The History of the Nineteenth Century in Caricature

The dangers which threatened Napoleon at this period were shown by Gillray in one of the most striking of all his cartoons, the "Valley of the Shadow of Death," which was issued September 24, 1808. The valley is the valley of Bunyan's allegory. The Emperor is proceeding timorously down a treacherous path, bounded on either side by the waters of Styx and hemmed in by a circle of flame. From every side horrors are springing up to assail him. The British lion, raging and furious, is springing at his throat. The Portuguese wolf has broken his chain. King Death, mounted on a mule of "True Royal Spanish Breed," has cleared at a bound the body of the ex-King Joseph, which has been thrown into the "Ditch of Styx." Death is poising his spear with fatal aim, warningly holding up at the same time his hour-glass with the sand exhausted; flames follow in his course. From the smoke rise the figures of Junot and Dupont, the beaten generals. The papal tiara is descending as a "Roman meteor," charged with lightnings to blast the Corsican. The "Turkish New Moon" is seen rising in blood. The "Spirit of Charles XII." rises from the flames to avenge the wrongs of Sweden. The "Imperial German Eagle" is emerging from a cloud; the Prussian bird appears as a scarecrow, making desperate efforts to fly and screaming revenge. From the "Lethean Ditch" the "American Rattlesnake" is thrusting forth a poisoned tongue. The "Dutch Frogs" are spitting out their spite; and the Rhenish Confederation is personified as a herd of starved "Rats," ready to feast on the Corsican. The great "Russian Bear," the only ally Napoleon has secured, is shaking his chain and growling—a formidable enemy in the rear.

Gillray's caricature entitled "John Bull Taking a Luncheon; or, British Cooks Cramming Old Grumble-Gizzard with Bonne Chère," shows the strange-appearing John of the caricature of that day sitting at a table, overwhelmed by the zealous attentions of his cooks, foremost among whom is the hero of the Nile, who is offering him a "Fricassée à la Nelson," a large dish of battered French ships of the line. John is swallowing a frigate at a mouthful. Through the window we see Fox and Sheridan, representative of the Broad Bottom administration, running away in dismay at John Bull's voracity.

As Gillray retires from the field several other clever artists stand ready to take his place, and chief among them Rowlandson. The latter had a distinct advantage over Gillray in his superior artistic training. He was educated in the French schools, where he gave especial attention to studies from the nude. In the opinion of such capable judges as Reynolds, West, and Lawrence, his gifts might have won him a high place among English artists, if he had not turned, through sheer perversity, to satire and burlesque. Rowlandson's Napoleonic cartoons began in July, 1808. These initial efforts are neither especially characteristic nor especially clever, but they certainly were duly appreciated by the public. Joseph Grego, in his interesting and comprehensive work upon Rowlandson, says of them:

"It is certain that the caricaturist's travesties of the little Emperor, his burlesques of his great actions and grandiose declarations, his figurative displays of the mean origin of the imperial family, with the cowardice and depravity of its members, won popular applause ... And when disasters began to cloud the career of Napoleon, as army after army melted away, ... the artist bent his skill to interpret the delight of the public. The City competed with the West End in buying every caricature, in loyal contest to prove their national enmity for Bonaparte. In too many cases, the incentive was to gratify the hatred of the Corsican rather than any remarkable merit that could be discovered in the caricatures. Very few of these mock-heroic sallies imprint themselves upon the recollection by sheer force of their own brilliancy, as was the case with Gillray, and frequently with John Tenniel. Rowlandson and Cruikshank are risible, but not inspired."

On July 8 Rowlandson began his series with "The Corsican Tiger at Bay." Napoleon is depicted as a savage tiger, rending four "Royal Greyhounds," quite at his mercy. But a fresh pack appears in the background and prepares for a fierce charge. The Russian bear and Austrian eagle are securely bound with heavy fetters, but the eagle is asking: "Now, Brother Bruin, is it time to break our fetters?"

