{"id":112222,"date":"2017-07-05T16:44:19","date_gmt":"2017-07-05T20:44:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=112222"},"modified":"2017-07-05T17:51:21","modified_gmt":"2017-07-05T21:51:21","slug":"nadars-livre-dor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/07\/05\/nadars-livre-dor\/","title":{"rendered":"Nadar\u2019s Livre d\u2019or"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Adam Begley interviews Ali Smith<\/a> in our new Summer issue. Begley\u2019s new book,\u00a0<\/em>The Great Nadar: The Man Behind the Camera<\/a>\u2014a biography of the fabled Parisian photographer F\u00e9lix Nadar\u2014is out this month. The book\u2019s appendix takes a closer look at one of Nadar\u2019s most treasured mementos.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The book, the size of a large photo album, has been disassembled, its two hundred-odd pages cut out and placed each in its own transparent protective sheath. Detached, the leather-bound front cover, with F\u00e9lix Nadar\u2019s flamboyant signature stamped in the center in gold leaf, lies in a cardboard box looking scuffed and forlorn, like exiled royalty.<\/p>\n

The album is a livre d\u2019or<\/em>, one of several guest books or autograph albums he kept in successive studios. If you came to sit for a portrait (or a caricature, in the early days on the rue Saint-Lazare), and if you were an artist or a celebrity or preferably both, he would pester you to sign and leave a memento: a quip, a sketch, a poem, a few bars of music. Most sitters complied. Many signed and left only a brief remark, if any; others spent hours over a drawing or a watercolor, leaving on the page work of impressive quality. F\u00e9lix was very proud of his collection of autographs, each one a token of friendship or a link with an eminent individual.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This particular livre d\u2019or<\/em>, an astonishing record of the rich cultural life of Paris during the Second Empire, is stored in a rare-book library in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Philadelphia? Suffering from one of his periodic bouts of acute insolvency, F\u00e9lix sold the album at auction in the early 1890s. It was bought by Thomas W. Evans, an American expatriate living in Paris who\u2019d grown rich and respected as the dentist to Napol\u00e9on III. When Evans died in 1897, he left his considerable fortune to endow the Thomas W. Evans Museum and Dental Institute; the livre d\u2019or<\/em> and his collection of art and antiques were shipped across the Atlantic and housed in the Evans Building, an imposing Tudor Revival edifice erected on the site of his ancestral home, in what is now the middle of the University of Pennsylvania campus. After languishing for decades in the Dental Medicine Library, the Nadar album was transferred in 1985 to the university\u2019s rare books and manuscripts collection. About ten years ago it was taken apart and led away in fourteen cardboard storage boxes.<\/p>\n

Few people know it exists; fewer ask to see it. Yet even disbound it evokes the busy ferment of Nadar\u2019s world in the decade after Louis-Napol\u00e9on\u2019s coup d\u2019\u00e9tat\u2014the decade in which F\u00e9lix attempted to create a panorama of his illustrious contemporaries. The pages of the livre d\u2019or<\/em> echo with the voices of talented men (only a handful of women signed the album, mostly opera singers, actresses, and ballerinas), and these voices make many different sounds: friendly greeting; mutual admiration; facetious commentary; and political harangue (mostly socialist). Self-conscious musings and private jokes abound, and always in the background is the buzz of artistic ego, sometimes muted, sometimes not. It\u2019s clear that an element of competition was involved: anybody about to sign would flip through to see what had been done before and by whom. Then there was the delicate business of choosing a page. With whom would you like to be associated?<\/p>\n

Nadar\u2019s photographs show us what the cultural elite of his day looked like, the images preserved by the modern miracle of the wet-plate collodion process. A livre d\u2019or<\/em> makes use of an older, more primitive method to offer a different perspective: the traces it preserves are marks on plain paper left by the individual\u2019s own hand.<\/p>\n

