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Once he had been shown the door into the Royal Institution, everything that happened subsequently to Faraday came as a result of his own efforts, determination and self-possession. The letters to Abbott amply demonstrate the calibre of the intellect that Riebau had taken on as an apprentice, and that Sir Humphry Davy had now engaged. Within three months of starting as Davy’s assistant, Faraday had become by observation as much an expert on lectures and lecturing techniques as anybody in London. There are four long letters to Abbott which examine in detail the finer and the coarser points of the art of lecturing, and consider too a lecturer’s needs, his equipment, illustrations, the design of the lecture theatre, its ventilation, seating, sight-lines, and entrance and exit arrangements. The most extraordinary thing about this is that Faraday, who had done no public lecturing himself, and who had not experienced any university lecturing, with its syllabuses, regular classes and so on, should so rapidly find the key to clarity in an art that was so widely abused. His notes, since they were first published in 1870,
have for more than a hundred years been widely and influentially used as benchmarks to guide aspiring lecturers. The only other person in Faraday’s ken who had come to lecturing afresh was Sir Humphry Davy himself in his professional journey from Penzance and Bristol to London. Between them they comprised the new wave of lecturing techniques, and re-invented the art.
Sir Humphry Davy threw Faraday in at the deep end. A month after he had begun at the Royal Institution, Faraday was working with Davy on the same nitrogen trichloride that had blown Dulong’s finger off, and sent glass into Davy’s eye. Faraday coolly told Abbott, ‘I have been engaged this afternoon in assisting Sr H in his experiments on it during which we had two or three unexpected explosions.’
We know practically all there is to know about how to make nitrogen trichloride from Faraday’s letters to Abbott. The new explosive had great military potential, and, from the post-Cold War perspective of two hundred years later, it is revealing how unconcerned Davy, a man of the establishment and deeply anti-French, was about the security of information about the explosive.
Davy may not have given his assistant much warning about what might happen when the greasy, butter-like compound, which smelt curiously of almonds, was put into a basin of water, and then phosphorus was added to it. They concocted the compound itself the same day by making up solutions of ammonium nitrate and ammonium chloride, and then, using a scrupulously clean air jar, inverting over them some ‘fresh made pure clean’ chlorine gas. There is a note of triumph in the expression of that recipe – Davy was inordinately proud of chlorine. There must be no trace of oil, grease or any other impurities anywhere in the equipment, and it was Faraday’s job to see that everything was spotless. By now Davy was fully confident of his assistant’s care and dexterity in handling fragile laboratory equipment, his attention to detail and his physical bravery. A month after taking Faraday on Davy was prepared to trust his young assistant to work side by side at the bench with him on murderous substances.
Davy and Faraday began by keeping the ammonium solutions as cold as possible by surrounding the basins with ice, but soon they relaxed that operation as they found it slowed the process down. When the chlorine came into contact with the solution, the liquid began to rise dramatically up the jar, and drops of yellow oil rose and then gently dropped down into the liquid to lie as an oily layer at the bottom. They found slightly different rates of absorption between the nitrate and the chloride, but the compound that lurked at the bottom of the retort was more or less the same in both versions of the experiment.
Having formed itself, this compound then began to give off nitrogen very actively. The liquid seethed with a sharp, stinging smell, ‘bringing forth tears in abundance it excites also a very disagreeable sensation in the nostrils and lungs’. When separated from the liquid the compound solidified in a buttery way, and lay pregnant with potential on its dish. This was where the excitement began again. Davy and Faraday put a tiny piece of it into some water and dropped some phosphorus into the basin. Suddenly, bang! – the whole thing exploded, shattering the basin and throwing glass, earthenware, water and the remains of the evil compound up into the air and everywhere. The two men were shocked, but slowly raised their heads above the bench as the clink of precipitated glass fragments died away. They tried once more to tame the beast by reversing the process and adding the compound to the phosphoric solution. This made a sudden flame, but there was no explosion. While they were doing the experiment, Davy blithely reminded his assistant how he had nearly blinded himself the past autumn by trying to heat it up.
