Accused of Unspeakable Crimes (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, reprint edition, 2014), 205–214. Nadar’s “ex-mactotum,” of course, brings together “factotum,” which recalls the now ex-pharmacist assistant, who filled many roles in the pharmacy, including the role of the wife’s lover, and “deux ex-machina,” which perfectly evokes the young pharmacist’s entrance into the plot of the story as an unexpected, intervening force that moves the story forward and, like God, is “the initial author of so many ills.”]
11. [Nadar here references a renowned murderer, Louis Menesclou, who was tried in Paris in 1880 for the rape, murder, and dismemberment of a four-year-old girl.]
12. [Hippolyte Bernheim (1840–1919), French physician and neurologist, widely known for his use of hypnotism in the medical treatment of “organic” diseases of the nervous system, and, according to Freud, one of his strongest early influences; Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909), Italian criminologist and physician who sought to establish the hereditary nature of deviance and to identify such “born criminals” through physical features. In his 1889 Man of Genius, he claimed a close link between genius and insanity.]
The First Attempt at Aerostatic Photography
1. [Jacques-Alexandre Charles (1746–1823), French physicist, first used hydrogen to fill aerostats, following the invention by the Montgolfier brothers who, in their experiments, had used hot-air balloons. With the Robert brothers, Anne-Jean and Nicolas-Louis, he launched the first hydrogen-filled balloon in 1783. In regard to the title of this section, “The First Attempt at Aerostatic Photography,” the French word “épreuve,” which we are translating here as “attempt,” also means “test,” “trial,” and, in a photographic context, “proof” or “print.”]
2. The first hemistich of a line of Cicero: Cedant arma togae: que les armes le cèdent à la toge; which means that the military government yields to the civil government.
3. [Jacques Cassini (1677–1756), French astronomer of Italian origins, focused his research mostly on the description of the shape of Earth. He became a member of the French Academy at the age of seventeen and was elected to the Royal Society of London in 1696.]
4. [Reference to the family members of Eugène Godard (1827–1890), French aeronaut, who joined Nadar in numerous adventures, such as, among other things, the ascent on the Géant. This event is here recollected in the chapter on “The Blind Princess.” During the Paris siege (1870–1871) Godard became one of the most prominent organizers of the first “air mail” service. He carried out more than 2500 balloon flights in France and abroad.]
5. [The Pereire brothers were among the most prominent nineteenth- century financiers in Paris, and were rivals of the Rothschilds. They were of Portuguese origin.]
6. An honorable scientific journal—Les Inventions nouvelles—was taken by surprise by one of its editors, who affirms flatly that the first aerostatic negative was obtained in 1881—by Mr. Paul Desmarets.
The incontestable notoriety of our experiment, which had figured in several exhibitions much before 1881, and the date of our patents responded in advance to this unexpected assertion, without any need to refer to the year of Charivari where everyone can find Daumier’s lithograph reproduced on the cover of this book.
7. [The Tissandier brothers, Albert (1839–1906) and Gaston (1843–1899), flew the first aerostat with an electric engine in 1883. During the siege of Paris, Albert piloted one of the first mail balloons outside the city, carrying over 1000 lbs. of mail and dispatches from over 100 families. Gaston published the first book on aerial photography, La photographie en ballon, in Paris in 1886, with a frontispiece consisting of an original photographic print by Jacques Ducom. Gaston had flown over Paris with Ducom in 1885, and over Auteuil with Paul Nadar in 1886.]
Subterranean Paris
1. [François-Constantin de Chassebœuf, Count of Volney (1757–1820), philosopher, joined the group of the “ideologues,” and authored, among other things, the work here cited by Nadar: The Ruins, or Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires (1791); Edward Young (1683–1765), English poet, became widely known all over Europe for the poem hereby cited, Night Thoughts (1742).]