On the first page, a pair of writers pop up, L\u00e9on Gozlan and Fabrice Labrousse. Each left a sentence and a signature, one on top of the other, like lines of dialogue. The two men were almost exact contemporaries, and both wrote for the theater; they must have known each other but probably visited Nadar\u2019s studio on different days\u2014a pause in the dialogue. A close associate of Balzac, and like Balzac wildly prolific, Gozlan scrawled in his neat but impulsive hand a pronouncement F\u00e9lix would have endorsed enthusiastically: \u201cNothing is more immoral than boredom.\u201d Labrousse\u2019s rejoinder\u2014\u201cNothing is more moral than distraction\u201d\u2014would also have appealed. The rest of the page is blank, as though there were nothing more to say.<\/p>\n

This\u00a0livre d\u2019or\u00a0<\/em>is a treasure house of distraction. Here are some highlights.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Sketches of F\u00e9lix were left by Alexandre Laemlein, Jean Gigoux, Prince Alexis Soltykoff, Alcide Joseph Lorentz, and Charles Am\u00e9d\u00e9e de No\u00e9 (better known as the cartoonist Cham).<\/p>\n

A Bavarian-born history painter, Laemlein was admitted to the \u00c9cole des Beaux-Arts at age sixteen to study with a neoclassical painter, Jean-Baptiste Regnault, who promptly died, and then another, Fran\u00e7ois-\u00c9douard Picot\u2014the same Picot who taught F\u00e9lix\u2019s brother, Adrien.<\/p>\n

In his review of the Salon of 1846, Baudelaire paused to mention a painting by Laemlein, Universal Charity<\/em>:<\/p>\n

[A] charming woman holds by the hand and carries at her breast kids from every climate, white, yellow black, etc. \u2026 Certainly Mr. Laemlein has an eye for color; but there\u2019s a major flaw in this painting, which is that the little Chinese boy is so pretty, and his robe makes such an agreeable effect that it almost monopolizes the eye of the spectator. The little mandarin is still trotting along in one\u2019s memory.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Somber, handsome, ambitious, Laemlein\u2019s monochrome ink and watercolor portrait of F\u00e9lix strains with some success for the psychological acuity of a Nadar photograph.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Gigoux tries less hard and does better. His rapid sketch, focused on the eyes, gives the impression of vitality\u2014the quality so many of his friends remarked on. F\u00e9lix looks as though he\u2019s just noticed something interesting and is about to jump up and investigate.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A talented and versatile painter, Gigoux is today remembered for having been the lover of Balzac\u2019s widow, the Polish noblewoman Ewelina Hanska. In 1851, a year after Balzac\u2019s death, Hanska hired Gigoux to paint a portrait of her daughter Anna; the widow and the artist lived together for the next thirty years.<\/p>\n

Prince Soltykoff was an aristocratic Russian diplomat who retired to Paris in 1840 (age thirty-four) and embarked on an unusual second career: over the next six years, he made two long voyages to the Indian subcontinent, traveling from the Himalayas to Sri Lanka and sketching the wonders he beheld. His written account of his exotic adventures and the dramatic lithographs based on his drawings caused a sensation and earned him the nickname \u201cthe Indian.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Soltykoff\u2019s pencil sketch of F\u00e9lix was made in 1853, a couple of years after the triumphant Russian publication of his book\u2014the prince was at the height of his fame. There\u2019s nothing exotic or dramatic about the portrait; it\u2019s quick, casual, and familiar. Because it\u2019s a profile, only one eye is visible\u2014but that\u2019s the focus of the sketch. Like Gigoux, Soltykoff noticed that the bulk of F\u00e9lix\u2019s energy went into looking.<\/p>\n

