Faraday: The Life

Everybody was questioned and thoroughly searched. Faraday had his hat removed by an official, and it was patted and prodded and inspected, and laid carefully on the deck. Then he was frisked, and his pockets and clothes inspected. He had to take off his shoes so that the officials could ensure there were no secret messages stuffed into them. He was found to be clean – they all were – and they were allowed to pass. But the letters they had written as they waited in the harbour were confiscated, and they were firmly told that they were not permitted to write home about their arrival and reception in France. If they were caught doing so, they risked arrest as spies.

The order was given to unload the party’s carriage and luggage, and

immediately the crew of Frenchmen pounced on them and conveyed them in every direction and by the most awkward and irregular means into the barge alongside, and this with such an appearance of hurry and bustle, such an air of business and importance and yet so ineffectually that sometimes nine or ten men would be round a thing of a hundred pounds weight, each most importantly employed, and yet the thing would remain immovable until the crew were urged by their officer or pushed by the cabin boy.

Released of its cargo and passengers, the cartel sailed for home, and ‘with no pleasurable feeling’, Faraday watched it go. By now the loaded barge was stuck in the mud as the tide flowed out. So they waited some more, and as the evening drew on Faraday watched the same phosphorescence that he had seen out at sea becoming visible in the ebb tide, rising and falling in brightness, disappearing and reappearing. When the waters rose again they felt the barge creaking and shifting heavily, and beginning to make a quiet way upriver between high wooded banks in the moonlight. They landed at the town quay, took essential luggage with them, and were led on foot through filthy streets to the only hotel in Morlaix. They thought that this could not possibly be the place, as a horse wandered idly through the front door. But, yes, this was it – ‘one of the dirtiest pig-sties I ever saw … I sat down without consideration in a very hungry plight for supper. It was clean and with my appetite its quality was no object, and being also considerably fatigued I had no difficulty in going to sleep, though singularly accommodated.’

After breakfast in the unspeakable hotel, they went down quickly to the Customs House where their belongings had been taken. They waited ‘patiently or otherwise for some time looking on our things but not daring to touch them. At last business commenced.’

The local soldiery marched up and formed a ragged line on the edge of the quay. Then thirty or forty inhabitants of Morlaix tumbled chattering out of the town and down the steps to help unload the belongings of this exotic party that had just blown in – enemy English, civilian, finely dressed and seemingly immune from touch of the law. Banging, bumping and crashing, the crowd leapt into the barge, ‘seized some one thing, some another and conveyed them to the landing place above … destitute of all method and regularity. It seemed as if a parcel of thieves was scampering away with what was not their own.’

The townsfolk had the greatest difficulty with the carriage. There were no cranes on the quay so they had to heave its bits up, chassis and cabin swaying dangerously amidst the muddle of willing hands. With the carriage waiting in pieces, all the travellers’ possessions were taken into the Customs House and laid out, with a soldier posted at every door. First the carriage was searched, ‘all the corners and crannies for what they could find and thumped over every part of [it] to discover hollow and secret places’.

Then, ‘disappointed in their hopes of booty from the carriage’, they came inside and started on the luggage. ‘They seemed determined to make up for their loss here. Package after package was opened, roll after roll unfolded, each pair of stockings unwrapped and each article of apparel shaken.’

Again they found nothing suspicious, but confiscated two or three dozen new cotton stockings for good measure. Davy, who had restrained himself for long enough, now lost patience. The stockings were theirs; they were marked with their names; they needed them for the journey. Perhaps threats followed, and if they had no effect, a bribe did the trick. ‘At last the business ended with everything in the possession of the rightful owners, and a gift to the officers for their polite attentions.’

So the workforce got on with the business of reassembling the carriage. They had none of the proper tools, just brute force and glimmering common sense: ‘’tis true they made the job appear a mighty one, but they got through it, and after having exclaimed “levez, levez” for an hour or two everything was in a moveable state and horses being tied to, we proceeded in order to the Hotel’.