2. [Charles Pierre Chapsal (1787–1858) was a French grammarian who, with François-Joseph-Michel Noël (1756–1841), wrote the Nouvelle grammaire française, which was first published in 1823; Jacques Delille, the ironical transcription of the last name of abbot Delille (1738–1813), was a fair, but quite impersonal and scholastic versifier.]
3. [The Latin phrases here translate as “In memory of the ancestors” and “Beyond these borders, they rest in the expectation of the hoped-for happiness,” respectively.]
4. [Nadar refers here to Jacques-Antoine Dulaure (1755–1835), French archaeologist and historian who wrote extensively on the history of Paris, France, and the French Revolution. The most important of his works is his ten-volume Histoire physique, civile et morale de Paris depuis 1821 jusqu’à nos jours (1825); and to Paul Fassy (1833– ?), who published his Les Catacombes: étude historique in 1861.]
5. [Luke 1:52: “He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and he hath raised the lowly ones.”]
6. [“Our days passed like water.”]
7. [Louis Bourdaloue (1632–1704), French Jesuit and court preacher. Well-trained in rhetoric, philosophy, and moral theology, he was known as the “king of preachers and the preacher of kings”; Joseph Prudhomme was a character created by Nadar’s friend, the lithographer, caricaturist, actor, and writer Henri Monnier (1799–1877). Prudhomme was the personification of the nineteenth-century Parisian bourgeoisie who, in turn, was modeled in part on Monnier himself. Prudhomme was adopted by Honoré Daumier, who included him in more than sixty caricatures.]
8. 1867. [Although the church opposed the public display of “sacred” human bones, public demand moved the French government to open the Catacombs to the general public in 1867. 1867 was of course also the year of the Universal Exhibition, in which several archaeological displays presented skeletal remains.]
9. [Charles-Julien Lioult de Chênedollé (1769–1833), French poet who published his Le génie de l’homme in 1807 and his Études poétiques in 1820. He was particularly interested in the relations between man, nature, society, and the world of astronomy.]
10. [Lucien Gaulard (1850–1888), inventor of instruments for the transmission of alternating current electricity. Best known for his development of a power transformer.]
11. [Jean-Jacques Pradier (1792–1852), Swiss-born French sculptor who worked in the neoclassical style and contributed to the Fontaine Molière in Paris. He was friends with several writers, including Victor Hugo, Théophile Gautier, and Gustave Flaubert; Antoine-Augustin Préault (1809–1879), French Romantic sculptor who first exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1833 and whose most famous surviving work is his 1876 relief sculpture of Ophelia, now in the Musée d’Orsay.]
12. Letter from N … (Paris), to Louis Blanc (Versailles), … May 1871.
13. [Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778), Italian artist, designer, architect, and theorist; he moved to Rome at the age of twenty and studied the city’s ancient monuments. He began etching inventive views of ancient ruins, and later created a series of etchings of fantastic prison interiors. His highly original designs and drawings influenced many artists and literary figures, during his lifetime as well as afterwards.]
14. [The barathrum is the pit in Athens into which criminals were thrown. It also can refer, figuratively, to the pit or chasm of hell.]
15. [Jean-Baptiste Boussingault (1802–1887), French chemist, discovered that nitrogen is essential to plants and animals and conducted several studies of the action and value of manures; Justus von Liebig (1803–1873), German chemist, considered the founder of organic chemistry and the “father of the fertilizer industry” for his discovery of the importance of nitrogen to plants; Louis Grandeau (1834–1911), professor of agriculture, known as the “grand old man of agricultural science in France,” studied the nutrition of plants and animals and also the use of fertilizers and manures.]
16. [“Under Jupiter, under the sun”; that is: in the open air, under the sun.]
Female and Male Clients
1. [Biblical character. Princess of Phoenician origins, wife of Arbat, king of Israel. Prophet Elijah accused her of despotism, idolatry, and love of luxury, and she became associated with false prophets and, later, with fallen or abandoned women.]