Lorentz\u2019s amusing pen and ink drawing of a wild-haired photographer gives us a rare glimpse of Nadar in action, bent in half behind the camera, a bony finger in the air calling for his subject to keep still. An old friend and unreformed bohemian, Lorentz, like many others, earned the contempt of the Goncourt brothers, who called him a \u201ccaricaturist manqu\u00e9\u201d and complained of his \u201ccoarse, blunt, traveling-salesman gaiety.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Cham\u2019s cartoon portrait is weirdly unsettling. F\u00e9lix\u2019s head is an explosion of orange hair and vigorous orange whiskers, and his jacket and slippers match the hair: he\u2019s a big tall orange monster bursting through the door with an avid, pop-eyed expression on his face. \u201cMr. Nadar?\u201d he asks, \u201cC\u2019est moi!\u201d It\u2019s possible that the echo of Flaubert\u2019s quip about Emma Bovary is intentional. (Cham\u2019s caricatures are mentioned in Flaubert\u2019s Sentimental Education<\/em>.) As well as evoking F\u00e9lix\u2019s loud physical presence, the cartoon captures the ad hoc, constructed quality of his identity: both he and Cham were young men when they became someone else by adopting a pseudonym.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Cham\u2019s professional life was as settled and regular as can be: he worked for thirty-six years as an illustrator for Philipon\u2019s Charivari<\/em>. His private life was settled, too; he ignored the tittering of snobby gossip about his domestic arrangements, as well as rumors of a veiled scandal. An elegant and refined aristocrat with a nimble intellect, he lived for twenty-five years with a woman named Jeanne Leroy, whom he always called Madame Manuel. Alexandre Dumas fils<\/em> described her as \u201ca fat woman, common looking, ignorant, rude, shamefully miserly, and without any wit.\u201d Dumas wondered, moreover, about her \u201cshadowy past.\u201d But no one doubted Cham\u2019s devotion to her. When his father died in 1858, Cham inherited the title comte de No\u00e9; eight years later, to the astonishment of his friends and family, he married Madame Manuel\u2014which made her the comtesse de No\u00e9. And what about her <\/em>devotion to him<\/em>? He died in September 1879; four months later, unable to overcome her grief, the comtesse de No\u00e9 threw herself out of a window.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

The anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, author of the slogan \u201cProperty is theft,\u201d thundered, \u201cAfter the persecutors, I know nothing more detestable than the martyrs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many pages later, another anarchist pops up: the Russian aristocrat turned tireless revolutionary Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin, who signed his name in the French manner, Bakounine. Visiting on August 7, 1862, he left this enigmatic warning: \u201cWatch out that liberty doesn\u2019t come to you from the north.\u201d Just a year earlier he\u2019d made a daring escape from perpetual exile in Siberia.<\/p>\n

Below Bakunin\u2019s signature is an ink wash sketch by Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Millet of a pair of clogs, as plain and honest as a big toe. F\u00e9lix considered Millet one of the best living French painters; he praised his art as \u201cessentially democratic.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bakunin and Millet\u2014what a confluence! Did Bakunin spot the clogs and feel that this realist depiction was a good match for his political convictions? Or did Millet see Bakunin\u2019s signature and feel moved to leave an emblem of humble peasantry? Or was it just serendipity?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Perhaps the oddest page of the album consists of fantastical doodles of grotesque goblins and monsters by Baudelaire\u2019s friend Armand du Mesnil, a bureaucrat who worked doggedly in the ministry of education for forty years, a career he embarked on after his father decamped for America and left him to care for his mother and a young niece. Though his day job was a necessity, he yearned for the literary life; according to his old pal Th\u00e9odore de Banville, du Mesnil had a \u201clyrical soul always over owing with poetry and dreams.\u201d In his free time, he wrote plays and stories. Later, too busy to write but still loyal to the bohemian ideals of his youth, he used his government position to advance a series of petitions on behalf of Baudelaire. It was hoped that a state pension might help relieve the poet\u2019s chronic debt. Du Mesnil\u2019s efforts met with partial success: from time to time Baudelaire received from the ministry grants of several hundred francs. But no pension was forthcoming, not even when he was paralyzed by a stroke in 1866 and a succession of prominent literary gures added their voices to the latest petition.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The curious du Mesnil doodles include a rabbitlike creature with alarming teeth and claws; running human legs that meet at a crotch that is a face; a knock-kneed humanoid with the head of a cross-eyed bird; and a skinny goblin skipping rope. The gothic flavor of the drawings is a reminder that tales of supernatural horror were enormously popular at the time. Baudelaire, the keen-eyed apostle of modernity, was as famous for having translated Poe as he was for the scandal of Les fleurs du mal<\/em>. The daydreams of his friend du Mesnil, the kind-hearted government bureaucrat whose career obliged him to be the servant of the orderly and the rational, were populated with nightmare monsters, surreal creatures crawling out of the unconscious.<\/p>\n

