Louis resisted the idea of taking a naked portrait of Isobel’s daughter. So much floated about him: the haze of mercury, the memory of the girl and the mother’s hair intertwined that day in the carriage, the recognition that Pigeon was the walnut-sized life that had curled inside Isobel’s stomach that day on the Pont Neuf. He saw visions in the Paris daylight. From his balcony he saw a grove of plum trees growing from a high-walled courtyard. A white swan nested on a gabled roofline. He positioned his camera obscura on the balcony and tried to photograph these images, but nothing rendered. The flask of mercury rested on his kitchen table like a carafe of wine. At night he heard it shudder and lap, a river preparing to break its banks.
Louis cared for the injured dog, propping it with pillows, cleaning its wounds with soap and water. He didn’t collect his tooth from the observatory, but each night, as he and the convalescing dog sat on his balcony, he pondered the history of stars and teeth, the secret journeys that result in form. The reddish-brown mutt was prone to long naps and hobbled about between sleeps, chomping uninterestedly on bones Louis fetched from the butcher. As the animal regained its strength, albeit with a hind leg that would forever resemble a gnarled tree branch, Louis grew attached to it. He awoke from his strange dreams in the empty hours of predawn and found the dog curled at the foot of his bed. He took it for walks before the sun was up. During these walks, Louis thought of Isobel and Pigeon and the infinite permutations of a man’s life. Louis ruffled a hand through the spiked hair on the dog’s back and connected the sight of Pigeon’s lustrous hair at age fifteen, the heartbreaking organdy bow, with the idea of her as a prostitute many years later. Had Isobel’s subsequent life been so cursed that she’d raised a whore? Inevitably, Louis was wrenched from these ruminations because the dog would dash under a bush or scramble for a ditch. The mutt was ungainly and seemed to have lived a feral existence. Louis scolded the animal but found himself carrying it in his arms to get home.
One afternoon, Louis was sitting on a park bench with the dog at his side when he saw Baudelaire bounding towards them. The poet’s hair had grown in slightly, giving him the appearance of a man recently escaped from jail. His white teeth flashed as he called out and dodged several charabancs. His words were lost in a gust of wind. Louis sat adrift in his thoughts and did not stand to greet the poet.
“Damn you, Daguerre,” Baudelaire said, panting.
“Oh, hello, Charles.”
“Don’t hello me.” Baudelaire dropped onto the bench.
Louis adjusted his collar to shield the wind coming off the open boulevard. “What on earth?”
“I have been trying to reach you for weeks. I’ve left notes under your door. I’ve knocked at all hours.”
Louis thought back on the past few weeks. There had been some noises and notes, that was true. “I am sorry,” he said. “I have been hard at work on my portraits. Only a few items remain on the list now.”
“Yes, well, that’s why I wanted to talk to you. Incidentally, what a strange-looking beast.”
Louis looked down, almost surprised by the sight of the scraggly mutt beside him. “I ran him over and have taken him in. He’s partially lame.”
Baudelaire cast another glance at the dog, its mouth hinged open, then looked at Louis. “Listen, Daguerre, Pigeon has been hounding me about her portrait. She wants to pose, and I think she’ll be perfect for it. She’s a little old, almost forty, but nonetheless a fine specimen. I’ve been tempted to pay for the privilege of her flesh, let me tell you.”
Louis sat bolt upright. “You will do no such thing. I won’t have it.”
“She’s a whore, Daguerre. That’s what she does.”
“No. You will not. She cannot continue in that trade.”
“Well, perhaps if you paid her to pose nude, you would keep her fallow for a night or two. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but times are hard.”
“I can’t take her portrait.”
Baudelaire took out his pipe and lit it, and the two men passed a moment of silence while the dark smoke streaked by in the wind.
Baudelaire sighed and said, “I’m inclined to believe the world is ending. Ever since that night of cannabis, everybody has been acting most peculiar.”
“Take my word for it, that cannabis will be enough to turn the world into a whirligig,” Louis said.
“On top of that, I’ve run out of money completely. A poet must die a martyr to become a great poet. We all know that. But I have money my mother won’t give me. She’s a sea wench.”
“Don’t say such things. God will punish you,” Louis said.
“I mean it. She cut me off. I’m forced to write garbage for the papers to buy bread.”
Louis looked at Baudelaire’s outfit—nankeen trousers and a black woolen waistcoat. “But look at you, your clothes are fine.”
“I spend my last sous on looking like a dandy. Salvation through style and all the rest of it. I’m deep in discontent, Louis. This time it’s in earnest.”
“But your criticism, surely it pays well,” Louis said.
“When it pays. Last piece I did took six months to get a payment.”
Louis ran a hand across the dog’s back.
“I need that hundred francs, Daguerre. Take her portrait. Please.”
Louis did not like the feeling of imposition in the air. “I can help you with food, for heaven’s sake. Come and I will give you whatever is in my pantry. Brandy, wine, meat. How did you afford that decadence of several weeks past?”
Baudelaire studied his perfect shoes. “All of it was donated by rich lawyers and merchants and weepy-eyed ladies with a weakness for oil paintings and verse. Every now and again they get a sorry heart and want to throw lamb chops to the dogs.”
“I see.”
“Maybe you could take my portrait and pay me. You need a poet on your list. How about it?” Baudelaire pointed at his face with a finger on each hand. “Look carefully, Daguerre—if this is not a doomsday face, then I don’t know what is.”
Louis said, “Too bad for you I already took the portrait of the horses.”
“That’s not funny.”
Louis again looked at Baudelaire, whose eyes were slightly jaundiced. Louis reached for his leather wallet and removed a small bundle of francs. He handed it to Baudelaire.
“Go see Pigeon and take her portrait. If nothing else, you must share your wealth before the end of the world. You can’t take it with you when your French brothers and sisters are in need. Something is rising in the garrets.”
“Goodbye, Baudelaire.”
“Long live France,” said Baudelaire. He trotted off towards a nearby tavern where, no doubt, he would spend the money on wine and snuff and perhaps a scratch of food. Louis had no delusions those francs would garner much in the way of real sustenance.
He sat for a long time, watching the dog sleep the sleep of the wild. Finally, when he felt the streets had emptied a little, he walked back towards his apartment. But soon he was taking a detour via 72 Rue de l’École, standing in the street with his hobbled mutt, trying to understand Pigeon from the exterior of her ground-floor apartment. Her wood-framed building was wedged between a pawnbroker and a brothel whose wide veranda was full of recumbent whores. Her windows were covered in gauzy curtains, and the medicinal plants, lined along a sill, sprung their foliage in front of the gossamer cloth. Louis imagined the comings and goings of such a street, the young soldiers coming to hock family heirlooms and spend their dividends on a consort. He pictured Pigeon on the veranda, done up, her cheeks rouged like a Russian doll’s. The organdy bow. He could not bear it. He tugged at the leash and the dog gimped at his side, head up, ears back. He would not come back to this address until he had a plan to rescue Isobel’s daughter. Whatever else the final plan had in store, Pigeon could not die a whore.