2. [“Petit Bob” is a kind of sunhat.]
Doctor Van Monckhoven
1. [Claude Louis Berthollet (1748–1822), Savoyard-French chemist, who first demonstrated the bleaching action of chlorine gas and soon after revolutionized the bleaching industry. His career was enriched during the Napoleonic era. Napoleon chose Berthollet to accompany him to Egypt as his scientific adviser. Berthollet became an important member of the scientific and archaeological institute that Napoleon established in Cairo, and he became vice president of the French Senate in 1804; Armand Séguin (1767–1835), French chemist who discovered a faster and more inexpensive process for tanning leather.]
2. This observatory, bought by the Belgian government after Monckhoven’s death, is today national property.
3. [Félicien Rops (1833–1898), Belgian artist, printmaker, and caricaturist, closely linked with nineteenth-century Symbolism and Decadence, and a friend of Charles Baudelaire.]
4. [Nadar here refers to the protagonist of Walter Scott’s 1819 novel The Bride of Lammermoor, Edgar Ravenswood. What is interesting is that he states that the motto of the Ravenswood family is “The Open Hand,” when in fact that novel says explicitly that it is “I Bide my Time.” There are several moments in Scott where the figure of the open hand appears, and perhaps the most salient one can be found in chapter XX of Waverley, or ’Tis Sixty Years Hence. There, Scott refers to a Gaelic proverb, “May the open hand be filled the fullest.”
Nadar may simply be confused here, but this confusion serves him well when, in his book on Baudelaire, Charles Baudelaire intime: le poète vierge, published posthumously in 1911, he writes: “Let us not forget that, as if born under the Ravenswoods’ motto, ‘The Open Hand!,’ Baudelaire had begun by more than liberally dissipating a fortune and, given that, did not avoid pressuring his friends—of whom I was one.” See Charles Baudelaire intime (Paris: A. Blaizot, 1911), 45. Here, this motto works better for Nadar, since he wishes to suggest the ease with which Baudelaire opened his hand to ask for money whenever he needed it.]
5. [The French here is: “Bon, reprend-il encore, mais rendre boeuf pour oeuf!”]
Obsidional Photography
1. [Gabriel Jean Baptiste Ernest Wilfrid Legouvé (1807–1903), French dramatist, essayist, and poet, known for his support of women’s rights and of the progressive education of children. With Eugène Scribe (1791–1861), he wrote the notorious Bataille de dames in 1851, and his Histoire morale des femmes had appeared three years earlier, in 1848. His De l’alimentation morale pendant le siège appeared in 1870.]
2. [Jean-Marie-Joseph Coutelle (1748–1835), French engineer, scientist, and pioneer in the history of ballooning. He was the first officer of the Company of Aeronauts, and he was invited to use his expertise to help Napoleon with his planned invasion of Britain; Nicolas-Jacques Conté (1755–1805), French painter, army officer, balloonist, and the inventor of the modern pencil.]
3. A very special mention is owed to this brave lad, chosen by me before anyone else for this first launch, which had to be entrusted to a very confident and experienced man.
He had already once half-drowned with the same Neptune, which we used, for many days, for lack of others, for our ascents in captivity—so ruined, deteriorated, and dried up that it had become so fragile that, at the descent, as Duruof would put it, the fingers entered between every stitch “as in an act of pleasure.”
Altogether proud and happy to go first, even under these perilous conditions, Duruof sacrificed for this honor, without a second’s hesitation, half of his profit from the manufacture of postal balloons, the bargaining for which I had concluded with the government the day before for the benefit of my two aides. This half of the profits was his only payment.
4. There were even double simultaneous departures; this was the case on the day when Gambetta finally decided to let us take him up—since that day was no longer a Friday.
