LIBEAEY OF
THE SCHOOL OF THE FINE AETS

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FORMED BT
James Abraham Hillhouse, JB.A. 1749
James Hillhouse, B.A. 1773
James Abraham Hillhouse, B.A. 1808
James Hillhouse, B.A. 1875
Removed 1942 from the
Manor House in Sachem's Wood
GIFT OF
GEORGE DUDLEY SEYMOUR
AND
THE ASSOCIATES IN FINE ARTS
AT YALE UNIVERSITY

cf tench. Stcheid of th
Second ompize

Lalanne. Le Pont des Arts et l'Institut
Size of the original etching, SVs X Wi inches

FRENCH ETCHERS OF THE
SECOND EMPIRE

BY
WILLIAM ASPENWALL BRADLEY

With Illustrations

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1916

COPYRIGHT, I9II, BY FREDERICK KEFPEL & CO.
COPYRIGHT, 1913, 1914, AND I916, BY MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Published November igib

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TO
FITZROY CARRINGTON

(oontentd

Introduction  xiii
I. Meryon and Baudelaire  3
II. Charles Meryon, Poet  18
III. Maxime Lalanne ...  34
IV. Some French Etchers and Sonneteers ... 41
V. The Goncourts and their Circle .... 59
VI. Some French Artists during the Siege and Com
mune .  76
VII. Corot as a Lithographer  95

Joidt of oJUudtzationd
Le Pont des Arts et l'Institut, by Maxime Lalanne Frontispiece
Portrait op Charles Meryon, by Felix Bracquemond . 4
Portrait op Charles Baudelaire, by Bracquemond . 4
Frontispiece for Les Fleurs du Mai op Baudelaire, by
Bracquemond  6
Le Pont au Change (with Balloon), by Meryon . 8
Le Pont au Change (with Birds), by Meryon . . 8
Le Petit Pont, by Meryon  10
Portrait of Charles Meryon, by Leopold Flameng 10
Portrait op Charles Meryon (Head), by Bracquemond 18
Verses to Zeeman (1854), by Meryon  20
Old Gate of the Palais de Justice, by Meryon . . 22
Le Stryge, by Meryon  22
La Rue des Mauvais Gahcons, by Meryon . . 24
La Petite Pompe, by Meryon .  24
Le Pont-Neuf, by Meryon  24
La Morgue, by Meryon  26
L'Abside de Notre-Dame de Paris, by Meryon . 28
Le Pilote de Tonga (1861), by Meryon . . . 28
L'Attelage, by Meryon  30
Le Haag — Poids de la Ville d'Amsterdam, by Lalanne 34

Plage des Vaches Noires, Villers, by Lalanne . . 34
Les Bords de la Tamise, by Lalanne . . 36
Rue des Marmousets, by Lalanne ... 36
Bordeaux, Vue de Cenon, by Lalanne . . 38
Nogent, by Lalanne ... . ... 38
Bordeaux, Quai des Chartrons, by Lalanne . . 40
Beuzeval, by Lalanne . . .40
A Cusset, by Lalanne . . . . .40
Le Verger, by Daubigny ... .48
L'Eclair, by Courtry (after Victor Hugo) . 50
Promenade hors des Murs, by Leys  50
Une Grande Douleur, by Ribot . . .54
The Rookery, by Seymour Haden . ... 56
Fleur Exotique, by Manet 58
Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, by Gavarni . 60
"Gavarni" (Guillaume Sulpice Chevalier) . . 66
Edmond de Goncourt, by Bracquemond . 70
Edmond de Goncourt, by Paul Helleu . 74
Automedon with the Horses of Achilles, by Regnault 78
"La ville de Paris investie confie a l'air son appel
a la France," by Puvis de Chavannes . . 80
"EcHAPPE A LA SERRE ENNEMIE LE MESSAGE ATTENDU
EXALTE LE CCEUR DE LA FIERE CITE," by Puvis de
Chavannes ...  80
La Resistance, etched by Bracquemond from the statue in
snow by Falguiere. . . . ... .82
La Republique, etched by Bracquemond from the bust in
snow by Moulin  84