Reminiscing at the end of his life about Baudelaire and their bohemian heyday, F\u00e9lix enumerated the friends he would meet in the poet\u2019s company, among them \u201cthe excellent Armand du Mesnil.\u201d\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

*<\/strong><\/p>\n

Henry Monnier, a talented illustrator who was also an actor and a playwright, left a drawing of a horse-drawn carriage with a coachman on the back\u2014but the carriage is a man\u2019s head in profile. It\u2019s an eerie image, at once surreal and familiar.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A good friend of Balzac, Monnier served as the model for Jean-Jacques Bixiou, a caricaturist who appears in several volumes of La com\u00e9die humaine<\/em>. Monnier\u2019s specialty was poking fun at the bourgeoisie, especially in the person of Monsieur Prudhomme, a character he invented who was, in Balzac\u2019s words, \u201cthe illustration of the type of the Parisian middle-class.\u201d<\/p>\n

Honor\u00e9 Daumier\u2019s contribution to the livre d\u2019or<\/em> is a pencil drawing of Henry Monnier posing as Monsieur Prudhomme\u2014literally posing, with his head secured by a mechanical brace that holds it in a fixed position. The device is a joke on the seemingly endless exposure time required by early photography and the difficulty of holding still.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Gustave Dor\u00e9, meanwhile, made a drawing of a fat cupid smoking a clay pipe\u2014and identified it as a portrait of Daumier.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Nadar\u2019s masterful portraits of Daumier look nothing like a cupid\u2014they\u2019re grand and solemn and charged with reverence\u2014but the resemblance to Dor\u00e9\u2019s sketch is undeniable. Note the angle of the eyebrow and the concentrated energy around the eyes.<\/p>\n

<\/a>

Photo: Biblioth\u00e8que nationale de France<\/p><\/div>\n

*<\/strong><\/p>\n

The prolific illustrator and caricaturist Bertall was F\u00e9lix\u2019s colleague and rival at Philipon\u2019s Journal pour rire<\/em>: one week the cover would be Nadar\u2019s, the next week Bertall\u2019s. He also set up as a professional photographer in the same year as F\u00e9lix (but later his business went bust). Bertall was short and testy, with a thick, pointed beard. And he was an aristocrat, with the cushion of family money behind him. (Bertall was a pseudonym; his real name was Charles Constant Albert Nicolas, vicomte d\u2019Arnoux, comte de Limoges-Saint-Sa\u00ebns.) There was every reason why he and F\u00e9lix should have been less than friendly. And yet Bertall drew in the album a lovely, haunting image of a naked man incubating under a bell jar. Haunting and mysterious.<\/p>\n

Who is this man in the pose of a dejected thinker, head bowed, his arms wrapped around an ink pen the size of a lance? The words JOURNAL POUR RIRE<\/small>, also under the bell jar, could mean that the paper incubated an illustrator\u2019s talent. But what\u2019s the significance of the pumpkin (or whatever it is) under the second bell jar? Very possibly it\u2019s a visual pun, an in-joke we\u2019re unable to enjoy from this distance. It reminds us, in any case, that cartoonists, like clowns, can strike a desperately melancholy note.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

All images, except where noted, courtesy of Thomas W. Evans Papers, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania.<\/em><\/p>\n

This text is excerpted from\u00a0<\/em>The Great Nadar: The Man Behind the Camera<\/a>, published this month by Tim Duggan Books. Copyright (c) 2017 by Adam Begley. Reprinted with permission of the author.<\/em><\/p>\n

Adam Begley\u00a0is the author of\u00a0<\/em>Updike. He was a Guggenheim fellow in 2010 and a fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography in 2011; from 1997 to 2009 he was the books editor of\u00a0<\/em>The\u00a0New York Observer. His writing has appeared in\u00a0the<\/em> New York Times,<\/em> the<\/em>\u00a0Guardian,\u00a0the<\/em>\u00a0Financial Times,<\/em> the<\/em>\u00a0London Review of Books, and<\/em>\u00a0The Times Literary Supplement. He lives with his wife in Cambridgeshire, England.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As his biographer writes, F\u00e9lix Nadar\u2019s autograph books provide an astonishing record of the rich cultural life of Paris during the Second 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