The Primitives of Photography
1. Bayard was the first photographer to produce photographs (on paper). He presented his research to François Arago in 1839, but the savant, the head of the democratic opposition, a member of the Chamber of Deputies was already protecting Daguerre and had his project approved by the Chamber. Bayard also organized the first world exhibition of photography in 1839; it took place in Paris. Photography on paper therefore had to wait until 1847, for the Frenchman Blanquart-Évrard to return to the processes of Bayard and of the Englishman Fox Talbot by improving them, and thus enabling photography to be commercialized.
2. Adam Salomon was also famous for his portraits; an old sculptor, he was one of the first to know how to be creative with lighting. He achieved effects of light, a very particular kind of mobility, a certain blurriness, which gave his photographs a singular appearance.
3. [The Latin here means “an excellent flock.”]
4. After long years of research, Gustave Le Gray succeeded in inventing the dry collodion process, which plays a decisive role in the history of photography. The fate of Le Gray was that of all the first photographers for whom the commercial part of the profession did not play an important role; almost all got crushed by the industry, which continued to grow; they mostly refused the pose and the process of retouching. Le Gray has left us a portrait of Napoleon III, a real document on the character of the emperor that tells us infinitely more about him than all the innumerable painted and photographed portraits of the period.
5. [Nadar here uses the figure of St. Helena to evoke Napoleon—St. Helena was the island to which Napoleon was exiled after his defeat at Waterloo in 1815—and, in particular, Napoleon’s role in creating a Salon des Refusés (Salon of the Refused) in 1863 order to display the works rejected by the Salon de Paris for not following the usual protocols. Works rejected included paintings by Monet, Cézanne, Degas, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, and others, many of which were painted in the open air. In April 1874, approximately 30 of these rejected artists put together an exhibition in Nadar’s studio.]
6. [Narcisse Virgilio Díaz de la Peña, a French painter of the Barbizon school.]
7. [Disdéri, the official photographer of the emperor, a very skillful merchant, was also, in his time, a serious competitor of Nadar. Curiously, his writings show that his opinions on photography were not that different from those of Nadar.]
8. We will cite here first the charity of Mr. Numa Blanc, Jr., from Cannes.
9. [Here Nadar refers to the sixteenth-century sculptor, draftsman, and goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini.]
10. Mrs. Adam Salomon has left a very small book of a few pages in thirty-twomo, quite a modest format for a real work of art. This booklet, hard to find today, is titled: Of Education. In her modesty, the author pretends that she has translated the advice of a Chinese princess to her daughter.
Lamartine wrote in two paragraphs, according to the proportions of this cute little book, a preface which ends with this surprising phrase: “… Finally we can say of this little book that it is The Imitation of the Mothers of the Family” (? …). And that Karr who could never understand my distrust of his Lamartine!
11. [Louis de Bourbon, Prince of Condé (1621–1686), French general and the most famous member of the Condé part of the House of Bourbon. He was known as le Grand Condé for his military skills.]
12. [La Villette, touted in the late 1860s as the greatest market and slaughterhouse area in all of Europe. One of the poorest areas of Paris, and home to a great number of factories and industrial warehouses, La Villette was widely known as an area of high crime; Cannebière, the historic high street in the old quarter of Marseille, full of cafés and shops.]
13. [Kermesse, a Mass performed on the anniversary of a church’s founding and in honor of the church’s patron, and accompanied by feasts and dancing.]
14. Among some very curious canvases issuing from the sale of this Exhibition, I possess a fake Meissonier, which never fails to hypnotize every visitor. Very eminent amateurs, the most expert of experts (I don’t want to name anyone), there is not one—I’m saying: not even one; the effect is certain!—who, guided by mere intuition, does not remain fixed on it with an admiring stare …
It is just simply a small photograph of a man in Louis XIII costume, rubbed with some red paint à la Meissonier—in order to make innocents and other signatories measure the genius of the capillary painter.
15. [Gotha almanac, a directory of Europe’s nobility, first published in Germany in 1763 and then published annually from 1785.]