Avenue de Boulogne, by Lalanne  86
From Souvenirs artistiques du Siege de Paris
La Mare d'Auteuil, by Lalanne  86
From Souvenirs artistiques du Siege de Paris
Arms of the City of Paris, by Martial (Adolphe Mar
tial Potement)  88
La Colonnb de la Place Vendome, by Martial . . 92
From Paris sous la Commune
Le Clocher de St. Nicolas-Lez-Arras, by Corot . . 96
Lb Dormoir des Vaches, by Corot  98
Le Moulin de Cuincy, by Corot . . . . 100
Le Repos des Philosophes, by Corot  102
Le Coup de Vent, by Corot  102
Saules et Peupliers Blancs, by Corot .... 104
Souvenir d'Italie, by Corot  104

Qjntzo duetto 110
|HESE studies appeared originally in The
Print-Collector's Quarterly, and are here re
printed with few changes. Though not
planned as a series, they derive a certain
unity from the fact that all deal with a group of
French graphic artists, mainly etchers, viewed agamst
the background of French life and letters under the
Second Empire.
It is a method that lends itself to the treatment of this
period. About 1860, etching, which had been revived
by the "Men of 1830," began to attain a wider popular
ity (partly as a result of cross-channel influences), and
to no class did it make a more definite and decided ap
peal than to the poets and men of letters. Baudelaire,
with Philippe Burty, was among the very first to esti
mate at its real worth the strange, arresting genius of
Charles Meryon, and there is still perhaps no more pre
cise or penetrating statement of the very spirit of etch
ing than is to be found in the brief articles to which
reference is so often made in the following pages.
The Goncourts had many friends and acquaintances
among contemporary etchers, including Bracquemond,
who instructed them in the principles of the art, as
Maxime Lalanne instructed Victor Hugo. The latter,
however, unlike Jules de Goncourt, made slight use of
the knowledge he thus acquired in his exile on the is-

land of Guernsey. This is, in a way, surprising. For, as
M. Emile Berteaux says in his admirable monograph on
Victor Hugo as an artist, acid or soft ground etching was
marvellously adapted to the translating of those violent
"effects" that the poet himself confessed he obtained
by using the barb of his pen as freely as the point.
"But, after a few attempts, he stopped. The writer
threw away the needle which threatened to make him
forget his pen. He did not wish to give the lie to the
words that Gautier had written some years earlier, in
presenting the drawings of his illustrious friend as a
'simple recreation': 'Ce n'est pas trop de tout un
homme pour un art.'"
A number of Hugo's drawings were, however, exe
cuted by other hands. One was the striking evocation
of a city in ruins called L' Eclair, which was etched by
Charles Courtry for Sonnets et Eaux-fortes, and which is
here reproduced in connection with the article on that
significant, if not particularly inspired, volume. Another
was a sketch whose origin makes it of special interest to
Americans. In 1859, Hugo, moved by the hopeless but
heroic exploit of John Brown, wrote a vigorous letter
to the United States Government, protesting against
his execution, and prophesying the evil consequences
that would result from such an act of repression. "At
the same time," to quote once more from M. Ber
teaux, "thinking of the waiting gallows, he drew several
silhouettes of men that had been hanged — funereal
shades blacker than the night, a ray of light descending
towards them."
The most somber and vigorous of these drawings he
gave to his brother-in-law, Paul Chenay, who executed
in a few days "a beautiful plate in mezzotint." Un-

fortunately, however, Hugo, struck by the correspond
ence between the date of John Brown's capture, and
that of the imperial coup d'etat, had inscribed at the
bottom of his drawing the two words: "Deux Decem-
bre." As a result, the proofs (with a single exception)
were confiscated and destroyed at the printer's. The
plate seemed destined never to see the light. But several
months later a new ministry removed the interdict, and
prints were circulated, though without the seditious le
gend. Hugo was so pleased with Chenay's work in this
instance that he gave him some of his other drawings to
execute, and an album containing them appeared in 1863
with a preface by Gautier.
One of Hugo's friends was the romantic etcher, Celes-
tin Nanteuil, with whom he once traveled through "Old
France," collecting sketches and impressions of Gothic
architecture. Both were strongly influenced by Piranesi,
whose great plates of Roman antiquities, impregnated
with his own spirit of the past, had recently been repub
lished in Paris, and who was largely responsible for the
spread of a romantic, or "expressive," style of architec
tural treatment. Even Meryon, so unlike either Nan
teuil or Hugo, did not escape this current tendency,
though curiously enough his immediate master was not
the imaginative, melodramatic Piranesi, but the realis
tic, matter-of-fact Dutch etcher, Reynier Nooms, or
Zeeman. Meryon, who thus combines its two strongly contrast
ing schools or tendencies, represents the culmination of
modern French etching, as well as its highest individual
accomplishment. The period following the publication
of his Eaux-fortes sur Paris is, on the whole, in spite of
its technical triumphs and rapidly spreading popularity,

