The frontispiece (plate 4), a round composition in which a devil carrying a great scroll hovers against a lurid sky over the Gothic gateway of the Palais de Justice, is a sinister design. The Tomb of Molière (plate 23), tail-piece to the set, was etched on the same plate, and a proof exists from the undivided copper containing both designs. The verses following the frontispiece are a comment on the latter, and express Meryon’s conviction that the city of Paris, “Paris le Paradis des amours et des Ris,” is possessed by a “noir Diabloton, malicieux, mutin,” fostered by science, and that this “méchant animal, Origine du mal” cannot be exorcised without razing the city to the ground. These etched verses are very rare. The symbolical coat of arms of the city of Paris (plate 5) is another of the minor pieces inserted in 1854, when the set was being completed. Then follows Le Stryge (plate 6), etched in 1853, one of the most original and impressive of all Meryon’s etchings. His elbows propped on the ledge of the balcony, one of the Gothic monsters of the western towers of Notre-Dame broods with head in hands and lolling tongue, an enigmatical and evil expression in his eye, over the city of Paris seen far below, with the Tour St. Jacques as the most prominent object. Jackdaws circle in the air about the towers, and graven beneath the oval, in one state only of the plate, is the sinister couplet:—

The delicacy of the work, in fine proofs, is beyond the power of any mechanical process to reproduce. Two pencil studies, formerly in the Macgeorge collection, are very interesting as showing Meryon’s conscientious method of preparation for this plate. He made one very highly finished drawing of all that is seen of the city of Paris down below, reserving blank spaces for the Stryge and for the Tour St. Jacques—there is also a trial state of the plate, showing that all this portion of the design was etched first, directly from this drawing—and then another equally finished drawing of the tower and the stone monster by themselves, with all the rest of the subject drawn in outline, probably traced from the first drawing. A drawing by Meryon of another of the monsters of Notre Dame, a monkey, with a set of verses written beside it, is reproduced in Bouvenne’s “Notes et Souvenirs.” Then follows Le Petit Pont (plate 7), in which the twin towers of Notre-Dame, beautifully placed on the plate, surmount the long rows of houses on the Quai du Marché Neuf and dominate the whole composition. The outline drawing which Meryon made from the level of the shore, showing the towers very much lower, is reproduced in M. Delteil’s catalogue. L’Arche du Pont Notre-Dame (plate 8), especially in the beautiful proofs on green paper, is one of the most charming of the whole series and free from any eccentricity. La Galerie Notre-Dame (plate 9) is a very beautiful rendering of Gothic architecture, and a most delicate study of effects of light, direct and reflected. The impressions vary much, some being rich in tone and rather veiled, others clean wiped and of a silvery clearness. The highly finished drawing which Meryon etched almost in facsimile, only adding clouds in the sky, was in the Macgeorge collection.

La Rue des Mauvais Garçons (plate 10), which formed the cul-de-lampe or tail-piece of the first livraison of “Eaux-Fortes sur Paris,” has always impressed modern observers as one of the most powerful and impressive of the etchings, fraught with mystery, enigmatic, suggestive of long past tragedies. “Quel mortel habitait,” are the verses etched on the building, “En ce gîte si sombre? Qui donc là se cachait Dans la nuit et dans l’ombre?” Was it Virtue, in silent poverty; was it Crime? No answer to the riddle is attempted. The street exists no longer.

La Tour de l’Horloge (plate 11) was drawn and etched in 1852 while alterations were in progress which materially altered the appearance of Le Châtelet. This plate has always struck me as being a very straightforward and masterly portrait of a building, but without so much personal expression as Meryon generally contrived to impart to his other etchings. An edition of 600 copies of Delteil’s sixth state was published in L’Artiste in 1858, and it was only after this large edition had been struck off that Meryon made a rather important change in the plate, which appears in the last two states, by making rays of light issue, somewhat unaccountably, from the windows between the high square tower and the first of the round ones. Tourelle de la rue de la Tixéranderie (plate 12), also etched in 1852, was drawn just before its demolition. The etching gives a very beautiful effect of sunlight on a most picturesque old house, with the lower part of its turret wreathed in the foliage of a creeper; but the mediæval knight in helm and plumes, who rides along the street, and the nude woman standing in the doorway (in the first state) are curious additions to the scene. The latter figure was retouched in the final state. Saint-Etienne-du-Mont (plate 13), also etched in 1852, is similar in style, as in dimensions, to the last subject. It gives, again, a beautiful effect of sunlight, and the architectural details of the church are shown with an exquisite clearness. The little figures are lively and interesting, but in the state here reproduced a blemish may be noticed; the raised arms of a workman on the scaffolding, near the gas lamp on the right, have been effaced, to be restored in the next state.