"The Political Butcher" bears date September 12 of the same year. In this print the Spanish Don, in the garb of a butcher, is cutting up Bonaparte for the benefit of his neighbors. The body of the late Corsican lies before him and is being cut up with professional zeal. The Don holds up his enemy's heart and calls upon the other Powers to take their share. The double-headed eagle of Austria is swooping upon Napoleon's head: "I have long wished to strike my talons into that diabolical head-piece"; the British bulldog has been enjoying portions of the joints, and thinks that he would "like to have the picking of that head." The Russian bear is luxuriously licking Napoleon's boots, and remarks, "This licking is giving me a mortal inclination to pick a bone."

The final failure of the Spanish campaign is signalized, September 20, in a cartoon labeled "Napoleon the Little in a Rage with his Great French Eagle." The Emperor, with drawn sword and bristling with rage, threatens the French imperial eagle, larger than himself. The bird's head and one leg are tied up—the result of damage inflicted by the Spaniards. "Confusion and destruction!" thunders Napoleon, "what is this I see? Did I not command you not to return until you had spread your wing of victory over the whole of Spain?" "Aye, it's fine talking," rejoins the bird, "but if you had been there, you would not much have liked it. The Spanish cormorants pursued me in such a manner that they set me molting in a terrible way. I wonder that I have not lost my feathers. Besides, it got so hot I could not bear it any longer."

In August, 1809, Rowlandson published "The Rising Sun." Bonaparte is surrounded by the Continental powers, and is busy rocking to sleep in a cradle the Russian bear, securely muzzled with French promises. But the dawn of a new era is breaking: the sun of Spain and Portugal is rising with threatening import. The Emperor is disturbed by the new light: "This rising sun has set me upon thorns." The Prussian eagle is trussed; Denmark is snuffed out. But Austria has once more taken heart: "Tyrant, I defy thee and thy cursed crew!"

The victories of the Peninsular war, and later of the disastrous Russian campaign, called forth an ever-increasing number of cartoons, which showed little mercy or consideration to a fallen foe. A sample of the titles of this period show the general tendency; he is the "Corsican Bloodhound," the "Carcass-Butcher"; he is a jail-bird doing the "Rogues' March to the Island of Elba." An analysis of a few of the more striking cartoons will serve to close the survey of the Napoleonic period. "Death and Bonaparte" is a grewsome cartoon by Rowlandson, dated January 1, 1814. Napoleon is seated on a drum with his head clasped between his hands, staring into the face of a skeleton Death, who is watching the baffled general, face to face. Death mockingly parodies Napoleon's attitude. A broken eagle, the imperial standard, lies at his bony feet. In the background the Russian, Prussian, Austrian, and other allied armies are streaming past in unbroken ranks, routing the dismayed legions of France.

"Bloody Boney, the Corsican Butcher, Left off Trade and Retiring to Scarecrow Island" is the title of still another of Rowlandson's characteristic cartoons. In it Napoleon is represented as riding on a rough-coated donkey and wearing a fool's cap in place of a crown. His only provision is a bag of brown bread. His consort is riding on the same beast, which is being unmercifully flogged with a stick labeled "Bâton Maréchal."

Napoleon's escape from Elba was commemorated by Rowlandson in "The Flight of Bonaparte from Hell Bay." In it the foul fiend is amusing himself by letting his captive loose, to work fresh mischief in the world above. He has mounted the Corsican upon a bubble and sends him careering upward back to earth, while hissing dragons pour forth furious blasts to waft the bubble onward.

"Hell Hounds Rallying around the Idol of France" is the title of still another of Rowlandson's designs, which appeared in April, 1815. The head and bust of the Emperor drawn on a colossal scale, a hangman's noose around his throat, is mounted on a vast pyramid of human heads, his decapitated victims. Demons are flying through the air to place upon his brow a crown of blazing pitch, while a ring of other excited fiends, whose features represent Maréchal Ney, Lefebre, Davoust and others, with horns, hoofs, and tails, are dancing in triumph around the idol they have replaced. Closely resembling this cartoon of Rowlandson is the German cartoon, which is reproduced in these pages, showing a double-faced Napoleon topping a monument built of skulls. Rowlandson's "Hell Hounds Rallying around the Idol of France" was the last English cartoon directed against Napoleon when he was at the head of France. Two months later the Emperor's power was finally broken at Waterloo.