one of gradual decline until, as we see in Sonnets et Eaux-
fortes, and in the later work of Lalanne, the etched plate
comes to be regarded for the most part merely as a
superior sort of illustrative and reproductive medium.
As such it seemed doomed when the invention of the
photogravure process made possible an enormous in
crease in the production of "prints" — particularly for
the embellishment of books — at a corresponding reduc
tion of cost. As a matter of fact, however, this very
release from alien requirements imposed upon it from
the outside, has proved a powerful stimulus to a second
revival of etching, in our own day. In this respect its for
tunes present a curiously close parallel to those of wood-
engraving, which at first threatened to disappear en
tirely when displaced by the halftone, but which is
steadily reasserting itself as a medium of original ex
pression. It is interesting to note that the artist, Au
guste Lepere, who has done more than any one else in
France to reestablish wood-engraving on a proper basis
of independence, is also one of those who have most
notably renewed the great tradition of landscape and
architectural etching in that country. With Lepere and
his contemporaries, however, we are no longer among
the etchers of the Second Empire, but have long since
reached those of the Third Republic.
W. A. Bradley.
Bailey's Island, Maine,
July, 1916.

cfzeneh, Stehezd of the
(Second Smpize

cfzeneh otchexd of the
Second Smplze
I
MERYON AND BAUDELAIRE
^LL French poets of the middle part of the
nineteenth century were interested, theoreti
cally at least, in painting and the graphic
arts generally. From Theophile Gautier,
godfather of Parnassianism, who reserved for his prose
the full resources of his superb Turneresque palette,
to the young Verlaine, author of Fetes Galantes and
Poemes Saturniens, pictorial preoccupations were, on the
the whole, paramount. Charles Baudelaire almost alone
appears, in part, an exception to this rule; but if, in his
work, the purely visual element is less predominant than
in that of most of his contemporaries — if the images of
sight yield there in number and in clear evocative power
to those of sound and of scent, thereby preluding the
way for a new poetic dispensation — he nevertheless fits
into the late Romantic tradition, if only by reason of his
keen aesthetic appreciation of the arts of design, and of
his association, as a disinterested friend or sympathetic
critic, with many of the most illustrious artists of the
age. Himself a rebel and an outlaw in the domain of
orthodox taste, though with a distinct tinge of the tradi-

tional, he was especially drawn to the insurgent leader,
like Delacroix, his championship of whom is as famous
as his espousal of the cause of Wagner's music in Paris,
or to the solitary attarde of Romanticism who, like Con
stants Guys, worked out his own salvation in his own
way. It is not that he did not welcome new movements
in all their collectivity of talents and temperaments; but
these, to find favor with him, must be vouched for by
unmistakable evidences of creative vigor and original
ity in the individual artists, not merely by pretentious
dogmas or plausible theories. Intellectual distinctions
counted but little with him in matters of art, and a new
way of rendering what was actually seen or felt seemed
to him of infinitely more importance than any merely
academic discussion as to what an artist should or
should not look for, deliberately, in order to put it into
or leave it out of his pictures.
Thus it was that while he shrugged his shoulders at
the realists who were not really observers, he turned an
attentive eye to the work of the group of young painter-
etchers who, about 1859, were beginning to attract at
tention in the salons. Baudelaire thought highly of
etching because it afforded an opportunity for "the
most clean-cut possible translation of the character of
the artist," and he was attracted to those who were en
gaged in reviving this almost obsolete medium, because
they gave clear proof in their work of that personal
force and distinction which he valued above all else, and
which he was always on the alert to discover in the pro
ductions of the new and the unknown.
In his article, Peintres et Aqua-fortistes, included in
the volume of his collected works entitled L'Art Ro-
mantique, Baudelaire mentions the following etchers as