16. [Stanislaw Julian Ostroróg (1830–1890), an early portrait photographer, whose pseudonym, Walery, was taken from his wife’s name, Waleria.]
17. [Louis Veuillot (1813–1883), French journalist and writer who notoriously supported papal authority. He wrote over fifty books, many of which describe the beauty of Christian doctrine.]
18. [Paul Scarron (1610–1660), French poet, dramatist, and novelist, mostly known for his burlesques and comedies. He often borrowed from Spanish sources; his most enduring work, Roman comique (1651–1657), adapts materials from Cervantes’ Don Quixote; Jacques Offenbach (1819–1880), German-born French composer and cellist. He is best known for his unfinished opera The Tales of Hoffmann and the nearly 100 operettas he wrote between the 1850s and 1870s. Napoleon granted him French citizenship.]
19. [Jean Leblond de Branville (1502–1553), French poet and translator, well known for his translations of ancient and modern Latin texts into French, including Thomas More’s Utopia in 1550.]
20. [Hippogriff, a legendary, magical creature that resembles a winged horse with the head and upper body of an eagle, first appearing in Virgil’s Eclogues. Born of a horse and a griffin (its birth is described in canto IV of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso), the hippogriff was presumably able to fly around the world, and to the moon. Since griffins and horses were supposed to be mortal enemies, the hippogriff appears as a figure of love, and of the impossible; Chimera, in Greek mythology, a fire-breathing female monster having a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail. Like the hippogriff, the chimera, composed of incongruous parts, suggests an illusion or invention of the mind, that is, something impossible.]
The New President of the French Society of Photography
1. [Théodore de Banville (1823–1891), French poet, theorized the necessity of formal perfection and the autonomy of art, one of the major contributors to “Parnasse contemporain.” He and Nadar were lifelong friends from 1843 onward.]
2. [Michel-Eugène Chevreul (1786–1889), French chemist, became a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1826. He focused his research on fatty substances, and was the first scientist to isolate stearic acid. Nadar and his son Paul interviewed Chevreul on the occasion of his 100th birthday, and photographed him during the interview; this interview became the first illustrated interview. The interview and photographs are now available in Paul Nadar, premier interview photographique (Lausanne: Éditions Ides et Calendes, 2000).]
3. [Jean Bouillaud (1796–1881), physician, conducted research on cardiovascular diseases and was an early advocate of localizing cerebral functions.]
4. 1885, second edition. [See La Méthode graphique dans les sciences expérimentales et principalement en physiologie et en médicine, deuxième tirage (Paris: G. Masson, Éditeur, 1885).]
5. Third year, no. 3, of Paris-Photographe. See also, in the next number, the very interesting account of similar results obtained by Viscount Ponton d’Amécourt.
The Bee Tamer
1. [Pays d’Oc and Pays d’Oil are two areas in southern France where the two principal dialects in medieval France are still spoken. Oc means “yes” in Provençal; oil means “yes” in Old French. Nadar also plays here on the echolalia between oil and ail, which means “garlic,” since the food in southern France uses a great deal of garlic.]
2. [Nadar here uses the Italian tutti.]
3. [Louis-Auguste Commerson (1802–1879), French journalist, founder of Tam-Tam, which later became Le Tintamarre, a polemical, satirical, burlesque magazine.]
1830 and Thereabouts
1. I refer here to the Teste affair and General Despans-Cubière. [Jean-Baptiste Teste (1780–1852) was a French politician, Chief of Police during Napoleon’s Hundred Days, later a minister of Louis Philippe from 1830 to 1843. In 1847 he was accused, along with General Cubière, of facilitating a state concession for a salt mine in exchange for the payment of a huge bribe. It was one of the major scandals of that time.]
2. [See Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, trans. Isabel F. Hapgood (New York: Thomas Y. Orowell, 1887), 114.]
