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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 cafés 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 Orléans. 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.
Dominic Smith grew up in Australia
and now lives in Austin, Texas. He is a former recipient of
the Dobie Paisano Fellowship from the Texas Institute of Letters.
His short fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize
and is forthcoming with The Atlantic Monthly. Please
visit his website at www.dominicsmith.net.
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