PART II
FROM WATERLOO THROUGH THE CRIMEAN WAR

CHAPTER VII
AFTER THE DOWNFALL

With the downfall of Napoleon the Gillray school of caricature came to an abrupt and very natural close. It was a school born of fear and nurtured upon rancor—a school that indulged freely in obscenity and sacrilege, and did not hesitate to stoop to kick the fallen hero, to heap insult and ignominy upon Napoleon in his exile. Only during a great world crisis, a death struggle of nations, could popular opinion have tolerated such wanton disregard for decency. And when the crisis was passed it came to an end like some malignant growth, strangled by its own virulence. The truth is that Gillray and Rowlandson led caricature into an impasse; they deliberately perverted its true function, which is, to advance an argument with the cogent force of a clever orator, to sum up a political issue in terms so simple that a child may read, and not merely to echo back the blatant rancor of the mob. In the hands of a master of the art it becomes an incisive weapon, like the blade with which the matador gives his coup-de-grace. Gillray's conception of its office seems to have been that of the red rag to be flapped tauntingly in the face of John Bull; and John Bull obediently bellowed in response. It would be idle to deny that for the purpose of spurring on public opinion, the Napoleonic cartoons exercised a potent influence. They kept popular excitement at fever heat; they added fuel to the general hatred. But when the crisis was passed, when the public pulse was beating normally once more, when virulent attacks upon a helpless exile had ceased to seem amusing, there really remained no material upon which caricature of the Gillray type could exercise its offensive ingenuity. What seemed justifiable license when directed against the arch-enemy of European peace would have been insufferable when applied to British statesmen and to the milder problems of local political issues. Another and quite practical reason helps to explain the dearth of political caricature in England for a full generation after the battle of Waterloo, and that is the question of expense. A public which freely gave shillings and even pounds to see its hatred of "Little Boney" interpreted with Gillray's vindictive malice hesitated to expend even pennies for a cartoon on the corn laws or the latest ministerial changes. In England, as well as on the Continent, caricature as an effective factor in politics remained in abeyance until the advent of an essentially modern type of periodical, the comic weekly, of which La Caricature, the London Punch, the Fliegende Blätter, and in this country Puck and Judge, are the most famous examples. The progress of lithography made such a periodical possible in France as early as 1830, when La Caricature was founded by the famous Philipon; but the oppressive laws of censorship throughout Europe prevented any wide development of this class of journalism until after the general political upheaval of 1848.

It would be idle, however, to deny that Gillray exerted a lasting influence upon all future caricature. His license, his vulgarity, his repulsive perversion of the human face and form, have found no disciples in later generations; but his effective assemblage of many figures, the crowded significance of minor details, the dramatic unity of the whole conception which he inherited from Hogarth, have been passed on down the line and still continue to influence the leading cartoonists of to-day in England, Germany, and the United States, although to a much less degree in France. Even at the time of Napoleon's downfall the few cartoons which appeared in Paris were far less extreme than their English models, while the German caricaturists, on the contrary, were extremely virulent, notably the Berliner, Schadow, who openly acknowledged his indebtedness to the Englishman by signing himself the Parisian Gillray; and Volz, author of the famous "true portrait of Napoleon"—a portrait in which Napoleon's face, upon closer inspection, is seen made up of a head of inextricably tangled dead bodies, his head surmounted by a bird of prey, his breast a map of Europe overspread by a vast spider web, in which the different national capitals are entangled like so many luckless flies. Had there been more liberty of the press, an interesting school of political cartoonists might have arisen at this time in Germany. But they met with such scanty encouragement that little of real interest is to be gleaned from this source until after the advent of the Berlin Kladderadatsch in 1848, and the Fliegende Blätter, but a short time earlier.