Portrait of Chakles Meryon
From the etching by Felix Bracquemond, done in 1853
Size of the original etching, 8^io X &Vs inches

Portrait of Charles Baudelaire
From the etching by F61ix Bracquemond. Of the same size as the
original etching. Evidently an excellent likeness, since it exactly
renders that ecclesiastical aspect of the poet which made one of
his friends compare him to a cardinal.

among those through whose efforts the medium was to
recover its ancient vitality: Seymour Haden, Manet,
Legros, Bracquemond, Jongkind, Meryon, Millet, Dau-
bigny, Saint-Marcel, Jacquemart, and Whistler. With
at least two of these, on the evidence of his published
correspondence,1 he had personal relations: Bracque
mond and Meryon. The name of the former occurs fre
quently in the letters with reference to a device which
Baudelaire wished to adopt as a frontispiece to the sec
ond edition of Fleurs du Mai. The idea of this device
came to him, as he writes to Felix Nadar (May 16, 1859),
while turning the leaves of the Histoire des Danses Ma-
cabres, by Hyacinthe Langlois. It was to be "an arbor
escent skeleton, the legs and the ribs forming the trunk,
the arms extended in the form of a cross breaking into
leaf and shoot, and protecting several rows of poisonous
plants arranged in rising tiers of pots, as in a green
house." In casting about for an artist to execute this
design, Baudelaire mentions and dismisses Dore, Pen-
guilly — whom he afterward wished he had taken —
and Celestin Nanteuil. Finally, perhaps at the instance
of his publisher, Poulet-Malassis, he chose Bracque
mond, — a most unhappy selection as it turned out, for
that artist was either unable or unwilling to grasp the
poet's conception, and the plate which he etched for this
purpose was not used. A few proofs were pulled, how
ever, and impressions in both the first and second states
of the plate are now in the Samuel P. Avery collection in
the New York Public Library.
Baudelaire's negotiations with the "terrible Bracque
mond," as he came to call him, were carried on for
the most part through Poulet-Malassis, which perhaps
i Charles Baudelaire: Lettres, 1841-1866. Paris, 1907.

affords a partial explanation of the misunderstanding
concerning the Macabre frontispiece. And, although he
speaks in one letter of having met the artist and repeated
verbally the instructions which he had already given,
with characteristically minute attention to detail, in
writing, no such special interest attaches to this meet
ing, by no means unique, as to that between Baudelaire
and Meryon which occurred about the same time, and
to which we owe one of the most vivid and fantastic pre
sentments we possess of that mad genius. In his Salon
de 1859, Baudelaire had written of Meryon with an en
thusiasm which awoke a responsive reverberation in the
breast of Victor Hugo.
"Since you know M. Meryon," the latter wrote to
Baudelaire (April 29, 1860), "tell him that his splendid
etchings have dazzled me. Without color, with nothing
save shadow and light, chiaroscuro pure and simple and
left to itself : that is the problem of etching. M. Meryon
solves it magisterially. What he does is superb. His
plates live, radiate, and think. He is worthy of the pro
found and luminous page with which he has inspired
you." This page, which Baudelaire afterward incorporated
in his Peintres et Aqua-fortistes, where he speaks further
of Meryon as "the true type of the accomplished aqua-
fortiste," and praises the famous perspective of San
Francisco as his masterpiece, does, indeed, betray the
subtle penetration of the poet into the very spirit of his
fellow-artist: "By the severity, the delicacy, and the
certitude of his design, M. Meryon recalls what is best in
the old aqua-fortistes. I have rarely seen represented
with more poetry the natural solemnity of a great capi
tal. The majesties of accumulated stone, the spires point-

