But there was one final fine Parisian extravaganza before they departed: Napoleon and the Empress Marie-Louise were to visit the Senate in full state on 19 December. The weather was cold and wet, but Faraday stuck it out on the terrace of the Tuileries, and eventually the long procession of trumpeters, guards and officers of the court wound into sight. At the end of the procession Faraday caught a glimpse of Napoleon in an opulent carriage surmounted by fourteen footmen, ‘sitting in one corner of his carriage covered and almost hidden from sight by an immense robe of ermine, and his face overshadowed by a tremendous plume of feathers that descended from a velvet hat. The distance was too great to distinguish the features well, but he seemed of a dark countenance and somewhat corpulent’ The Emperor was received by his citizens in complete silence: ‘no acclamations were heard where I stood and no comments’.19
There were, however, joyful acclamations from some members of Sir Humphry Davy’s party in the morning of 29 December, for, as Faraday writes, ‘this morning we left Paris’.20
They were all elated. It was freezing cold, bad enough for Sir Humphry and Lady Davy sitting inside the carriage, but deadly for those outside in the air. They were heading for Nemours, forty miles south of Paris, to spend the night, but it was evening before they reached the Forest of Fontainebleau. There had been no heat in the sun all day, and by evening the trees were still covered in hoar frost. This moved Faraday to lilting, Coleridgean prose.
… we did not regret the severity of the weather, for I do not think I ever saw a more beautiful scene than that presented to us on the road. A thick mist which had fallen during the night and which had scarcely cleared away had by being frozen dressed every visible object in a garment of wonderful airiness & delicacy. Every small twig and every blade of herbage was encrusted by a splendid coat of hoar frost, the crystals of which in most cases extended above half an inch. This circumstance … produced an endless variety of shapes and forms. Openings in the foreground placed far-removed objects in view which in their airiness, and softened by distance, appeared as clouds fixed by the hands of an enchanter: then rocks, hills, valleys, streams and roads, then a milestone, a cottage or human beings came into the moving landscape and rendered it ever new and delightful.1
Sir Humphry was also moved to such pictorial levels of passionate exclamation as they galloped through the forest. The experience drew the romantic poet out of him, forty lines of passion. This is a sample:
The trees display no green, no forms of life;
And yet a magic foliage clothes them round,-
The purest crystals of pellucid ice,
All purple in the sunset …2
This poem captures an essential difference in outlook between Faraday and Davy. In worldly affairs Faraday was naïve, ignorant, and wilfully avoided considering political issues. His understanding of the very dangerous situation in France was practically non-existent. Blundering about a Parisian quarry, patently the uninformed Englishman, openly sketching Napoleon’s telegraph equipment, he was being careless in the extreme. He felt an unfortunate, but at the time perfectly commonplace, kind of juvenile superiority over the French and the Italians, and this emerges regularly in his account of the continental journey.
Davy, however, though feeling superior to most people around him, had political antennae. He saw the importance of racing to an understanding of what iodine was before Gay-Lussac got to it; knowledge was power. He saw, too, the importance of putting on a theatrical show of chemical effects for the French scientists, and making them nervous. And he saw the importance of not appearing impressed by the treasures in the Louvre. So, at the end of his versification, Davy gives the lines a twist, and turns them into poetry. He draws a picture of a golden eagle on the gorge at Fontainebleau:
… the bird of prey, –
Emblem of rapine and lawless power:
Such is the fitful change of human things:
An empire rises, like a cloud in heaven,
Red in the morning sun …
… soon its tints
Are darken’d, and it brings the thunder-storm, –
Lightning and hail, and desolation comes;
But in destroying it dissolves, and falls
Never to rise!
Davy could handle allegory; indeed his whole imaginative life was wreathed in it, his visionary writings were driven by it, and his later writings suggest that towards the end of his life he was taken over by it. Faraday, on the other hand, saw the natural world as part of the revealed truth, the real thing, and his life’s work came to be dedicated to understanding the purposes behind nature – God’s purposes, in his view – and to explaining them in their most direct terms to humanity.
Riding through the Forest of Fontainebleau as the winter’s day, and the year 1813, drew to their close, Davy and Faraday were separated by more than the roof of the carriage. Davy was inside, looking out of the window to the right or left. Faraday, however, sitting up with the driver and the luggage, could see from an aerial perspective the entire 360 degrees around him, and the zenith of the skies. The man of allegory was enclosed from the world; the budding scientist of revealed truth was out within the elements.
It took them five days to reach Lyons. Faraday writes of travelling hastily, faring meagrely and arriving ‘fatigued and at a late hour’ at one of their stops on the way.3 It was a difficult and uncomfortable trip, to say the least. But even after the ecstatic experiences of Fontainebleau there were more natural joys for them to witness. They set off before dawn, without knowing where they would sleep that night. ‘These dark hours however have their pleasures, and those are not slight which are furnished at such hours by the memory or the imagination,’ wrote Faraday. As the sun went down in the Burgundian hills they saw crepuscular rays, or ‘Zodiacal light’, as Faraday described it. ‘It appeared as an emanation of light in enormous rays from the sun into the expanse. There were about seven rays diverging upwards and sideways and ascending many degrees into the heavens. They continued for nearly half an hour …’.4
The horses splashed through the waters at the edge of the Loire as they galloped down to Lyons in the starlight. In the gorges of the Auvergne they walked ‘for some miles through these wild valleys and passes’, to rest the horses and for Sir Humphry to investigate the extinct volcanoes.5 This was one of the main purposes of this part of the journey – Napoleon himself wanted Davy to study volcanoes.6 ‘We seem tied to no spot, confined by no circumstances, at all hours, at all seasons and in all places,’ Faraday wrote, using words which have a distinct echo, remarkable in a young non-conformist, of a significant passage in the Anglican Holy Communion service.
We move with freedom. Our world appears extending and our existence enlarged. We seem to fly over the globe rather like satellites to it, than parts of it, and mentally take possession of every spot we go over … We have lived hard this last day of the year.7
But a few days into January 1814 they began to feel the welcome of the warm south. The weather gradually lost its icy grip, and their spirits rose at these first hints of a Mediterranean climate. Sir Humphry reached for his pencil:
The air is soft as in the month of June
In northern climes; a balmy zephyr blows,
And nothing speaks of winter’s harshest month
Save that the trees are leafless …8
Looking