CHAPTER VIII
THE "POIRE"

Throughout the Napoleonic period England practically had a monopoly in caricature. During the second period, down to the year 1848, France is the center of interest. Prior to 1830, French political cartoons were neither numerous nor especially significant. Indeed they present a simplicity of imagination rather amusing as compared with the complicated English caricatures. A hate of the Jesuits, a mingling of liberalism, touched with Bonapartism, and the war of newspapers furnished the theme. The two symbols constantly recurring are the girouette, or weather-cock, and the éteignoir, or extinguisher. Many of the French statesmen who played a prominent part during the French Empire and after the Restoration changed their political creed with such surprising rapidity that it was difficult to keep track of their changes. They were accordingly symbolized by a number of weathercocks proportioned to the number of their political conversions, Talleyrand leading the procession, with not less than seven to his credit. The éteignoir was constantly used in satire directed against the priesthood, the most famous instance appearing in the Minerva in 1819. It took for the text a refrain from a song of Beranger. In this cartoon the Church is personified by the figure of the Pope holding in one hand a sabre, and, in the other, a paper with the words Bulls, crusades, Sicilian vespers, St. Bartholomew. Beside the figure of the Church, torch in hand, is the demon of discord. From the smoke of the torch of the demon various horrors are escaping. We read "the restoration of feudal rights," "feudal privileges," "division of families." Monks are trying to snuff out the memory of Fénelon, Buffon, Voltaire, Rousseau, Montaigne, and other philosophers and thinkers. For ten years the caricaturists played with this theme. A feeble forerunner of La Caricature, entitled Le Nain Jaune, depended largely for its wit upon the variations it could improvise upon the girouette and upon the éteignoir.

Yet it would be a mistake to suppose that French art was quite destitute of humorists at the beginning of the century. M. Armand Dayot, in a monograph upon French caricature, mentions among others the names of Isabey, Boilly, and Carle Vernet as rivaling the English cartoonists in the ingenuity of their designs, and surpassing them in artistic finish and harmony of color. "But," he adds, "they were never able to go below the surface in their satire. It would be a mistake to enroll in the hirsute cohort of caricaturists these witty and charming artists, who were more concerned in depicting the pleasures of mundane life than in castigating its vices and irregularities." The 4th of November, 1830, is a momentous date in the history of French caricature. Prior to that time, French cartoons, such as there were, were studiously, even painfully, impersonal. Thackeray, in his delightful essay upon "Caricatures and Lithography," in the "Paris Sketch Book," describes the conditions of this period with the following whimsical allegory:

"As for poor caricature and freedom of the press, they, like the rightful princess in a fairy tale, with the merry fantastic dwarf, her attendant, were entirely in the power of the giant who rules the land. The Princess, the press, was so closely watched and guarded (with some little show, nevertheless, of respect for her rank) that she dared not utter a word of her own thoughts; and, as for poor Caricature, he was gagged and put out of the way altogether."