Bracquemond. Frontispiece for "Les Fleurs du Mal" of Baudelaire
The seven plants symbolize the Seven Deadly Sins, and the outstretched
arms of the skeleton will support, later, the Fruits of Evil. This romantic
and remarkable frontispiece was never used. Baudelaire criticized the draw
ing of the skeleton severely, as well as the spirit and arrangement of the whole
design. Size of the original etching, 6% X -i^ie inches

ing a finger to the skies, the obelisks of industry vomiting
their thick clouds of smoke heavenward, the prodigious
scaffoldings of monuments under repair, relieved against
the solid mass of architecture, their tracery of a filmy
and paradoxical beauty, the misty sky charged with
wrath and with rancor, the depths of the perspectives
augmented by the thought of the dramas contained
therein, — none of the complex elements of which the
dolorous and glorious setting of civilization is composed
is here forgotten."
Grateful for such recognition on the part of a dis
tinguished man of letters who was also accepted as one
of the leading art critics of the day in Paris, Meryon evi
dently wrote to Baudelaire, thanking him and asking
permission to call; for in his letter of January 8, 1860, to
Poulet-Malassis, the poet writes as follows: —
"What I write to-night," he begins, "is worth the
trouble of writing: M. Meryon has sent me his card, and
we have met. He said to me: You live in a hotel whose
name must have attracted you because of the relation it
bears, I presume, to your tastes. — Then I looked at the
envelope of his letter. On it was 'H6tel de Thebes,' and
yet his letter reached me."
It is necessary to interrupt the letter at this point to
explain what is obscure in the foregoing allusion for one
not familiar with Baudelaire's haunts and homes in
Paris. He was living at this time, not in the Hotel Pimo-
dan where he dwelt so long, and where he held those
famous meetings described by Gautier in his introduc
tory essay to Fleurs du Mai, but in modest quarters in
the Hotel de Dieppe, 22, rue d'Amsterdam, whose prin
cipal advantage was its proximity to the Gare de l'Ouest,
whence he took the train for Honfleur on his frequent

visits to his mother. Thus, through a bizarre confusion
between the two words, Dieppe and Thebes, is explained
Meryon's curious mistake in addressing his letter to
Baudelaire. The poet proceeds with the following report of their
conversation: "In one of his great plates,1 he [Meryon]
has substituted for a little balloon a flight of birds of
prey, and, when I remarked to him that it was lacking in
verisimilitude to put so many eagles into a Parisian sky,
he replied that what he had done was not devoid of
foundation in fact, since ces gens-la [the imperial govern
ment] had often released eagles so as to study the pres
ages, according to the rite, — and that this had been
printed in the newspapers, even in Le Moniteur.
"I must tell you that he makes no attempt to conceal
his respect for all superstitions, but he explains them
badly, and he sees cabalistic mysteries everywhere.
" He drew my attention to the fact, in another of his
plates, that the shadows cast by one of the masonry
constructions of the Pont-Neuf 2 on the lateral wall of
the quay represented exactly the profile of a sphinx;
that this had been, on his part, quite involuntary, and
that he had only remarked the singularity later, on re
calling that this design had been made a short time be
fore the coup d'etat. But the Prince is the real person
who, by his acts and his visage, bears the closest re
semblance to a sphinx.
"He asked me if I had read the tales of a certain
Edgar Poe. I answered that I knew them better than
any one else, and for a good reason. He then asked me
in a very emphatic manner, if I believed in the reality of
1 The Pont-au-Change.
2 An error of Baudelaire's. The plate is the Petit-Pont.
8

Mehyon. Lb Pont au Change
The bridge, above which is seen the roof of the Pompe-a-feu, occupies the middle distance; to the right is the Palais de
Justice; beyond, the trees on the Quai aux Fleurs.
Size of the original etching, 6% X 13% inches

Merton. Le Pont au Change
"In me 0/ his great plates, he has substituted for a little balloon a flight of birds of prey, and, when I remarked to
him thatit was lacking in verisimilitude to put so many eagles into a Parisian sky, he replied that writ he hac I done
since cm gens-la (the imperial government! had often released eagles so as to
ana that this had been printed in the newspapers, even in Le Moniteur "
Charles Baudelaire in a letter to Poulet-Malassis (January 8 1860)

wras not devoid of foundation in fact,
study the presages, according to the rite,

