Faraday: The Life. James Hamilton

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.’⁴²

      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’.⁴³ 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’.⁴⁴ 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.⁴⁵ 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.’⁴⁶

      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.’⁴⁷

      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.⁴⁸

      He walked through the markets, and noted their organisation into separate sections for poultry, flour, vegetables, meat and corn: ‘They are in general small and roofed over.’

      On 18 November, the day after he had failed to get into the museum of the Jardin des Plantes on his own, Faraday returned there with Sir Humphry to meet Nicolas Louis Vauquelin, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Paris, highly respected as the discoverer of chromium. This discovery, in 1798, brought Vauquelin plaudits from the revolutionary French government, and secured him the post of official assayer of precious metals for Paris when Napoleon became First Consul in 1799. The year before Davy and Faraday’s visit, Vauquelin had isolated glucinium, a white metal obtained from the semi-precious gem beryl, later to be named beryllium. His area of study was among these special metals and their compounds, whose common property was an entrancing chromatic quality, something which gave added delight to Davy and Faraday when they discussed his work with him and saw his specimens.

      Many years later, Davy wrote some notes about the scientists he had met in Paris.⁴⁹ He had been quite taken aback by Vauquelin’s domestic ménage. On his first visit (on 31 October; this may have been without Faraday) he had been ushered into Vauquelin’s bedchamber, which doubled as a drawing room, where he also met the scientist’s two elderly housekeepers, sisters of an even more eminent chemistry professor, Antoine Fourcroy. One of the sisters was sitting up in the bed, peeling truffles for the kitchen, and Vauquelin insisted on Davy being given some for breakfast.

      ‘Nothing could be more extraordinary than the simplicity of his conversation,’ Davy wrote.⁵⁰ By ‘simplicity’, he means ‘lewdness’: ‘[Vauquelin] had not the slightest tact, and, even in the presence of young ladies, talked of subjects which, since the paradisical times, never have been the objects of common conversation.’ By now, as Davy put it,