On this famous 4th of November, however, there appeared the initial number of Philipon's La Caricature, which was destined to usher in a new era of comic art, and which proved the most efficacious weapon which the Republicans found to use against Louis Philippe—a weapon as redoubtable as La Lanterne of Henri Rochefort became under the Second Empire. Like several of his most famous collaborators, Charles Philipon was a Meridional. He was born in Lyons at the opening of the century. He studied art in the atelier of Gros. He married into the family of an eminent publisher of prints, M. Aubert, and was himself successively the editor of the three most famous comic papers that France has had, La Caricature, Charivari, and the Journal pour Rire. The first of these was a weekly paper. The Charivari appeared daily, and at first its cartoons were almost exclusively political. Philipon had gathered around him a group of artists, men like Daumier, Gavarni, Henry Monnier, and Traviès, whose names afterward became famous, and they united in a veritable crusade of merciless ridicule against the king, his family, and his supporters. Their satire took the form of bitter personal attacks, and a very curious contest ensued between the government and the editorial staff of the Charivari. As Thackeray sums it up, it was a struggle between "half a dozen poor artists on the one side and His Majesty Louis Philippe, his august family, and the numberless placemen and supporters of the monarchy on the other; it was something like Thersites girding at Ajax." Time after time were Philipon and his dauntless aids arrested. More than a dozen times they lost their cause before a jury, yet each defeat was equivalent to a victory, bringing them new sympathy, and each time they returned to the attack with cartoons which, if more covert in their meaning, were even more offensive. Perhaps the most famous of all the cartoons which originated in Philipon's fertile brain is that of the "Pear," which did so much to turn the countenance of Louis Philippe to ridicule—a ridicule which did more than anything else to cause him to be driven from the French throne. The "Pear" was reproduced in various forms in La Caricature, and afterward in Le Charivari. By inferior artists the "Pear" was chalked up on walls all over Paris. The most politically important of the "Poire" series was produced when Philipon was obliged to appear before a jury to answer for the crime of provoking contempt against the King's person by giving such a ludicrous version of his face. In his own defense Philipon took up a sheet of paper and drew a large Burgundy pear, in the lower parts round and capacious, narrower near the stalk, and crowned with two or three careless leaves. "Is there any treason in that?" he asked the jury. Then he drew a second pear like the first, except that one or two lines were scrawled in the midst of it, which bore somehow an odd resemblance to the features of a celebrated personage; and, lastly, he produced the exact portrait of Louis Philippe; the well-known toupet, the ample whiskers—nothing was extenuated or set down maliciously. "Gentlemen of the jury," said Philipon, "can I help it if His Majesty's face is like a pear?" Thackeray, in giving an account of this amusing trial, makes the curious error of supposing that Philipon's naïve defense carried conviction with the jury. On the contrary, Philipon was condemned and fined, and immediately took vengeance upon the judge and jury by arranging their portraits upon the front page of Charivari in the form of a "Pear." In a hundred different ways his artists rang the changes upon the "pear," and each new attack was the forerunner of a new arrest and trial. One day La Caricature published a design representing a gigantic pear surmounting the pedestal in the Place de la Concorde, and bearing the legend, "Le monument expia-poire." This regicidal pleasantry brought Philipon once more into court. "The prosecution sees in this a provocation to murder!" cried the accused. "It would be at most a provocation to make marmalade." Finally, after a picture of a monkey stealing a pear proved to be an indictable offense, the subject was abandoned as being altogether too expensive a luxury.

CHAPTER IX
THE BAITING OF LOUIS PHILIPPE

But although the "Pear" was forced to disappear, Philipon continued to harass the government, until Louis Philippe, who had gained his crown largely by his championship of the freedom of the press, was driven in desperation to sanction the famous September laws, which virtually strangled its liberty. Yet, in spite of the obstacles thrown in their way, the work of Philipon and of the remarkable corps of satirical geniuses which he gathered round him, forms a pictorial record in which the intimate history of France, from Charles X.'s famous coup d'état down to the revolution of 1848, may be read like an open book. The adversaries of the government of 1830 were of two kinds. One kind, of which Admiral Carrel was a type, resorted to passionate argument, to indignant eloquence. The other kind resorted to the methods of the Fronde; they made war by pin-pricks, by bursts of laughter, with all the resources of French gayety and wit. In this method the leading spirit was Philipon, who understood clearly the power that would result from the closest alliance between la presse et l'image. Even before La Caricature was founded the features of the last of the Bourbons became a familiar subject in cartoons. Invariably the same features are emphasized; a tall, lank figure, frequently contorted like the "india-rubber man" of the dime museums; a narrow, vacuous countenance, a high, receding forehead, over which sparse locks of hair are straggling; a salient jaw, the lips drawn back in a mirthless grin, revealing huge, ungainly teeth, projecting like the incisors of a horse. In one memorable cartoon he is expending the full crushing power of these teeth upon the famous "charter" of 1830, but is finding it a nut quite too hard to crack.

From the very beginning La Caricature assumed an attitude of hostile suspicion toward Louis Philippe, the pretended champion of the bourgeoisie, whose veneer of expedient republicanism never went deeper than to send his children to the public schools, and to exhibit himself parading the streets of Paris, umbrella in hand. Two cartoons which appeared in the early days of his reign, and are labeled respectively "Ne vous y frottez pas" and "Il va bon train, le Ministère!" admirably illustrate the public lack of confidence. The first of these, an eloquent lithograph by Daumier, represents a powerfully built and resolute young journeyman printer standing with hands clinched, ready to defend the liberty of the press. In the background are two groups. In the one Charles X., already worsted in an encounter, lies prone upon the earth; in the other Louis Philippe, waving his ubiquitous umbrella, is with difficulty restrained from assuming the aggressive. The second of these cartoons is more sweeping in its indictment. It represents the sovereign and his ministers in their "chariot of state," one and all lashing the horses into a mad gallop toward a bottomless abyss. General Soult, the Minister of War, is flourishing and snapping a military flag, in place of a whip. At the back of the chariot a Jesuit has succeeded in securing foothold upon the baggage, and is adding his voice to hasten the forward march, all symbolic of the violent momentum of the reactionary movement.