La Pompe Notre-Dame (plate 14), another plate belonging to the prolific year 1852, is one of the most picturesque etchings of the series. The proportions of the various masses of architecture to the oblong plate are perfectly satisfying, and the eye delights in the intricate lines, alternately light and dark, of the two wooden structures that rise out of the water like the piles of a “lake dwelling.” Meryon excuses himself, in an interesting letter, for making the towers of Notre-Dame higher than they should be, as actually seen from this point of view: “Les Tours saillent aussi un peu plus que dans la réalité; mais je considère que ce sont licenses permises, puisque c’est pour ainsi dire dans ce sens que travaille l’esprit, sitôt que l’objet qui l’a frappé a disparu de devant les yeux” (quoted by M. Loys Delteil from a letter to Paul Mantz). This plate was published in an edition of 600 by L’Artiste in 1858; before that time the building itself had been demolished. Meryon alludes to the impending demolition in the rather insignificant little design, with some doggerel verses etched within it, known as La Petite Pompe (plate 15), of 1854.

Le Pont-Neuf (plate 16), an etching of 1853, is the ninth of the set as Meryon numbered it. It is a solid, masterly piece of architectural etching about which there is not much to be said. The light falling on the truncated turrets of the bridge and reflected on the surface of the river is very subtly observed. In the sixth state, and in that only, eight verses are etched, beginning

This is poor stuff, and Meryon was well advised to suppress it in later states.

Le Pont-au-Change (plates 17, 18), etched in 1854, shows again Le Châtelet and the Tour de l’Horloge, and, beyond the bridge, the tower, with which we are now familiar, of La Pompe Notre-Dame. This etching is remarkable for the many changes introduced into the sky in successive states. From the second to the sixth state of Delteil there is a balloon floating in the sky towards the left, inscribed SPERANZA (plate 17), to which the verses L’Espérance (plate 19) allude. In the seventh state this balloon disappears; in its stead there are great flights of birds across the sky, of which the lower resemble wild duck, while the upper ones, with longer wings, have got hooked beaks which make them look more like birds of prey than the jackdaws which one would expect to fly round the towers of a city. These remain (plate 18) during several alterations in the plate, until the tenth state, when they have disappeared from the left, though a concentrated flock wheels about the Tour de l’Horloge, and their place is taken by new balloons, near and distant, and in the eleventh state by still more balloons, one of which bears the name of Vasco de Gama. This is all rather crazy, and the alterations were made, like those on other plates to which we shall refer later, after Meryon’s mind had finally become deranged. This is evidently the etching referred to in a letter from Baudelaire to Poulet Malassis (quoted by M. Loys Delteil): “Dans une de ses grandes planches, il a substituté à un petit ballon une nuée d’oiseaux de proie, et, comme je lui faisais remarquer qu’il était invraisemblable de mettre tant d’aigles dans un ciel parisien, il m’a répondu que cela n’était pas dénué de fondement, puisque ces gens-là (le gouvernement de l’Empereur) avaient souvent lâché des aigles pour étudier les présages, suivant le rite,—et que cela avait été imprimé dans les journaux, même dans le Moniteur. Je dois dire qu’il ne se cache en aucune façon de son respect pour toutes les superstitions, mais il les explique mal, et il voit de la cabale partout.” This letter dates from January 1860, a few months after Meryon had been released from his first confinement in an asylum, and it must be observed that any eccentricities due to mental derangement can only be traced in plates etched subsequently to 1859, or in the late states, produced by re-touching after that date, of the “Eaux-fortes sur Paris” themselves, which, as first completed in 1854, the year of this publication, had been perfectly normal.

Another of the etched poems, “L’Espérance,” accompanies Le Pont-au-Change. After this, two more of the “Eaux-Fortes” remain to be noticed, and they are by general agreement the finest of the whole set: La Morgue and L’Abside de Notre-Dame de Paris, both etched in 1854. La Morgue (plate 20) combines a masterly distribution of black and white spaces and a perfectly successful treatment of the windows, roofs and chimneys, which rise in a curious succession of different levels from the riverside, with a motive of poignant human interest in the dramatic group that bears, on the left, the body of a drowned man from the Seine towards the “Doric little Morgue,” as Browning calls it, on the right. The associations of the building, irresistibly suggested by this incident, are explained in the pathetic little poem, “L’Hôtellerie de la Mort” (plate 21), Meryon’s finest effort in verse, etched on two separate plates and intended to accompany La Morgue, but so rare that it very seldom does so. “The bed and the table that the City of Paris offers gratis at any time to its poor children,” we can imagine what they are—a marble slab, with water dripping down it, under that roof so magnificently etched.