If they had hoped to be on their way directly, they were disappointed. Just one more formality, messieurs, mesdames. The Governor of the town had to check with Paris, ‘to learn whether the government continues in the same mind as now, that they were in when they sent Sir H Davy his passport to England. If it does not we of course are prisoners.’

It took another day for the good news to get back from Paris to Morlaix, and for the party to be cleared for onward travel. In the meantime Faraday had time to walk about.

I cannot refrain from calling this place the dirtiest and filthiest imaginable. The streets are paved from house to house with small sharp stones, no particular part being appropriated to foot passengers. The kennels are full of filth and generally close to the house. The places [squares] and corners are occupied by idle loiterers who clothed in dirt stand doing nothing.

Horses, pigs (the strangest kind of pig, more like greyhounds, Faraday thought), poultry, human beings ‘or whatever has connection with the [hotel] or the stables and pigsties beyond’ passed indiscriminately through. This was the same everywhere in the town. Idlers, beggars and nondescripts hung about the fires in the hotel’s kitchens, chatting and getting in the way. There was an extraordinary mixture of luxury and squalor: ‘on the left of the passage is a dining room ornamented with gilded chairs, tables and frames, but with broken windows and stone floors … [and] if pigs do not go upstairs at least animals as dirty do’.

The next morning the party got their permission to proceed. The postillion – ‘mostly a young, always a lively man’, Faraday generalised of the profession of hired local coachmen – gave a laugh and showed off his jackboots as he walked stiffly from the fireside to the horses to prepare for the journey. Faraday’s interest in high technical detail brings him to describe fully the appearance, purpose, weight (fourteen to twenty pounds a pair) and construction of the jackboot, the iron and leather leg armour that protected the postillion, who rode the near-side lead horse, from breaking his legs in an accident. The party climbed aboard the carriage to their allotted places, the postillion checked the trappings, clambered up to his saddle, fixed his jackboots into position and tucked in his coat. With a glance back at the driver, he cracked his whip, ‘a most tremendous weapon to dogs, pigs and little children. With a handle of about 30 inches, it has a thong of 6 or 8 feet in length, and it is constantly in a state of violent vibratory motion over the heads of the horses, giving rise to a rapid succession of stunning sounds.’

There was Faraday, ever-ready with his observing eye, out in the air on top of the coach, and off they went with a lurch towards Paris. They had hoped to cover the ground like the wind, the whip-thong crackling over the heads of the horses. But the roads were potholed and rutted, and they were shaken about desperately. They may not have considered just how big France is. The distance between Morlaix and Paris is about the same as that between Land’s End and Dover, a major expedition by the standards of the day. One dark evening outside Rennes a horse stumbled and broke its traces. While they were waiting in the cold for the postillion to calm the animals and refix the harness, Faraday saw a glow-worm shining on the road. He had never seen one before, and its light entranced him. He picked it up, poked at it, watched how its light came from two luminous spots which brightened and faded, brightened and faded and then failed altogether. ‘On examining it afterwards … I found it to be a small black worm not three fourths of an inch in length and having no parts particularly distinguished as those which had been luminous.’

They lumbered late into Rennes and put up at the cold and desolate post house, which Faraday describes in the tones of a gothic novelist, reminiscent of Mrs Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho: ‘from being built of stone, from containing long galleries, winding stone stairs, narrow passages, deserted rooms &c [it] strongly reminded me of the interior of a romantic castle, and a black man as cook, attendant &c wonderfully assisted the fancy’.

They carried on through Laval, Alençon and Dreux, picking up bread and wine in villages on the way, putting up at post houses and huddling in front of miserable fires. Faraday noticed that travellers were provided with firewood in the bedrooms, but the wood was always green, and needed bellows to keep it alight – and of course, there were never any bellows to be had. Late on the seventh day after leaving Morlaix, the party approached Paris. Thirty or forty miles out, the roads began to improve, practical signs of the effects of Napoleon’s public works strategy. The roads were straight, and for four or five miles would stretch ahead in a line, and then, with a slight bend would stretch on again. ‘The eye,’ Faraday writes, ‘is enabled to perceive at once all it will see for the next hour [and] the expectation slackens and a monotonous effect is produced.’