3. [Adolphe Thiers (1797–1877), French statesman, journalist, and historian. He was Minister of the Interior in 1832 and from 1834 to 1836, and Minister of Trade from 1833 to 1834. He became President of the Republic in 1871, after ruthlessly using troops to defeat the Paris insurrection.]
4. [Benôit-Constant Coquelin (1841–1909), French actor, one of the most famous theatrical figures of the nineteenth century, and a member of the Comédie-Française for more than twenty-five years, playing the lead role in nearly fifty productions, including plays by Molière, Théodore de Banville, and Paul Ferrier. After resigning from the group in 1886, he successfully toured Europe and America, often with Sarah Bernhardt; L’Abbé François-Ferdinand Châtel (1795–1857), founder of the French Catholic Church. He was the first abbot to conduct the Mass in French, not in Latin. He was against the celibacy of priests and for the emancipation of women; Jacques de Molay (c. 1243–1314), the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar and the most famous representative of the Order. He was condemned to death by King Philip IV after a conflict for power between Philip and Pope Clement V, and after the Knights Templar were abolished by papal decree.]
5. [Barthélemy Prosper Enfantin (1796–1864), French social, political, and economic theorist, a founder of Saint-Simonianism, often referred to as “Père Enfantin.” Enfantin and his followers formed a communal group in Ménilmontant, He also had imagined a Suez Canal that would serve as a bridge between the East and the West.]
6. Élie Reclus, Les Primitifs d’Australie. [See Élie Reclus, Le Primitif d’Australie ou les non-non et les oui-oui (Paris: E. Dentu, 1894), 22. Reclus (1827–1904) was an ethnographer in the classical sense, but also, and far more radically than his colleagues and contemporaries, a critic of bourgeois life and an anarchist (he is at the beginning of the tradition that links anarchism to primitive “gift” systems).]
7. [Étienne Cabet (1788–1856), in his novel Travels to Icaria (1840), described the utopia of a communist society which, after the failure of the 1848 revolutionary uprising in Europe, was later attempted with dubious results in America: first in Texas, and subsequently in Illinois and St. Louis.]
8. [Constant Cheneau established a Reformist Christian cult that baptized adults, conceived of confession as a conversation, and believed in the primordial unity of humanity in Eve-Adam. The cult was referred to as the religion of Evadism (a name formed by putting together the names of the first man and the first woman) or of Ma-Pa, from mater and pater; Émile de Girardin (1806–1881), French journalist and publicist, called the Napoleon of the press for his ability to publish inexpensive newspapers with wide circulations.]
9. [Hyacinthe-Louis de Quélen (1778–1839) was the 125th Archbishop of Paris from 1821 to 1839. Following the violence of the July Revolution of 1830, he was driven twice from his palace. Later, during the epidemic of 1832, he turned his seminaries into hospitals and cared for the sick at the Hôtel-Dieu.]
10. [Emmanuel-Augustin-Dieudonné-Joseph, comte de Las Cases (1766–1842) was a French atlas maker and author, most famous for his Memorial of Saint Helena, which presumably consists of notes taken from his conversations with Napoleon. He was expelled in 1816 by the governor of Saint Helena, Sir Hudson Lowe, for infringing British regulations, and for criticizing Lowe for his treatment of Napoleon.]
11. [Jean-Barthélemy Hauréau (1812–1896), French historian, journalist, and writer. In 1848 he was appointed Director of Manuscripts in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, but he resigned from the position in 1851, in protest against Napoleon’s coup d’état in December of that year. His best-known work was his Histoire de la philosophie scolastique (1872–1880).]
12. [TF and TP are the initials, respectively, of travaux forcés and travaux à perpétuité.]
13. [Bousingot or Bousingo is an offensive word, used after the July 1830 revolution to refer to a group of young political and literary rebels who flaunted their shabby clothing, and expressed advanced democratic ideas.]