this Edgar Poe. I naturally asked him to whom he at
tributed all his tales. He replied :'Toa syndicate of men
of letters who are very clever, very powerful, and who are in
touch with everything.' And here is one of his reasons:
' The Rue Morgue. I have made a design of the Morgue.
¦ — An Orang-outang. I have often been compared to a
monkey. — This monkey murders two women, a mother
and her daughter. I also have morally assassinated two
women, a mother and her daughter. — I have always
taken the story as an allusion to my misfortunes. You
would be doing me a great favor if you could find out for me
the date when Edgar Poe, supposing that he was not helped
by any one, composed this story, so that I could see if the
date coincided with my adventures.'
"He spoke to me, with admiration, of Michelet's
book on Jeanne d'Arc, but he is convinced that this
book is not by Michelet.
"One of his great preoccupations is cabalistical
science, but he interprets it in a strange fashion that
would make a cabalist laugh.
"Do not laugh at all this with mechants bougres.
For nothing in the world would I wish to injure a man
of talent. . . .
"After he left me, I asked myself how it happened
that I, who have always had, in my mind and in my
nerves, all that was needed to make me mad, had not
become so. Seriously, I addressed to heaven the
thanksgivings of the Pharisee."
It is not surprising that Baudelaire should have
been somewhat disconcerted by this interview which
confirmed so strikingly the reports of the mental
malady of his visitor to which he had alluded in his

Salon de 1859, and that he should soon have sought,
after some brief intercourse, to avoid personal and
private encounters which might have proved embar
rassing. He gave notice in ways the artist could not
long mistake, that he did not wish to continue the
acquaintance on a footing of intimacy; though, as
Crepet, in his Charles Baudelaire x points out, he by no
means ceased to interest himself in the artist, several
sets of whose Eaux-Fortes sur Paris he was instrumental,
with one or two other admirers of Meryon, in having
purchased by the Ministry. Poor Meryon! With an
incomplete realization of his own condition, which ren
dered him incapable of divining the real truth, he felt he
had offended Baudelaire in some way, and finally ad
dressed him the following appeal, tragic in its note of
noble and unconscious pathos : —
"Dear Sir: I called on you yesterday evening at the
Hotel de Dieppe. I was informed that you had
changed your domicile. I wished, above all, to see
you, in order to learn from your own lips that you
were not angry with me, for I do not think I have
ever done anything to you which could serve as a mo
tive for your change of manner toward me. Only, as
the last letter which I wrote you has remained unan
swered, and as three times I have left my name at
your dwelling without my having had the slightest
word from you, I am entitled to believe that you have
some reason for breaking with me. I did not remind
you of your promise to write a newspaper article
about my work, because, quite frankly, I was sure that
1 Charles Baudelaire. Stude biographique d' Eugene Crepet revue et
mise au jour par Jacques Crepet. Paris, 1907.

Meryon. Le Petit Pont
"He drew my attention to the fact, in another of his plates, that the shadows
cast by one of the masonry constructions of the Pont-Neuf on the lateral
wall of the quay represented exactly the profile of a sphinx; that this had
been, on his Dart, quite involuntary, and that he had only remarked this singu
larity later, on recalling that this design had been made a short time before
the coup d'etat."
Charles Baudelaire in a letter to Poulet-Malassis (January 8, 1860).
Size of the original etching, 9^ X 714 inches

r'<3 *•>>¦ .??. 'Tf A'/

Portrait of Charles Merton
From the drawing by Leopold Flameng, made in May, 1858, in Meryon's room in the rue des
Fosses-Saint- Jacques, the night before Meryon became dangerously mad and was taken by his
friends, in a cab, to Charenton for the first time. Later he was discharged, and took up his
lodging in the rue Duperre, and in October, 1866, returned to Charenton, where he died in
February, 1868.