The poem was evidently completed originally in the first column, ending with Meryon’s name, address and date, to which he added as an afterthought a second column of verses full of consoling thoughts and ending with words of faith and hope about the expansion of a flower “à la fraiche corolle, à la sainte auréole,” a flower of love and happiness, from the germ that is in man’s heart. In the impression at the British Museum, words of bad omen, like “Mort,” “Misère,” “Plaisir,” are printed in red, and the good words, “Dieu,” “Cieux,” “Amour,” and “Bonheur,” are printed in blue. Then follows L’Abside (plate 22), the justly famous masterpiece for which higher sums are paid to-day than for any other etching except some of Rembrandt’s. The design of the whole plate, the lighting of the sky and of the side of the majestic cathedral, the proportion of the towers and high-pitched roof of Notre-Dame to the massive but comparatively insignificant buildings along the line of the Seine combine to produce a total effect of unrivalled dignity and charm. How eloquent, too, is the contrast of all that splendid architecture across the river with the squalid foreground, where heaps of sand are being shovelled into carts, and barges of the humblest kind are moored along the shore. L’Abside, again, has a little etched poem “O toi dégustateur de tout morceau gothique,” to accompany it, but this is one of the very rarest of Meryon’s etchings and is not in the British Museum, though the verses are written in pencil by Meryon’s hand on the margin of one of the states of L’Abside in that collection. Then, with the Tombeau de Molière (plate 23) the series closes. Not only in the intensity of this realisation of his subject and in the perfect skill of the actual etching was Meryon a great innovator, but also in the importance that he attached to the utmost care in printing. In collaboration with Auguste Delâtre, the best printer of etchings of his day, Meryon produced exquisite proofs of the early states of the “Eaux-fortes sur Paris” printed in carefully composed brown and black inks on the choicest papers, green, brown, yellowish, white, of old Dutch manufacture or imported from Japan. This was a complete innovation in 1850, and he set an example which the most scrupulous etchers and printers have endeavoured to follow to this day but have never surpassed. Like most French etchers, Meryon preferred proofs from clean wiped plates to those printed with any considerable amount of tone. A letter from Meryon himself on this subject, written in 1863, is quoted by Burty.

During the production of all these masterpieces Meryon was living, almost a recluse, in his rooms in the Rue St. Etienne-du-Mont. He had great difficulty in selling proofs of his etchings, though he asked no more than 30 francs for a Paris set. He took them in vain to various publishers; there were then no dealers who sold etchings of this kind. He had spent the money left to him by his mother; he gained no rewards at the Salon; the Chalcographie Impériale du Louvre ignored him. He was almost starving, says Burty, when he made the acquaintance of M. Jules Niel, librarian at the Ministry of the Interior, a cultivated man who recognised at once the significance of Meryon’s work. He obtained the purchase of several sets of the etchings by the Minister and orders for other work to be done by Meryon in the shape of reproductions of historical drawings. In the winter of 1855-56 the Duke of Aremberg had seen the Views of Paris at Montpellier. In 1857 he sent for Meryon to Belgium, and commissioned him to etch views of his park at Enghien. But Meryon was just then becoming a prey to mental disease, and he returned to Paris, in great trouble of mind, in March 1858. He became more and more unsociable, especially after he removed to a little hotel in the Rue Fossé St. Jacques. Delâtre looked after him as best he could, but Meryon refused to leave his bed, saying that he could not cross a sea of blood, and threatened with a pistol those who approached him. Whilst he was in this state Léopold Flameng drew, in May 1858, the well-known portrait of Meryon in bed, sitting up, with a large black cravat round his neck, the dark shadow of his head thrown upon the wall by the rays of a lamp (plate 24). The features are sharp and emaciated with self-imposed fasting. When the drawing was finished, Meryon asked to see it. He sprang out of bed and tried to tear it up, but Flameng fled with the portrait. On the following day, May 12th, Meryon was carried off to the asylum at Charenton St. Maurice. The discipline and regular food, instead of semi-starvation, had a good effect on him, and he was quiet, gentle and polite. While he was in the asylum he made one etching, from a drawing of the ruins of Pierrefonds brought to him by the architect, Viollet le Duc. It was during this time that Delâtre had impressions of some of his plates published by L’Artiste. On the 25th August, 1859, Meryon was released on leave for three weeks, and did not actually go back to the asylum until 1866.