Another of Faraday’s jobs that afternoon was to collect the compound together from the various retorts and basins. This he did very gingerly, knowing its explosive power in combination. Davy was not discouraged by the dangers – they seemed to empower him – and this gave confidence to his assistant. Together they set to work again on new ways of attacking the chloride of nitrogen. They tried mixing hydrochloric acid with it in a glass tube, and this caused a rush of gas out of the liquid, filling the tube with bubbles ‘which expanded as they ascended in a beautifull manner to fourteen or fifteen times their original bulk and the tube quickly became full of this gas’. The gas was piped to a trough of water, and its smell and colour immediately revealed it to be chlorine, with a tiny admixture of oxygen. The resulting precipitate was ammonium chlorate. They tried the trick again, this time with nitric acid, and nitrogen alone came off. Then they tried a third time, with a solution of potash. For a fourth time, Davy told Faraday to do it with ammonia, and this immediately produced thick acrid smoke, ammonium chloride, which filled the laboratory, making them both choke violently. Once the smoke had cleared they took some more glass bowls and tubes and tried again with ammonia. The smaller tubes constrained the reaction, but in an instant the whole lot exploded. That brought the experiments to an end, and it was Faraday who had to clear up the mess.
The next day they tried again, this time with yet more violent results. There were four big explosions in the laboratory that day,
audible throughout the building. Perhaps they caused some alarm, and staff ran downstairs to see what had happened; or perhaps the Royal Institution, being used to the Professor’s stinks and bangs, took little notice. So the Professor and his new boy carried on, undaunted, ducking down behind the bench when they felt the need. They wore glass masks, which were some protection, but the day’s work came to an abrupt end when Faraday had his hand nearly blown apart. The tube he was looking at rather too closely exploded in front of his face, blew violently out of his hand, shattered his mask and took part of his fingernail with it.
Working side by side, the two men were the vanguard, the thin line between the known and the unknown. In his first Elements lecture, Davy stressed the importance of instruments, and the progress that had been made in chemical discovery simply through the development of new, better and yet more ingenious pieces of equipment. ‘Nothing,’ he wrote, ‘tends so much to the advancement of knowledge as the application of a new instrument.’
Davy was a gadgets man, perfectly at home with glass tubes, bottles and retorts, ground glass stoppers and brass taps and mounts, jointing them together like infinitely variable skeletal remains, with gutta percha, caoutchouc, string or wax or a combination of some of these, though safety was never taken much notice of.
We know nothing of the talk that went on between Davy and his assistant in the laboratory. Davy, who had recently enlarged and published his Elements of Chemical Philosophy lectures, cannot possibly have been silent about them to his companion as they worked together. In a later remark, Faraday described Davy as ‘a mine inexhaustible of knowledge & improvement’,
and it is likely that that knowledge and improvement will have emerged, by demonstration and example, from the mine from their first day together. Davy will have shown Faraday the importance and efficacy of accurate and accurately-made instruments. Engravings in the back of the Elements volume suggest that the equipment was neat and precise, but the reality at Davy’s chaotic bench, where instruments might have to be devised on the spot at speed, was rather different. Davy, quick in movement, might carry on several unconnected experiments at the same time, and ‘was perfectly reckless of his apparatus, breaking and destroying a part in order to meet some want of the moment … With Davy, rapidity was power.’
Faraday, who was himself already an expert maker of electrical equipment, was more careful and circumspect, perhaps shocked by Davy’s bullish approach. But he had much to tell Davy about his own experiences with batteries, electrolysis, the making of crystals and so on, and with two such articulate and involved men on common ground the talk cannot have been idle.
The importance of chemistry, its role as a civilising force in world affairs, was a topic that Davy had written about extensively. Chemistry in the early nineteenth century had been shown by Davy to be the key to industrial and economic progress in peace and war. The manufacture of porcelain and glass, dyeing and tanning, advances in medicine and agriculture, improvements in the composition and manufacture of gunpowder, were all dependent on the growth of chemical knowledge, and that, in its turn, depended on the progress that Sir Humphry Davy was personally making in his laboratory in the Royal Institution basement. In his correspondence with Abbott Faraday revealed that his own private experiments were careful and ordered, and followed more or less a course of self-improvement in science. What may once have seemed to Faraday, through Tatum’s lectures and his conversations with friends, to be an involved and complex subject, dissolved through talk with Davy into a perspective of reasoned, reassuring and repeatable processes. Davy saw the simplicity of the subject, the inter-connectedness of chemical laws, and he put this across clearly in his writings:
It is indeed a double source of interest in this science, that whilst it is connected with the grand operations of nature, it is likewise subservient to the common processes as well as the most refined arts of life … Complexity almost always belongs to the early epochs of any science; and the grandest results are usually obtained by the most simple means.