14. [Nadar here refers to the Luxor obelisk, a 75-foot-high Egyptian obelisk which was transported in 1833 from the entrance to the Luxor Temple in Egypt to the Place de la Concorde in Paris. It was shipped on the barge Louqsor and was installed in the center of the Place de la Concorde by King Louis-Philippe. The obelisk is over 3,000 years old, and is inscribed with hieroglyphics depicting the pharaohs Ramses II and Ramses III.]
15. [Pierre Lescot (1515–1578), one of the great French architects of the mid-sixteenth century, most famous for his rebuilding of the Louvre, which he started in 1546 as a commission from King Francis I. The style and design of Lescot’s work on the Louvre reflect a revolution in French architecture that incorporated classical elements into more traditional French design, and thereby created a unique style of French classicism, which Nadar references here.]
16. [Doyenné was the name of a building located on a namesake pathway across the area which is nowadays occupied by Carrousel Square. Nerval, Rogier and Moussaye, and later Petrus Borel, Gautier, and other writers and artists who belonged to the Romantic groups called “Jeune-France” and “Bousingot” lived in a nine-bedroom apartment inside this building.]
17. [Schapska or chapska, flat-topped cavalry helmet of Polish origins, which was later adopted by several military corps of the French Army.]
18. [An old two-wheeled public carriage.]
19. [François-Joseph-Victor Broussais (1772–1838), French physician, theorist of “physiological medicine,” believer in the physiological interdependence of the various organs, considered inflammation of the tissues the very cause of all diseases, which he treated with diet and phlebotomy. Such treatments were extended also to mental illnesses, as in the situation described here by Nadar.]
20. [Mathieu Orfila (1787–1853), French physician of Spanish origins, often called the “father of toxicology,” was the first great nineteenth-century exponent of forensic medicine.]
21. [François-Vincent Raspail (1794–1878), French chemist, naturalist, and physician, became well known in the 1830s as one of the most prominent exponents of the Republican Party. He was a scientist, and studied chemistry and biology. His work anticipated important elements of cell theory. Here, Nadar alludes to this aspect of his legacy. His name rhymes with ail, that is, with garlic.]
22. [Brid’oison is the character of the foolish and empty-headed judge in Pierre Beaumarchais’s The Marriage of Figaro (1778).]
23. [Here “Je-les-serre” is a wordplay based on the phonetic mix-up of the Police Chief’s last name, Delessert, and the sentence Je les serre, I lock them (implicitly, with handcuffs).]
24. Today the rue d’Amsterdam, rue de Berlin, rue de Rome, etc., the neighborhood Malesherbes, Saint-Augustine Church, etc.
25. [Arbela, name of the ancient Assyrian city of Erbil and of the namesake battle in which Alexander the Great defeated Darius III of Persia in 331 BC.]
26. [Gabriel Davioud (1823–1881), architect, exponent of architectural eclecticism; during the Second Empire he collaborated with Haussmann in the project for the demolition and renovation of Paris’s old neighborhoods.]
27. [Charles-Victor Prévot d’Arlincourt (1788–1856), poet and novelist, author of epic narratives (on Charlemagne) during the First Empire, wrote mediocre and unrealistic novels, of which the most famous is Le Solitaire (1821).]
28. [Nadar suggests that Balzac here speaks like a Celt. The Celts were people in early Europe who spoke Celtic languages, and generally occupied lands stretching from the British Isles to Galatia.]
29. Charles Baudelaire, Aesthetic Curiosities [“The Salon of 1846,” in Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists, 93].
30. [Jean-Joseph Vadé (1719–1757), French singer, playwright, and poet, known for his use of the genre poissard, a theatrical and poetic genre that plays with the language and mores of the lower classes. It was often deployed in informal “parades” or pantomimes organized for private aristocratic entertainments, but it infiltrated the repertory of the Parisian fairs and inspired vaudevilles and burlesques. Vadé was best known for his capacity to re-create the authentic jargon of fishwives and street vendors.]