OTHER ETCHINGS OF THE ’FIFTIES

The Paris set had almost entirely absorbed his energies during the years of its production, but he made one or two other good etchings during the same period. Two of the Bourges etchings belong to this time, the third being much later. The only etching of 1851 was Porte d’un ancien Couvent, Bourges (plate 39), a lightly etched plate, parts of which were only drawn in outline. Meryon printed very few copies of it, and intended to complete it later, but it is a very beautiful piece of work in its present condition. Meryon projected the publication of a Bourges set, but it always remained in abeyance. Two draughts exist in his handwriting, dated 1852, for the lettering of a title page to such a set, and M. Delteil prints a letter addressed by him in 1854 to the Ministry of the Interior, in which he sends a proof of the first plate etched of the proposed Bourges set (meaning, no doubt, Rue des Toiles, Bourges) and begs for a subscription for fifty copies of a set of ten etchings at fifteen francs a set. The set was to consist of four etchings of the same dimensions as the specimen submitted and six etchings of details of buildings. The etchings were to represent private houses, which were in more danger of demolition than public monuments. He sent Porte d’un ancien Couvent (plate 39) as a specimen of the less important etchings that he projected. In the same letter he recalls that the Ministry had subscribed for fifty copies of the Paris set, which had been originally intended to consist of ten etchings (he counts only the important subjects which ultimately received numbers); he had now decided to add two more (La Morgue and L’Abside) and begged the Minister to subscribe for fifty copies of these additional plates at two francs each, adding that such help as he would get from the Ministry was almost his only assistance in view of the indifference of the public. Rue des Toiles à Bourges (plate 40) is a very fine etching, comparable to some of the rather similar subjects in the Paris set, notably Tourelle, Rue de la Tixéranderie. The early impressions of it are very beautifully printed. The British Museum has recently acquired a probably unique first state, earlier than any described by M. Delteil, printed before the plate had been reduced to its ultimate dimensions. The third Bourges etching, Ancienne habitation à Bourges (plate 41) was added much later, in 1860, and is in the style of some of the late Paris etchings, but not so good. The only other etchings that date from the period of the “Eaux-Fortes sur Paris” are the Verses to Eugène Bléry (two different plates with the same contents, D. 88, 89) and the fine Entrée du Couvent des Capucins à Athènes (plate 42), both etched in 1854. Though Meryon had drawn in early youth the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates which was then partly embedded in the buildings of the French Capuchins at Athens, though it was afterwards detached from the wall, his etching is copied from one of the plates by J. P. Le Bas in J. D. Le Roy’s “Ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce,” Paris, 1758.

It was about this time that Meryon began to etch plates of antiquarian interest from old drawings or prints. Though they were commissioned for illustrations, it is evident, among other things from a letter of Baudelaire’s written in 1860, that Meryon himself developed a rather tiresome habit of research, both pedantic and eccentric in its methods. One of the best of these derivative etchings, the Salle des Pas-Perdus (plate 35), after Ducerceau, dates from 1855, and Le Pont-Neuf et la Samaritaine (plate 33) and Le Pont-au-Change vers 1784 (plate 34) were also etched in the same year. They are fine etchings, but do not arouse the same interest as Meryon’s first-hand impressions of the Paris of his own day. Le Château de Chenonceau, also after Ducerceau, and etched in a very dry manner, is a plate of 1856, and in the same year he etched, from photographs, the large panoramic view of San Francisco. More typical Meryons are the two queer etchings of 1855 and 1856 called La Loi Solaire and La Loi Lunaire, in which he propounded very crazy views on morality, one of them being that an upright posture is the proper attitude for sleep, a theory which he himself carried into practice in later years, by passing the night between two upright boards with his arms supported by loops of rope to keep him from falling. Le Pilote de Tonga, a prose poem in a frame, etched in 1856, is the first of what grew, in the sixties, into a long series of etchings founded on his sketches and reminiscences of his early voyage to the South Seas. These filled an even larger place in his thoughts in his last years, but it is to be feared that the etchings of these subjects, of which a few specimens are here reproduced (plates 43-46), leave posterity rather cold.