In putting the discipline to which he had dedicated his life and health into its place, Davy brought comfort and reassurance to Faraday, quite as much as he imparted knowledge. Working and talking with Davy, Faraday found a structure for his knowledge, and a purpose for acquiring and categorising it. He now had somebody with whom to share his instinctive appreciation of the visual beauty of chemicals – the sheer, relentless black of carbon, the yellow of sulphur, purple of potassium – and their changes in colour, nature, texture, state, even taste if they were bold enough, that took place in reactions in the laboratory. The harmony, novelty and magic of the chemical names that tripped upon the tongue – silicium, aluminium, zirconium, ittrium, glucium, manganese, zinc, tin, iron, lead, antimony, bismuth, tellurium, cobalt, copper, nickel, palladium, uranium, osmium, tungsten, titanium, columbium, cerium, iridium, rhodium, mercury, silver, gold, platina (now ‘platinum’) – all these wonderful names had run in their turn from Davy’s own pen,
and through the smoke and fume of experiment many must have found their moment in conversation.
Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday are connected for all time as teacher and pupil, master and assistant, milord and valet, tyrant and subject. From a perspective of two hundred years, however, they stand at equal but separate stature. Michael Faraday’s upbringing, with its twin constraints of impending poverty and strict religion, had a third ingredient of tight urban boundaries. Unlike Davy, who roamed the Cornish moors as a youth and declaimed poetry into the winds, Faraday did not see a moor, or any wild space, or much green, until he travelled abroad with his master. Davy wrote poetry, and had friends among poets, and his interconnected lifelong series of personal quests for discovery began through his poetic writing as he divined the nature of the earth and his place in it. The core of his achievement is in the isolating, naming and proving of unique entities – nitrous oxide, chlorine, potassium, iodine, the Davy Lamp – each a link in a chain. By the time he died in 1829 he was separated from the culture to which he had contributed so much by illness, distance and attitude. His final years, spent apart from his wife and wandering in Europe, found him speaking largely to himself in a series of visionary writings about travel, the rise and fall of civilisations, interplanetary voyaging and fishing. Davy was a man of the early Romantic movement – prodigious, interrogative, eye-catching and original are words that illuminate him.
In the late summer of 1813 Sir Humphry and Lady Davy laid plans for a tour, lasting perhaps two or three years, to France, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, and thence into Greece and Turkey. The first object was to enable Davy to collect the medal awarded him by the Emperor Napoleon and the Institut de France for his electrochemistry. This itself had been the cause of controversy, of accusations of treating with the enemy. Davy wrote to Thomas Poole:
Some people say I ought not accept this prize; and there have been foolish paragraphs in the papers to that effect; but if two countries or governments are at war, the men of science are not. That would indeed be a civil war of the worst description: we should rather, through the instrumentality of men of science, soften the asperities of national hostility.
Along the route Davy planned to meet, talk and experiment with the continental scientists with whom he had corresponded. Though Britain was at war with France, Davy, a scientist renowned in France and now honoured by Napoleon, obtained a passport for himself and his party. This comprised his wife, her lady’s maid, his Flemish valet La Fontaine, a footman, and Michael Faraday as Davy’s assistant. Sir Humphry had not had personal staff before, this was an introduction of Jane’s: a man in his position must have a valet. A few days before departure, however, the valet’s wife refused to let her husband go to Boney’s France for so long, and Faraday was asked to do his job, with the promise that Davy would hire a replacement in Paris. Attending to Sir Humphry’s personal needs was not quite what Faraday had bargained for, but he could hardly refuse and risk being left behind.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow about 1 o’clock,’ Faraday wrote briefly to Benjamin Abbott early in October, perhaps to give him the news,
and on 13 October 1813 the party of five set off.
CHAPTER 4 ‘The Glorious Opportunity’ (#ulink_7902ccee-f769-592d-9644-7431fcf4d8e8)
At eleven o’clock on that crisp autumn morning the coach rolled off from the Davys’ house in Grosvenor Street. Sir Humphry and Lady Davy and the lady’s maid travelled inside the shining black carriage; Michael Faraday and the footman were outside, on the roof, with the driver. Those three had to stand all the force of the weather, but they also got the fresh air and the view, and for Faraday this was central to his enjoyment of the journey and his record of it.
In one of the fullest and most exciting travel documents of the period, Faraday wrote a long account of his tour with the Davys.
