Levels of Life (2 page)

Aeronauts were the new Argonauts, their adventures instantly chronicled. A balloon flight linked town and country, England and France, France and Germany. Landing provoked pure excitement: a balloon brought no evil. By the Normandy fireside of M Barthélemy Delanray, the village doctor proposed a toast to universal brotherhood. Burnaby and his new friends clinked glasses. At which point, being British, he explained to them the superiority of a monarchy over a republic. But then, the president of the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain was His Grace the Duke of Argyll, and its three vice presidents were His Grace the Duke of Sutherland, the Rt Hon. the Earl of Dufferin, and the Rt Hon. Lord Richard Grosvenor MP. The equivalent French body, the Société des Aéronautes, founded by Tournachon, was more democratic and intellectual. Its aristocrats were writers and artists: George Sand, Dumas
père et fils
, Offenbach.

Ballooning represented freedom – yet a freedom subservient to the powers of wind and weather. Aeronauts often couldn’t tell if they were moving or stationary, gaining height or losing it. In the early days, they would throw out a handful of feathers, which would fly upwards if they were descending, and down if ascending. By Burnaby’s time this technology had advanced to torn-up strips of newspaper. As for measuring horizontal progress, Burnaby invented his own speedometer, consisting of a small paper parachute attached to fifty yards of silk line. He would toss the parachute overboard and time how long it took for the line to run out. Seven seconds translated into a balloon speed of twelve miles per hour.

There were multiple attempts, over that first century of flight, to master this uncontrollable bag with its dangling basket. Rudders and oars were tried, pedals and wheels turning screw-fans; they all made slight difference. Burnaby believed that shape was the key: an aerostat in the form of a tube or cigar, and propelled by machinery, was the way forward – as it eventually proved. But all, whether English or French, conservative or progressive, agreed that the future of flight lay in the heavier-than-air machine. And though his name was always linked to ballooning, Tournachon also founded the Society for the Encouragement of Aerial Locomotion by Means of Heavier-than-Air Machines; its first secretary was Jules Verne. Another enthusiast, Victor Hugo, said that a balloon was like a beautiful, drifting cloud – whereas what humanity needed was the equivalent of that gravity-defying miracle, the bird. Flight, in France, was generally a matter for social progressives. Tournachon wrote that the three supreme emblems of modernity were ‘photography, electricity and aeronautics’.

In the beginning, birds flew, and God made the birds. Angels flew, and God made the angels. Men and women had long legs and empty backs, and God had made them like that for a reason. To mess with flight was to mess with God. It was to prove a long struggle, full of instructive legends.

For instance, the case of Simon Magus. The National Gallery in London owns an altarpiece by Benozzo Gozzoli; its predella has been broken up and dispersed over the centuries. One section illustrates the story of St Peter, Simon Magus and the Emperor Nero. Simon was a magician who had won Nero’s favour, and sought to keep it by proving that his powers were greater than those of the apostles Peter and Paul. This tiny painting tells the story in three parts. In the background is a wooden tower, from which Simon Magus is demonstrating his latest trick: human flight. Vertical take-off and lift have been achieved, and the Roman aeronaut is seen heading skywards, with only the bottom half of his green mantle showing; the rest is cut off by the picture’s top edge. Simon’s secret rocket fuel is, however, illegitimate: he relies – physically as well as spiritually – on the support of demons. In the mid-ground, St Peter is shown praying to God, asking Him to dispossess the demons of their power. The theological and aeronautical results of this intervention are confirmed in the foreground: a dead magician, blood oozing from his mouth after an enforced crash-landing. The sin of height is punished.

Icarus messed with the Sun God: that was a bad idea too.

The first ever ascent in a hydrogen balloon was made by the physicist Dr J. A. C. Charles on the 1st of December 1783. ‘When I felt myself escaping from the earth,’ he commented, ‘my reaction was not pleasure but
happiness
.’ It was ‘a moral feeling’, he added. ‘I could
hear myself living
, so to speak.’ Most aeronauts felt something like that, even Fred Burnaby, who made a point of not rising easily to rapture. High above the English Channel, he observes the steam from the Dover and Calais packet boat, reflects on the latest foolish and abominable plan to build a Channel tunnel, then is moved, briefly, to moral feeling:

The air was light and charming to breathe, free as it was from the impurities that burden the atmosphere near the globe. My spirits rose. It was pleasant to be for the time in a region free from letters, with no post office near, no worries, and above all no telegraphs.