They had their last change of horses in the square in front of the Palace of Versailles, and then off they went for Paris, rolling up outside the Hôtel d’Autriche, ‘where I cannot imagine we shall stop. It is deficient in common accommodation, and yet withal it bears a very respectable character.’

As quickly as they reasonably could, the party moved on to the Hôtel des Princes, a highly fashionable and well-appointed hotel at the northern end of the rue de Richelieu. The Hôtel des Princes was one of the most sumptuous in Paris, brightly lit, panelled and furnished throughout with marble-topped furniture which, perhaps after conversation with Davy, Faraday identified:

One beautiful slab is valued at 800 livres. It is formed of various minerals arranged mosaically and contains between four and five hundred specimens, among which are Porphyry, Serpentine, Marble, Sulphate of Baryta, Carcareous Spar, Fluor Spar, Lapis Lazuli, Jasper, Agate &c &c &c. The appearance of the whole being very beautiful. There are also in these apartments three fine large slabs of black encrina marble, in one of which was the head of an animal.

The expectations Faraday had had when he set off for France were that he would act as Sir Humphry’s valet until they reached Paris, where a replacement would be hired. He would attend Sir Humphry at his scientific work ‘as his assistant in experiments and in writing’,

at meetings with men of science, and would continue to learn from him as he had at the Royal Institution in London. But from the evidence of the diaries he was left much to his own devices in Paris, and during the thirty-one days they remained there on only six does he note that he was attending Sir Humphry on scientific duties. He must have been working with him as a secretary or accompanying him on other days, but he was fairly well lost, ignored and depressed on his first full day in Paris, Friday, 29 October.

I am here in the most unlucky and irritating circumstances possible … I know nothing of the language or of a single being here, added to which the people are enemies & they are vain … I must exert myself to attain their language so as to join in their world.

His spirits perked up the next day when he accompanied Davy to meet Davy’s old friend Thomas Underwood. Described by John Davy as ‘an artist of some talent, with a fondness for science’,

Underwood had been a proprietor of the Royal Institution in its early days, and indeed had recommended in 1800 that Davy be appointed as Lecturer. He and Davy had travelled in England together, making a geological tour to Cornwall in 1801.

But Underwood was a republican, and had made too many approving noises in England about the French Revolution. He went to France in 1802, but after the Peace of Amiens had ended the following year, was arrested by the French. Napoleon, however, tolerated him, and licensed him to stay as a ‘détenu’ in Paris, where he patrolled the fringes of the Emperor’s court, and appears to have been on good terms with the Empress Josephine.

As a foreigner, Underwood had a pass to enter the Louvre at will, and he took Davy and Faraday to see the treasures that Napoleon’s armies had amassed during their victorious years in Europe. This was a special concession, given so that foreign visitors could enjoy and take back good reports of the riches of the imperial museums, and of how well the looted treasures were being cared for. Works of art and antiquities had been removed as spoils of war from the Vatican, from Italian Papal and city states, and from the Netherlands, Flanders and other subject nations, to be displayed in the Louvre.

Since the first haul had arrived in 1797 French people and foreigners had flocked to see them at the Musée Napoleon, the shiny new revolutionary name for the former palace.

I saw the Galerie Napoleon today but I scarcely know what to say of it. It is both the Glory and the disgrace of France … [W]hen memory brings to mind the manner in which the works came here and views them only as the gains of violence and rapine she blushes for the people that even now glory in an act that made them a nation of thieves.

Sir Humphry Davy had a rather different response to seeing the treasures. He remarked with a sniff, ‘What an extraordinary collection of fine frames,’

and stalked out, unable to stomach the injustice of the cull of works of art from vanquished nations. Faraday, however, showed no such political instinct, and took his opportunity to see as much as he could of ‘the works of the old and most eminent masters’. He noted the ancient Greek statues, including the Apollo, Laocoön, Venus de Medici, Hercules and the Dying Gladiator, and the paintings ‘in a gallery of enormous length … some thousands of pieces’. Walking out of the Louvre, Faraday passed the multi-coloured Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, raised eight years earlier in honour of Napoleon in ‘the rarest and most valuable marbles’, and crowned with the four bronze horses sequestered from St Mark’s, Venice. He carried on through the Tuileries and turned north across the rue de Rivoli to the place Vendôme. Taking a candle, he climbed to the top of the column erected to Napoleon, and looked out wide over Paris.