The peculiarity of the Journal is not only its detail or its length – nearly four hundred pages of Faraday’s fluent hand, whippy, spiky letterforms, sloping elegantly to the right – but its purpose and arrangement. The volume contains descriptions of two extended tours made by Faraday, the first to Europe from October 1813 until April 1815, the second to south Wales in 1819. The accounts blend into one another: on page 46 the continental diary breaks off in mid-sentence and, after a blank sheet or two, dives straight into 150 pages on the Welsh trip. Then the continental journey takes over again, with a description of the Parisian water supply, and leads us for a six-month dance through France, over the Alps, down to Genoa, Turin, Florence, Siena and Rome, where it cuts off again in mid-sentence, this time finally. A diary of the subsequent months of the journey, to Naples, back to Rome, into Switzerland and Germany, and back to Italy again before returning home is now lost, but long extracts were published in Henry Bence Jones’s biography of Faraday in 1870.
The document that we have must be a second version, written up from initial notes, at home in some of the long evenings before Faraday married in 1821.
A pencil note inside the front cover gives his reasons for writing the diary:
This journal is not intended to mislead or to inform or to convey even an imperfect idea of what it speaks. The sole use is to recall to my mind at some future time the things I see now and the most effectual way to that will be I conceive to write down be they good or bad or however imperfect my present impressions.
The keeping of the diary was thus Faraday’s attempt to grapple with the chronic memory loss which dogged him from his youth in bouts and flashes, an inability to recall anything from common events to complex thoughts, and which would lead him to deep melancholia and threaten at times to destroy his career. This also drove his compulsion, encouraged by Isaac Watts’s advice, to take detailed notes, and to write them up – from John Tatum’s and Humphry Davy’s lectures, and from his own laboratory experiments. The deliberate and full process of laboratory notes that Faraday practised and introduced as a standard for all scientists thereafter derived not so much from a desire to record, as from his deep-seated and desperate fear of forgetting.
Everything Faraday writes of the days on the move comes from the elevated perspective of the top of the carriage, is bathed in the light of day, and swings with the rhythm of the coach. He was apprehensive when they set off – quite naturally, for as he wrote in his opening paragraphs, he had never before ‘within my recollection’ been further than twelve miles from London. ‘But curiosity has frequently incurred dangers as great as these and therefore why should I wonder at it in the present instance.’
‘This morning formed a new epoch in my life,’ he mused, as he awaited the fresh curving landscapes and the insights to come.
The party trotted off along Park Lane to Hyde Park Corner, through Kensington and west towards Hammersmith and Kew. Their destination that evening was Amesbury, north of Salisbury, eighty-five miles away along what is now the A30. At the comfortable pace of ten miles per hour, with a change of horses at Basingstoke, they should have made it before nightfall. The next morning was cooler, probably cloudy. They skirted the edge of Salisbury Plain, seeing Stonehenge across the fields, but made all speed for Exeter, where they ‘arrived rather late and put up for the night’, Faraday wrote. ‘I have before me at this time the Cathedral but it is too dark to see it distinctly.’
If the first two days’ journey was a novelty for Faraday, the third was a revelation: ‘Reached Plymouth this afternoon. I was more taken by the scenery today than by anything else I have ever seen. It came upon me unexpectedly and caused a kind of revolution in my ideas respecting the nature of the earth’s surface.’
The first sight of Dartmoor and the journey round its southern edge had been the jolt that, by his own admission, first took Faraday out of the limited horizons of London, into the beginnings of a new world view. No amount of reading of Ali Baba or of the Encyclopaedia Britannica had prepared him for it: ‘The mountainous nature of the country continually put forward new forms and objects and the landscape changed before the eye more rapidly than the organ could observe it. This gave me some ideas of the pleasures of travelling and have [sic] raised my expectations to future enjoyments to a very high point.’
Appetite whetted, Faraday and the party retired to bed at the Commercial Inn in Plymouth: ‘Travelling I take it is fatiguing work but perhaps a little practice will enable one to bear it better.’
It was in Plymouth that Faraday’s Journal, and his journey, really began. What survives of the manuscript is a narrative of eighteen months’ adventure by an extraordinarily receptive young man who has been lifted by accident, perseverance and a succession of events from the humdrum life of a bookbinder’s apprentice to stand beside the greatest man of science of the day. There was pain with the pleasure, for although Sir Humphry Davy was instructive and sympathetic to his assistant, and had undoubtedly answered his questions about the geology of Devonshire, he was changeable, and could be vain, high-handed, and overly deferential to his difficult wife. For her part, Lady Davy was snappy and irritable, particularly to the servants, and especially to Faraday. Until the promised replacement for the absent valet came in Paris, Faraday had some extra duties to perform. There was Sir Humphry’s shaving to attend to, the laying out of his clothes in the mornings, the ascertaining of proper standards in the hotels and inns they stayed at, the marshalling of the hotel staff and other servants, and the disposal of the contents of his master’s nightly piss-pots, a chemistry lesson in itself.