Aboard the
Doña Sol
, ‘the Divine Sarah’ is in heaven. She finds that up above the clouds there is ‘not silence, but the shadow of silence’. She feels the balloon to be ‘the emblem of uttermost freedom’ – which is also how most groundlings would have viewed the actress herself. Félix Tournachon describes ‘the silent immensities of welcoming and beneficent space, where man cannot be reached by any human force or by any power of evil, and where he feels himself live as if for the first time’. In this silent, moral space, the aeronaut experiences health of body and health of soul. Altitude ‘reduces all things to their relative proportions, and to the Truth’. Cares, remorse, disgust become strangers: ‘How easily indifference, contempt, forgetfulness drop away … and forgiveness descends.’

The aeronaut could visit God’s space – without the use of magic – and colonise it. And in doing so, he discovered a peace that didn’t pass understanding. Height was moral, height was spiritual. Height, some thought, was even political: Victor Hugo believed, quite simply, that heavier-than-air flight would lead to democracy. When
The Giant
crashed near Hanover, Hugo offered to raise a public subscription. Tournachon refused out of pride, so instead the poet composed an open letter in praise of aeronautics. He described walking in the Avenue de l’Observatoire in Paris with the astronomer François Arago when a balloon launched from the Champ de Mars passed over their heads. Hugo had said to his companion: ‘There floats the egg waiting for the bird. But the bird is within and will emerge.’ Arago took Hugo’s hands and replied ardently, ‘And on that day Geo will be called Demos!’ Hugo endorsed this ‘profound remark’, by saying, ‘“Geo will become Demos.” The whole world will be a democracy … Man will become bird – and what a bird! A thinking bird. An eagle with a soul!’

This sounds high-flown, overinflated. And aeronautics did not lead to democracy, unless budget airlines count. But aeronautics purged the sin of height, otherwise known as the sin of getting above yourself. Who now had the right to look down on the world from above and command its description? It is time to bring Félix Tournachon into better focus.

He was born in 1820 and died in 1910. He was a tall, gangling figure with a mane of red hair, passionate and restless by nature. Baudelaire called him ‘an astonishing expression of vitality’; his gusts of energy and flames of hair seemed enough to lift a balloon into the air by themselves. No one ever accused him of being sensible. The poet Gérard de Nerval introduced him to the magazine editor Alphonse Karr with the words, ‘He is very witty and very stupid.’ A later editor and close friend, Charles Philipon, called him ‘a man of wit without a shadow of rationality … His life has been, still is, and always will be incoherent.’ He was the sort of bohemian who lived with his widowed mother until he married; and the sort of husband whose infidelities coexisted with uxoriousness.

He was a journalist, caricaturist, photographer, balloonist, entrepreneur and inventor, a keen registerer of patents and founder of companies; a tireless self-publicist, and in old age a prolific writer of unreliable memoirs. As a progressive, he hated Napoleon III, and sulked in his carriage when the Emperor arrived to watch the departure of
The Giant
. As a photographer, he declined the custom of high society, preferring to memorialise the circles in which he moved; naturally, he photographed Sarah Bernhardt several times. He was an active member of the first French society for the protection of animals. He used to make rude noises at policemen and disapproved of prison (where he had once been confined for debt): he thought juries should ask not ‘Is he guilty?’ but rather ‘Is he dangerous?’ He threw huge parties and kept open table; he gave over his studio on the Boulevard des Capucines to the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874. He planned to invent a new sort of gunpowder. He also dreamed of a kind of talking picture, which he called ‘an acoustic daguerreotype’. He was hopeless with money.

He was not known by the sturdy Lyonnais name of Tournachon. In the bohemia of his youth, friends were often affectionately rebaptised – for instance, by adding or substituting the suffix -
dar
. So he became first Tournadar, and then simply Nadar. It was as Nadar that he wrote and caricatured and photographed; as Nadar that he became, in the years between 1855 and 1870, the finest portrait photographer yet seen. And this was his name when, in the autumn of 1858, he put together two things that had not been put together before.

