Richard Holmes - Sidetracks

Within a year Felix Tournachon had taken his mother and his brother back to Paris, his heart set on the grand conquest his father had attempted, but failed. He had no métier, but many schemes. Between 1838 and 1844, the years of the bourgeois monarch with the furled umbrella, Tournachon plunged into the life of the Left Bank. His story became that of Henri Murger’s Scènes de la Vie de Bohème (1849), the sloping attics of the sixth arrondissement, the cheap cafés round Notre Dame de Lorette, and the laundry girls and golden-hearted grisette of the quartier Breda.

A bewildering assortment of bad jobs and good contacts followed: stenographer, bookshop assistant, coalseller, pipeseller, cub reporter, private secretary, editorial hack. While writing theatre reviews for an ephemeral journal, he met Jean Duval – later Baudelaire’s mulatto mistress – stealing the show in a bit part at the Porte-Saint-Antoine, and they became friends. His newspaper work brought him into touch with Gautier, Nerval, de Banville, Murger himself (who frequently shared his attic and his purse), Baudelaire, Dumas père, Champfleury, and even Balzac, hiding out from creditors in a chamber hung with gentian wallpaper in the rue de Richelieu.

A somewhat weary police dossier was opened on him. ‘Yet another of those dangerous people sowing highly subversive doctrines in the Quartier Latin – he makes speeches about the Lamennaian socialist theory.’ He was also notorious for his wild, unbourgeois-like generosity.

Tournachon cut a remarkable figure in the narrow, cobbled streets – huge, gangling, red-headed, with long twitching fingers and staring impudent eyes. But it was some time before he settled upon his public image, a concept of singular importance to him. The journalist Charles Bataille first met him climbing down, with ostentatious stealth, from a fifth-floor attic in the rue Neuve des Martyres by the outside ‘like a huge scrawny cat’, presumably to avoid the concierge. Having reached the relative safety of terra firma, he arranged an eye-catching ‘bull’s blood’ jacket round his shoulders, pulled on an elegant pair of gloves and, carefully neglecting to button cuff or cravat, loped off with a boyish grin to impress his new editor. This mixture of craft and sartorial naïveté always remained: at the height of his fame he attended a Fancy Dress Ball with Gustave Doré, dressed as a baby with orange beads and a cotton bib.

By 1842, Tournachon had landed his first regular job, as Letters Editor on Le Commerce (he wrote them himself), and he began publishing short stories of Bohemian life, and finally a novel, La Robe de Déjanire (1846). These showed his lifelong understanding of poverty, and a characteristic combination of fulsome sentiment and black humour. He had also found his name: from Tournachon to Tournadard, an obscure, epistemological gallic joke, referring either to his satirical sting, or else to the tongue of flame (also dard) above his brow; and thence to the more economical and generally more marketable, Nadar. This signature now began to appear below little matchstick drawings, and at the age of twenty-seven, Nadar published a first caricature on the inside page of Charivari, the celebrated illustrated journal edited by Charles Philipon. Pictures, not words, suddenly began to flow from his pen.

The revolutionary events of 1848 precipitated Nadar into perhaps the most quixotic adventure of his entire career. It was nothing less than the liberation of Poland from the Prussians, by a volunteer column of 500 ultra-red republican Parisians, inspired by the rhetoric of the ageing Lamartine and the exiled Mickiewicz. Nadar proudly showed his falsified Polish passport round the cafés: ‘Age 27 years, height 1.98 metres, hair rust red, eyes protuberant, complexion bilious.’ The expedition ended in a prison near Magdeburg, but Nadar, irrepressible, was soon back in Paris looking for work with a Polish astrakhan cap perched proudly on his wild locks. Gérard de Nerval introduced him to a friendly editor: ‘This is Tournachon; he’s got lots of spirit, but he’s very crazy.’ The poet and the ex-Pole worked night shifts together, discussing ballooning – a shared enthusiasm – and politics, and sleeping on top of the warm printing presses. All the time, Nadar’s long fingers were drawing.

In the following spring, the editor Charles Philipon began to use Nadar’s caricatures regularly for his new illustrated magazine, Le Journal Pour Rire. Nadar’s professional friendship with the forty-three-year-old editor was to be the most influential of his life. A collection of eighty manuscript letters, which lies in the archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale, still unpublished, vividly traces the growth of a fraught but chaotically fruitful partnership. Philipon appears always thoughtful, severe, appreciative, fatherly; while Nadar is rumbustious, multifarious, and ceaselessly late with copy. Like Emile de Girardin of La Presse, Philipon belonged to the first great generation of mass-circulation editors in Paris, and Nadar rapidly became his star. By 1851 Nadar was being asked to produce as many as 100 separate caricatures a month.

It was thus that sheer pressure of demand created the first atelier Nadar, a vital cooperative formation which was to extend subsequently to his photographic work. Up to a dozen fellow craftsmen were soon employed on Nadar’s inimitable sketches and ideas, and transferring them to the wooden blocks sent for printing all over Paris. The atelier became a kind of syndicate, and his ubiquitous spidery N changed from an artist’s signature to ‘marque de fabrication’. In a press now forbidden, by Imperial decree, all direct political commentary, Nadar spawned an entire world of grotesque little homunculi, a myriad croquetons, in which all the famous writers, actors and painters of the day danced and gibbered in manic processions across the tabloids of Paris. ‘So then, we are lost’, sighed the frères Goncourt, ‘Nadar has now learnt to draw.’

But for Nadar himself, drawing remained the means only, not the long-sought object. The image, the outward physical projection of the inner, private, spiritual man, still obsessed him. How to capture it? And especially, how to capture it in that most elusive of creatures, his fellow writer? ‘How to draw out, for example,’ he asked himself, ‘in the wonderfully sympathetic face of Dumas père, the hints of exotic blood, how to press the simian analogy in a profile which seems a living proof of Darwin, and yet to emphasize above all the predominant note in his character, his extreme and inexhaustible generosity … without ever forgetting, as a final detail, the increased reduction of the conch of his already microscopic ear.’ Of Gautier, he wondered, ‘how not to travesty that oriental beauty, that Olympian serenity’; and of Baudelaire, how one might trace the fantastic combination of ‘strangeness and perfect sincerity’ in that ‘native from the land of the Griffin and the Chimera’. Always it was this good-humoured, but relentless search for the ressemblance morale of his subject.

Nadar’s files in the atelier now contained over 800 studies, including even interview notes and daguerreotypes. From this massive repository of images, Nadar created – with Philipon’s aid and advice – his first distinctive masterpiece, in 1854. This was his celebrated ‘Pantheon Nadar’, a vast single-sheet lithograph cartoon, showing a spiral cortege of over 240 contemporary writers and journalists, each minutely transformed into a jostling gargoyle of the creative spirit. With a printing investment of 200,000 francs, Nadar sold out; the sensation of the season.