They had hoped to leave Plymouth the morning after their arrival on a cartel, a ship licensed to ply between countries at war, carrying messages, essential mail, and prisoners for exchange. But the wind was too high, had been for several days, and had generated an ‘enormous swell of waters which comes rolling in from the Atlantic ocean’.
This was Faraday’s first sight of the sea. Its strength surprised and entranced him, and over the next few days he observed it with the eye of a natural scientist. The ship’s captain, however, was observing it with a sailor’s eye, and the following day, Sunday, 17 October, he warned the party that having dismantled and loaded the carriage and stowed the luggage, they should come on board to prepare to leave at a moment’s notice. This may have been the first time that Faraday had failed to attend a meeting at the Sandemanian chapel on the Sabbath, and as the continental journey unrolls it becomes clear that he is not as fully committed to the Sandemanianism of his parents as we might expect. He is at best semi-detached, and allows himself to come close to the pleasures of worldly temptation. His first cultural shock came, however, before leaving Plymouth, when he and the party found themselves suddenly and unexpectedly caught in one of the practices of Jewish law that he had read about in Leviticus.
Davy needed to change some money into francs, but as it was the ninth day of the Jewish Feast of the Tabernacles the money-changers in Plymouth refused to do business until after sunset. So the captain devised a charade. He put his watch forward, closed the shutters, lit some candles and assured the money-changers that, yes, the sun had now set, and they really did need to change their money and set sail for France on the tide. ‘He would have prevailed,’ wrote Faraday, spotting the transparent collusion between the captain and the money-changers. But just as a money-changer was ‘about to take the bag out of his pocket, his wife came and to his sorrow told him the hour. And as she knew that he then knew it, he patiently and we impatiently waited until the sun was beneath the horizon.’
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While this went on, the captain sailed the ship out of the harbour on the evening tide, and lay waiting in the Sound. With time ticking away, Sir Humphry and his party changed their money, pocketed their francs, jumped into a little boat at the quay, sailed with all speed to catch the cartel and clambered breathlessly aboard.
There was a good swell running that night. The Davys had a cabin, but Faraday stayed on deck, pacing up and down, sitting wrapped in a blanket, leaning on the rail, drinking it all in. His excitement at the new experience of the wind in his face on a night sea voyage rises up out of his Journal. What he writes has a youthful, prosaic directness about it which engages and endears. His impressions are still very present nearly two hundred years later, and we breathe the sea-salt with him. Early in the voyage he is entranced by the phosphorescence shining in the water as the ship’s bow cuts through the waves; he has ‘a fine opportunity of observing the luminous appearance of the sea and was amused by it for a long time. The prow … seemed to turn up a vast number of luminous bodies about the size of peas.’
As day came on and the light increased, Faraday captured the roll of the sea, the rise and fall of the ship, the distance of the far horizon, and the cold green darkness of the wave troughs. A French privateer passed by, a speck in the distance, but although the captain did his best to point it out to him, Faraday could not spot it. There was nothing to be seen ‘except sky and immense waves striding one after the other at a considerable distance. These as they came to us lifted up our small vessel and gave us when on their summits a very extended horizon, but we soon sank down into the valleys between them and had nothing in view but the wall of waters around us.’
They made landfall at Morlaix on the Brittany coast too late in the evening to disembark, so had to anchor and spend ‘another night tossed about on the waters. The evening was very fine but cold. I found the deck however a better place than the cabin.’
When he first saw France Faraday had pangs of ‘regret for home’, intermingled with fear and apprehension. At eleven o’clock in the morning they sailed past the guard ship, their flag of truce flying,
and came to anchor in the harbour. There they had to wait, writing letters home and amusing themselves with the cabin boy’s banter, until an official was ready to come aboard to give permission to land. The sudden arrival of an enemy ship in a small French port was a significant event, and the local officials needed time to prepare themselves, agree procedure and puff themselves up. This was a big day in Morlaix. They may not have known that the ship’s party included the great natural philosopher Sir Humphry Davy and his entourage, landing with a passport approved by Napoleon himself. The functionaries gathered themselves together, and ‘late in the afternoon the mighty man of office came attended by several understrappers and a barge full of Frenchmen apparently beggars and porters’.
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.
