"When the vision came, he was in the bathtub." So begins the
madness of Louis Daguerre. In 1847, after a decade of using
poisonous mercury vapors to cure his daguerreotype images, his mind
is plagued by delusions. Believing the world will end within one
year, Daguerre creates his "Doomsday List" -- ten items he must
photograph before the final day. The list includes a portrait of
Isobel Le Fournier, a woman he has always loved but not spoken to
in half a century.
In this luminous debut novel, Dominic Smith reinvents the life
of one of photography's founding fathers. Louis Daguerre's story is
set against the backdrop of a Paris prone to bohemian excess and
social unrest. Poets and dandies debate art and style in the cafes
while students and rebels fill the garrets with revolutionary talk
and gun smoke. It is here, amid this strange and beguiling setting,
that Louis Daguerre sets off to capture his doomsday subjects.
Louis enlists the help of the womanizing poet Charles
Baudelaire, known to the salon set as the "Prince of Clouds," and a
jaded but beautiful prostitute named Pigeon. Together they scour
the Paris underworld for images worthy of Daguerre's list. But
Louis is also confronted by a chance to reunite with the only woman
he's ever loved. Half a lifetime ago, Isobel Le Fournier kissed
Louis Daguerre in a wine cave outside of Orleans. The result was a
proposal, a rejection, and a misunderstanding that outlasted three
kings and an emperor. Now, in the countdown to his apocalypse,
Louis wants to understand why he has carried the memory of that
kiss for so long.
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