you could make much better employment of your time
and of your literary skill. My etchings are known to
nearly all whom they could interest and rather too
much good has been said of them. As to the interrup
tion of our relations, which have been but of brief
duration and of slight importance, I agree to this
without a word if such is your desire, and I shall con
serve, none the less, the recollection of the eminent
services you have rendered me in coming to see me,
and in occupying yourself with me at a time when I
was utterly destitute.
"I have forwarded to M. Lavielle, whom I had the
advantage of meeting once with you, the set of my
views, reworked and a trifle modified; he has, per
haps, shown them to you. I have had difficulty in
procuring the ten sets of them (the printer being very
busy at that time) that I have disposed of, with suffi
cient rapidity. I have no longer any left and I have
destroyed the Petit-Pont, which I propose to engrave
anew, after I have made in it some rather important
corrections. "Adieu, dear sir, with all possible good wishes.
"I am your sincere and devoted friend,
"C. Meryon.
"20, rue Duperrd."
The letter to which Meryon refers in the opening
paragraph of the foregoing as having remained unan
swered by Baudelaire is doubtless that bearing the
date of February 23, 1860, which is the only other one
given by Crepet in the appendix to his volume. This
is it : —

ii

"Dear Sir: I send you a set of my 'Views of Paris.' !
As you can see, they are well printed, on Chinese
tissue mounted on laid paper, and consequently de
bonne tenue. It is on my part a feeble means of rec
ognizing the devotion you have shown on my behalf.
However, I dare hope that they will serve sometimes
to fix your imagination, curious of the things of the
past. I myself, who made them at an epoch, it is true,
when my naive heart was still seized with sudden
aspirations toward a happiness which I believed I
could attain, look over some of these pieces with a
veritable pleasure. They may, then, be able to pro
duce nearly the same effect upon you who also love to
dream. "I have not yet terminated the notes that I prom
ised to make in order to aid you in your work; at all
events, I shall go to see you soon to discuss the matter
with you further. As the publisher recoils before the
steps which would still have to be taken, he says, for
the placing of these prints, there is nothing pressing
about the affair. Thus, do not let this disturb you.
"Adieu, monsieur; I hope that before your depar
ture, I shall be able to profit by the kindly reception
that I have received from you.
"I am your very humble and very devoted ser
vant. "I am going to try to place sets with those persons
1 Baudelaire had already tried to obtain a set of these prints.
In writing to Charles Asselineau (February 20, 1859) he com
missions his friend to get from iSdouard Houssaye "all the en
gravings of Meryon (views of Paris), good proofs on Chinese
paper. Pour parer notre chambre, as Dorine says." He was not
successful, however, at that time. In quoting Moliere, Baude
laire refers to Toinette's speech in Le Malade Imaginaire (Act II,
sc. vi). 12

who have been so good, on your recommendation, as
to interest themselves in this work.
"Meryon.
"20, rue DuperreV'
This letter renders sufficiently clear the kind of serv
ice Baudelaire had rendered Meryon over and above
the public praise contained in his writings. What, at
the first glance, is less certain, is the work on which
the poet was engaged at this time and for which
Meryon, on his own testimony, had promised to assist
him with notes. In a footnote to this letter, M. Jacques
Crepet states that it was "doubtless L'eau-forte est a
la mode, an anonymous article published by the Re
vue anecdotique in the latter half of April, 1862."
Personally, I doubt the correctness of this conjecture.
One has but to turn to Baudelaire's letters of the
period to see that there was then under discussion
another piece of work for which Meryon would have
been much more likely to give assistance in the form
of notes, since it directly concerned himself. Indeed,
the matter almost amounted to a project of collabora
tion between Meryon and Baudelaire. The publisher
Delatre had promised to bring out an album of the
Vues de Paris, and had asked the poet to prepare
some text for the plates. The first reference to this
tentative undertaking occurs in Baudelaire's letter of
February 16, 1860 (just a week before Meryon's), to
Poulet-Malassis : —
"And then Meryon!" — he broaches the matter ab
ruptly, after having expressed his impatience at the
attitude of two other artists, Champfleury and Du-
ranty, friends of his, toward Constantin Guys, and at
13