For the next eleven days, Faraday seems to have explored the centre of the city very thoroughly, walking about on his own.

He was dismissive of the Seine, ‘a very poor dirty river, not at all what I expected to find it. It has of course no tide, and is therefore almost unfit for navigation, at least such as is required by a large city. Scarcely anything moves on it but charcoal barges and washing houses.’

The grandeur of imperial Paris also struck him – the statues, fountains and gardens of the Tuileries – ‘It is the Parisian lounge and is much frequented’ – and the programme of ‘sticking up N’s in every spot central and lateral where they can. This is a principle scrupulously attended to in every public work. The Museum and the Gallery &c abound with N’s and silently recall the Emperor to mind at every step and turn.’

But as a natural-born analyst, Faraday is engaged most of all by observing how the city works as an organism – the generous public water supply, the way wood is brought in for fuel from the north by barge, the washerwomen working in their dozens in the fountains and from barges on the river, and above all the Parisian road systems. Encircling the city at different distances from the centre, he noted, were ‘two circles of boulevards … two great circumscribing roads’, the inner and outer tree-lined rings shaded in the summer and autumn, with ‘shops, stalls, coffee houses and various places of public amusement’ presenting ‘a light, airy, pleasant and inviting variety’. How different this all was from London, where there were no gushing fountains, no broad encircling boulevards, no wide roads at all to speak of except the new Portland Place, and no embankments on the river. Paris, however, was built for the fierce heat of summer and for public show, it is a summer and autumn city, at its best when the people dress up and spill out onto the walks and pavés. But beyond the imperial façade, ‘the streets of Paris are in general narrow. At the same time there are many of great length and width and noble appearance, but the number is not so great as might be expected in a city so much vaunted.’

Faraday had to leap for his life, and risk being soaked in the flooded central drain, to avoid the cabriolets which ‘men drive furiously and make streets already dangerous from the absence of foot paths still more so’. He became footsore from the street surface of stones ‘very small and sharp to the foot’, but despite that, over those few days he walked for miles.

There was an undercurrent of excitement in Paris, a kind of thrill or frisson at the naughtiness of it all; how different it was from the home life of the devout Faraday family. Michael Faraday was not yet a Sandemanian, not having made a Confession of Faith, but nevertheless he found the French hard to take. Living with Sir Humphry and Lady Davy, socialites both, both with a more flexible outlook on the proprieties of life, he had to maintain what he could of his moral defence and religious observance with no help from his employer: ‘Travelling … I find is almost inconsistent with religion (I mean modern travelling) and I am yet so old-fashioned as to remember strongly (I hope perfectly) my youthful education.’

The casual attitude in Paris to the Sabbath, ‘a day of pleasure instead of work’, bemused him. Shops were open as usual, and ‘accordingly you will find the streets as gay on such a morning as this as on any other morning, and without a good memory or an almanack it would be difficult to tell the Sabbath from other days, for no visible distinctions exist’.

They shut their shops earlier on Sundays, Faraday noted, ‘but why do they shut them up? To go to the theatre.’

Faraday’s account of autumn and early winter 1813 in Paris is unique not only because he was himself so perceptive, fluent and lengthy in his diary, but also because there were no British visitors half as articulate as he in Paris at this time. A flood of Britons had come to the city in autumn 1802 during the short-lived Peace of Amiens, and the flood would briefly become a torrent after April 1814 when Napoleon was removed to Elba, and then permanently after June 1815, when Paris was an occupied city once again. Among the new influx would be two Scotsmen, Walter Scott, whose Paul’s Letters to his Kinsfolk (1816) gave a vivid picture of occupied Paris, and the painter Andrew Robertson, whose journal of autumn 1815 in Paris boils over with enthusiasm at his first experience of an extraordinary foreign culture. Like Faraday, he was taken aback by the Parisians’ lax attitude to the Sabbath: ‘it is quite orthodox to go from the theatre to the church and vice versa’.