THE LATE ETCHINGS

The only etchings of any importance that Meryon produced after his release from confinement are some of the last views of Paris, done at the time when he was retouching his old plates of Paris and making the, not very judicious, alterations which distinguish their latest states. The new ones are: Rue Pirouette (1860, plate 36), Tourelle de la rue de l’Ecole-de-Médecine (1861), which shows the house in which Marat was assassinated (plates 25, 26), Rue des Chantres (1862, plates 27, 28), Collège Henri IV (1864, plate 29), Bain-froid Chevrier (1864, plate 30), Le Ministère de la Marine (1866, plates 31, 32) and L’ancien Louvre, vers 1650 (1866, plate 38), in which, fulfilling a commission from the Chalcographie du Louvre, he returned to the study of his old love, Renier Zeeman. The Rue des Chantres is incomparably the finest of these, but it can only be seen to real advantage in the very rare early states, one of which the British Museum possesses (plate 27), in which the spire, a recent addition to Notre-Dame designed by Viollet-le-Duc, soars into an empty sky, which was afterwards disfigured by the incongruous insertion of two bells and a device with the initials J. B. (plate 28). The streets of all the etchings of the sixties are filled with excited crowds or little groups of tall, unnatural looking people, and all kinds of curious monsters and allegorical figures hover in the sky or swoop in rapid flight across it. The Collège Henri IV (plate 29) in some of its states, has for background a sea with sails and whales and sea-gods, and the figures in the foreground are the most extraordinary that Meryon ever drew.

It is of no use to dwell at length on these symptoms of mental decline. The lonely artist, subject to hallucinations, thinking that Jesuits were watching him in every street, quarrelling with his best friends, who found it impossible to help him, almost starving because he thought it wrong to eat when others were in need, was no longer capable of the concentrated effort that had produced the masterpieces of the first half of the fifties. On October 12th, 1866, he was shut up again at Charenton, where he died on February 4th, 1868, and where a friend of his sailor days, De Salicis, pronounced an oration over his grave. Bracquemond etched, with a few symbolical ornaments, a copper plate to be laid on the slab of black Breton stone, resting on cubes on white stone, which covered his tomb.

His life had been a failure; he was himself only too ready to proclaim it. He regarded art as something so mysterious, so sacred, as to be quite out of reach. “L’art pour lui n’existait qu’ à l’état de fétiche, d’idéal,” wrote Dr. Gachet to Bouvenne, “on ne devait pas y toucher—il n’y avait pas d’artistes.” To praise him as an artist was to make of him an enemy. To such a temperament fame was denied while he lived. It remained for posterity to do homage that could meet with no rebuff. The sincerest flattery, that of imitation, has been offered to Meryon without stint by a generation of etchers that was being born while he was relaxing by degrees his imperfect grasp of life.

LIST OF MERYON’S ETCHINGS

Besides the earliest full catalogue of Meryon’s etchings, that by P. Burty, translated into English by M. B. Huish (1879), which derives its value from Burty’s Memoir of Meryon and his notes on certain of the etchings, there are two catalogues of Meryon in general use, that written by the late Sir F. Wedmore (“Méryon and Méryon’s Paris,” 2nd ed., London, 1892) and the much more thorough catalogue by M. Loys Delteil (1907) which forms Tome II. of the series, “Le Peintre-Graveur illustré.” The British Museum collection is still arranged in Wedmore’s order, which has one practical advantage: it gives precedence to the important works, the etchings of Paris, and describes the other etchings as minor works after these. Thus the visitor, not an expert, who asks for Meryon’s etchings and receives the first volume, finds in it at once a number of the masterpieces. He can persevere, if he will, and see the minor works also; but, if he is more easily tired, he will at least have seen the Paris set while his eye is fresh, and will have spent none of his energy on the early experiments. On the other hand, Delteil is not pedantically chronological; he also places the Paris etchings early, by themselves, and groups the remainder, unlike Wedmore, by a subject arrangement, in various classes. By his more scientific description of states Delteil has superseded Wedmore, and is now invariably quoted in sale catalogues. How far even his catalogue is from being exhaustive is proved by the numerous additional states, chiefly based on the examination of the British Museum and Macgeorge collections, which Mr. H. J. L. Wright has described in the July number (1921) of the Print Collector’s Quarterly. It is understood that a new edition of Delteil is projected, containing a definitive numeration of the states, in which these and other corrections will be incorporated. The present list attempts no description of states. The titles are given in M. Delteil’s order, Wedmore’s numbers following in brackets, with the date of each etching and a summary indication of the number of states at present known to exist, quoted from Delteil except where the reference “see Wright” is given.