Photography, like jazz, was a sudden, contemporary art which achieved technical excellence very quickly. And once it became able to leave the confines of the studio, it tended to spread horizontally, out and across. In 1851 the French government set up the Heliographic Mission, which dispatched five photographers across the land to record the buildings (and ruins) that made up the national patrimony. Two years earlier, it had been a Frenchman who first photographed the Sphinx and the Pyramids. Nadar was less interested in the horizontal than the vertical, in height and depth. His portraits surpass those of his contemporaries because they go deeper. He said that the theory of photography could be learnt in an hour, and its techniques in a day; but what couldn’t be taught were a sense of light, a grasp of the moral intelligence of the sitter, and ‘the psychological side of photography – the word doesn’t seem too ambitious to me’. He relaxed his subjects with chatter, while modelling them with lamps, screens, veils, mirrors and reflectors. The poet Théodore de Banville called him ‘a novelist and caricaturist hunting his prey’. It was the novelist who took these psychological portraits, and who concluded that the vainest sitters were actors, closely followed by soldiers. The same novelist also spotted one key difference between the sexes: when a couple who had been jointly photographed returned to examine their proofs, the wife always looked first at the portrait of her husband – and so did the husband. Such was humanity’s self-love, Nadar concluded, that most were inevitably disappointed when they finally saw a true image of themselves.

Moral and psychological depth; also physical depth. Nadar was the first to photograph the Paris sewers, where he made twenty-three images. He also descended into the Catacombs, those sewer-like ossuaries where bones were stacked after the cemetery clearances of the 1780s. Here, he needed an eighteen-minute exposure. This was no problem for the dead, of course; but to ape the living, Nadar draped and dressed mannequins, and gave them parts to play – watchman, bone-stacker, labourer pulling a wagon full of skulls and femurs.

And this left height. The things Nadar put together that had not been put together before were two of his three emblems of modernity: photography and aeronautics.

First, a darkroom had to be built in the balloon’s cradle, with doubled curtains of black and orange; inside was the merest flicker of a lamp. The new wet-plate technique consisted of coating a glass sheet with collodion, then sensitising it in a solution of silver nitrate. But it was a cumbersome process which required deft handling, so Nadar was accompanied by a plate preparer. The camera was a Dallmeyer, with a special horizontal shutter Nadar had patented. Near Petit-Bicêtre, in the north of Paris, on a day of little wind in the autumn of 1858, the two men made their ascent in a tethered balloon, and took the world’s first sky-based photograph. Back down at the local auberge which served as their headquarters, they excitedly developed the plate.

And found nothing. Or rather, nothing but a muddy soot-black expanse with no trace of an image. They tried again, and failed; tried a third time, and failed again. Suspecting that the baths might contain impurities, they filtered and refiltered them, to no effect. They changed all the chemicals, but still it made no difference. Time was passing, winter was approaching, and the great experiment had not worked. Then, as Nadar relates in his memoirs, he was sitting one day beneath an apple tree (a Newtonian coincidence which perhaps stretches credulity), when suddenly he understood the problem. ‘The persistent failure derived from the fact that the neck of the balloon, always left open during ascents, allowed hydrosulphuric gas to stream out into my silver baths.’ So the next time, once sufficient height had been reached, he closed off the gas valve – a dangerous procedure in itself, which might cause the aerostat to explode. The prepared plate was exposed, and back at the auberge Nadar was rewarded with an image, faint but discernible, of the three buildings beneath the tethered balloon: farm, auberge and gendarmerie. Two white pigeons could be seen on the farm roof; in the lane was a stopped cart, its occupant wondering at the contraption floating in the sky.

This first picture did not survive, except in Nadar’s memory and our subsequent imagination; nor did any others he took in the next ten years. The only images of his aerostatic experiments date from 1868. One shows an eight-part, multi-lens view of streets leading to the Arc de Triomphe; another looks across the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne (now Avenue Foch) towards Les Ternes and Montmartre.