It was not likely that the part which Louis Philippe played in the revolution of 1789, his share in the republican victories of Jemappes and of Valmy, would be forgotten by those who saw in him only a pseudo-republican, a "citizen king" in name only, and who seized eagerly upon the opportunity of mocking at his youthful espousal of republicanism. The names of these battles recur again and again in the caricature of the period, in the legends, in maps conspicuously hung upon the walls of the background. An anonymous cut represents the public gazing eagerly into a magic lantern, the old "Poire" officiating as showman: "You have before you the conqueror of Jemappes and of Valmy. You see him surrounded by his nobles, his generals, and his family, all ready to die in his defense. See how the jolly rascals fight. They are not the ones to be driven in disgrace from their kingdom. Oh, no!" Of all the cartoons touching upon Louis Philippe's insincerity, probably the most famous is that of Daumier commemorating the death of Lafayette. The persistent popularity of this veteran statesman had steadily become more and more embarrassing to a government whose reactionary doctrines he repudiated, and whose political corruption he despised. "Enfoncé Lafayette!... Attrapé, mon vieux!" is the legend inscribed beneath what is unquestionably one of the most extraordinary of all the caricatures of Honoré Daumier. It represents Louis Philippe watching the funeral cortège of Lafayette, his hands raised to his face in the pretense of grief, but the face behind distorted into a hideous leer of gratification. M. Arsène Alexandre, in his remarkable work on Daumier, describes this splendid drawing in the following terms: "Under a grey sky, against the somber and broken background of a cemetery, rises on a little hillock the fat and black figure of an undertaker's man. Below him on a winding road is proceeding a long funeral procession. It is the crowd that has thronged to the obsequies of the illustrious patriot. Through the leafage of the weeping willows may be seen the white tombstones. The whole scene bears the mark of a profound sadness, in which the principal figure seems to join, if one is to judge by his sorrowful attitude and his clasped hands. But look closer. If this undertaker's man, with the features of Louis Philippe, is clasping his hands, it is simply to rub them together with joy; and through his fingers, half hiding his countenance, one may detect a sly grin." The obsequious attitude of the members of Parliament came in for its share of satirical abuse. "This is not a Chamber, it is a Kennel," is the title of a spirited lithograph by Grandville, representing the French statesmen as a pack of hounds fawning beneath the lash of their imperious keeper, Casimir Périer. Another characteristic cartoon of Grandville's represents the legislature as an "Infernal laboratory for extracting the quintessence of politics"—a composition which, in its crowded detail, its grim and uncanny suggestiveness, and above all its bizarre distortions of the human face and form, shows more plainly than the work of any other French caricaturist the influence of Gillray. A collection of grinning skulls are labeled "Analysis of Human Thought"; state documents of Louis Philippe are being cut and weighed and triturated, while in the foreground a legislator with distended cheeks is wasting an infinite lot of breath upon a blowpipe in his effort to distill the much-sought-for quintessence from a retort filled with fragments of the words "Bonapartism," "anarchy," "equality," "republic," etc. One of the palpable results of the "political quintessence" of Louis Philippe's government took the form of heavy imposts, and these also afforded a subject for Grandville's graphic pencil. "The Public Thrown to the Imposts in the Great Pit of the Budget" first appeared in La Caricature. It represented the various taxes under which France was suffering in the guise of strange and unearthly animals congregated in a sort of bear pit, somewhat similar to the one which attracts the attention of all visitors to the city of Berne. The spectacle is one given by the government in power for the amusement of all those connected in any way with public office: in other words, the salaried officials who draw their livelihood from the taxes imposed upon the people. It is for their entertainment that the tax-paying public is being hurled to the monsters below—monsters more uncouth and fantastic than even Mr. H. G. Wells's fertile brain conceived in his "War of the Worlds," or "First Men in the Moon." Daumier in his turn had to have his fling at the ministerial benches of the government of July—the "prostituted Chamber of 1834." At the present day, when the very names of the men whom he attacked are half forgotten, his famous cartoon, "Le Ventre Législatif," is still interesting; yet it is impossible to realize the impression it must have made in the days when every one of those "ventrigoulus," those rotund, somnolent, inanely smiling old men, with the word "bourgeoisie" plainly written all over them, were familiar figures in the political world, and Daumier's presentment of them, one and all, a masterly indictment of complacent incapacity. As between Daumier and Grandville, the two leading lights of La Caricature, there is little question that the former was the greater. Balzac, who was at one time one of the editors of La Caricature, writing under pseudonym of "Comte Alexandre de B.," and was the source of inspiration of one of its leading features, the curious Etudes de Genre, once said of Daumier: "Ce gaillard-là, mes enfants, a du Michel-Ange sous la peau." Balzac took Daumier under his protection from the beginning. His first counsel to him was: "If you wish to become a great artist, faites des dettes!" Grandville has been defined by later French critics as un névrosé, a bitter and pessimistic soul. It was he who produced the cruelest compositions that ever appeared in La Caricature. He had, however, some admirable pages to his credit, among others his interpretation of Sebastian's famous "L'Ordre règne à Varsovie." Fearfully sinister is the field of carnage, with the Cossack, with bloody pique, mounting guard, smoking his pipe tranquilly, on his face the horrible expression of satisfaction over a work well done. Grandville also conceived the idea, worthy of a great cartoonist, of Processions and Cortèges. These enabled him to have pass before the eye, under costumes, each conveying some subtle irony or allusion, all the political men in favor. Every occasion was good. A religious procession, and the men of the day appeared as choir boys, as acolytes, etc. Un vote de budget, and then it was une marche de bœuf gras, with savages, musketeers, clowns forming the escort of "M. Gros, gras et bête." It is easy to guess who was the personage so designated. Nothing is more amusing than these pages, full of a verve, soutenue de pince sans rire.