But Michael Faraday alone drew an Englishman’s picture of a tense Paris in the months before Napoleon’s first downfall.

A week or so after arrival, Faraday had to apply for a passport, and present himself at the Prefecture of Police, ‘an enormous building containing an infinity of offices’ opposite Nôtre Dame. Nobody would tell him which of the infinity was the one for him, until he had paid for the information. Then a door was pointed out to him, and behind it twenty clerks were sitting behind twenty desks and twenty enormous ledgers, each with a long queue of people in front of him waiting to be dealt with. What little French Faraday might have picked up in the past few days deserted him now, and, tongue-tied, he became the centre of attention. A handy American noticed his discomfort, and helped him explain himself, but was bemused when he saw a Frenchman calmly making out a passport for an enemy Englishman. Faraday got a squint at the ledger, and seeing Sir Humphry Davy’s name written down ahead of his, was told that he and Sir Humphry were the only two free Englishmen in Paris at that time.

‘A round chin, a brown beard, a large mouth, a great nose &c &c’ was how the passport clerk unflatteringly described Faraday.

He does not wear a beard in any subsequent portrait, so we might conclude that he grew his beard either as a youthful extravagance, or because with his valet’s duties for Sir Humphry, he did not have time to shave himself. Besides all the optimistic exhortations written on the passport asking Parisian authorities to respect and aid the travellers as required, the paragraph which pleased Faraday most was the one which gave him free entry to museums, libraries and other public property on any day of the week.

The first duty for Sir Humphry that Faraday records was to accompany him on 11 November to the Imperial Library, now the Bibliothèque Nationale, a hundred yards down the rue de Richelieu from their hotel. ‘Any person of a decent appearance may go in,’ Faraday writes, and books could be read at the tables provided. ‘By a proper application to the principal Librarian’, books could also be borrowed for a few days. This was a novelty to both Davy and Faraday, and it may be that one purpose of Davy’s visit, if not also to consult particular books, was to study the library’s organisation and see if he could begin to advocate such a system at home: ‘It contains an immense number of books in all languages and on all subjects arranged in several long galleries separated into divisions.’

In the library galleries Faraday saw the bronze cast of Louis Garnier’s Le Parnasse Française (1718–21; now at Versailles), a three-foot-high sculpture of Mount Parnassus surmounted by Apollo, and peopled with figures of the great French writers of the seventeenth century. There were rooms of rare manuscripts, antiquities and, where two galleries met, a wooden model of the pyramids of Egypt. But what particularly caught his eye were two globes, about fifteen feet in diameter, ‘the largest I believe that have ever been made’, set at either end of the library, and projecting through two floors.

So, with much sightseeing and walking the streets, the bright young boulevardier passed his time in Paris. Over the next few days he tried, but failed, to get into a sugar factory to see how the French manufactured sugar from beet, and tried, but failed the first time, to visit the museum at the Jardin des Plantes – ‘but I got a fine walk in the Garden, and found amusement for some hours’. He had ‘an easy walk’ around the Palais Royal, now ‘a collection of public exhibitions, coffee houses, shops &c.’, and in the evening, with another Englishman ‘who had been in France 12 years’ (this was most probably Thomas Underwood again), went to a coffee house ‘said to belong to the handsomest lady in Paris. She is always in the room and is one of the principal attractions.’

There is more than a trace of exasperation in Faraday’s account, a reflection perhaps of his Sandemanian desire for plainness, at the excesses of decoration and sumptuousness that he found at the Palais Royal:

Pillars of marble rise from the floor to the ceiling; glasses and piers line the walls of the room and garlands of flowers run from one to the other. Luxury here has risen to its height and scarcely any thing more refined or more useless can be conceived.