Another cartoon bearing upon the same subject represents Liberty wearing a Phrygian cap, driving the chariot of the sun. The King and his ministers and judges, above whom a crow hovers ominously, flapping its black wings, are seeking to stop the course of liberty by thrusting between the spokes of the wheels sticks and rods inscribed "Lawsuits against the Press," while Talleyrand comes to their aid by throwing beneath the wheels stones symbolizing "standing armies," "imposts," "holy alliance," and so forth. This cartoon is inscribed: "It would be easier to stop the course of the sun," and is the work of Traviès, who is best known as the creator of the grotesque hunchback figure, "Mayeux."

CHAPTER X
MAYEUX AND ROBERT MACAIRE

A peculiar feature of French caricature, especially after political subjects were largely forbidden, was the creation of certain famous types who soon became familiar to the French public, and whose reappearances from day to day in new and ever grotesque situations were hailed with growing delight. Such were the Mayeux of Traviès and the Macaire and Bertrand of Daumier, who in course of time became as celebrated, in a certain sense, as the heroes of "The Three Musketeers." In his "Curiosités Esthétiques" Beaudelaire has told the story of the origin of Mayeux. "There was," he says, "in Paris a sort of clown named Le Claire, who had the run of various low resorts and theaters. His specialty was to make têtes d'expression, that is, by a series of facial contortions he would express successively the various human passions. This man, a clown by nature, was very melancholy and possessed with a mad desire for friendship. All the time not occupied in practice and in giving his grotesque performances he spent in searching for a friend, and when he had been drinking, tears of solitude flowed freely from his eyes. Traviès saw him. It was a time when the great patriotic enthusiasm of July was still at its height. A luminous idea entered his brain. Mayeux was created, and for a long time afterward this same turbulent Mayeux talked, screamed, harangued, and gesticulated in the memory of the people of Paris."