a certain note of pedantry and dogmatism that was
stealing into art under the influence and sanction of
"realism" — "And then Meryon! Oh, as for him, it
is intolerable. Delatre asks me to write some text for
the album. Good! there is an occasion to write some
reveries — ten lines, twenty or thirty lines — on beauti
ful engravings, the philosophical reveries of a Parisian
flaneur. But Meryon, whose idea is different, objects.
I am to say: on the right you see this; on the left you
see that. I must say: here originally there were twelve
windows, reduced to six by the artist, and finally I
must go to the Hotel de Ville to find out the exact
epoch of the demolitions. M. Meryon talks, his eyes
fixed on the ceiling, and without listening to any ob
servation." Thus it was historical and antiquarian notes that,
in all probability, Meryon had promised to jot down
to facilitate the composition of a running commentary
on the etchings. Meryon's reference to the reluctance
of the publisher in the very same paragraph in which
he speaks of these notes, serves to remove the least
doubt as to what is meant. When he tells Baudelaire
not to be disturbed, it is clearly as to the time at his
disposal for the preparation of his text. Baudelaire,
however, seems to have been less concerned about his
own share in the work than about the fate of the
project as a whole. Evidently he was not satisfied
at the prospects of the work with Delatre, for, on
March 9, 1860, he wrote in a postscript to Poulet-
Malassis : — ¦
"I turn my letter, to ask you, very seriously, if it
would not be advisable for you to be the publisher of
Meryon's album (which will be augmented) and for

which I am to write the text. You know that, unfor
tunately, this text will not be in accordance with my
wishes. "I warn you that I have made overtures to the
house of Gide. . . .
"This Meryon does not know how to go about
things; he knows nothing of life. He does not know
how to sell; he does not know how to find a publisher.
His work is readily salable."
And again, on March 13, he writes, in response to
some proposition from his friend : —
"Concerning Meryon, do you mean by buying the
plates to buy the metal plates, or rather the right of
selling an indefinite number of proofs from them? I
can conceive that you fear the conversations with
Meryon. You should carry on the negotiations by
letter (20, rue Duperr6). I warn you that Meryon's
great fear is lest the publisher should change the
format and the paper. . . What you say to me of
Meryon does not affect what I write to you concerning
him." The excellent business sense, the note of prudence
and painstaking, that comes out in all this correspon
dence on the part of Baudelaire, and which is scarcely
less notable than his unwearied devotion to the inter
ests of his friends, ought to go far toward discoun
tenancing the theory that a poet cannot be a good
man of affairs. Still again he writes on the same
subject, with recapitulations of what he had said be
fore, to the same correspondent : —
"I am very much embarrassed, mon cher, to reply
to you in regard to the Meryon affair. I have no rights
in the matter whatsoever; M. Meryon has repulsed,

with a species of horror, the idea of a text composed
of a dozen little poems or sonnets; he has refused
the idea of poetic meditations in prose. So as not to
wound him, I have promised to write for him, in re
turn for three copies with the good proofs, a text in
the style of a guide or manual, unsigned. It is, there
fore, with him alone that you will have to treat. . . .
The thing has presented itself to my mind very sim
ply. On one side, an unfortunate madman, who does
not know how to conduct his affairs, and who has
executed a beautiful work; on the other, you, on
whose list I want to see the best books possible. As
the journalists say, I have considered for you the
double pleasure of a good bit of business and of a good
act." And he compares Meryon's case with that of
Daumier, then without a publisher, to wind whom up,
"like a clock," would also, he tells Poulet-Malassis, be
"a great and good bit of business."
This is the last reference in any of the letters to
Meryon, or to the album, for which Baudelaire never
wrote his text, since no publisher was willing to pub
lish the work. Had Poulet-Malassis not failed in 1861,
it might have appeared, and then, in spite of the re
strictions imposed upon the restive spirit of the poet,
we might have had in Baudelaire's text some literary
equivalent of Meryon's etchings. How sympathetic
this would have been, is shown by the descriptive and
interpretative passage from the Salon de 1859 already
quoted, which, in a few sentences, completely defines
the form of Meryon's imaginative genius, and reveals
the inmost source of its power to stir the emotions.
There was, indeed, much that was common to the
genius of Meryon and of Baudelaire. The work of
16

both was profoundly personal, and in both a power
ful and somber imagination was tinged with a subtle
fantasy supplied by a morbid exaggeration in the
senses, which did not, however, preclude an intense
and ardent preoccupation with formal perfection.
On the contrary, these two modern detraques pre
sent in their work a solidity of construction and an
absolute rectitude in the rendering of their moods
and dreams, that is scarcely to be found in the work
of even their best-balanced and sanest contempo
raries. The art of Baudelaire has been compared to
that of Racine, and, in the same way, Meryon's de
sign has the complete economy and control of Robert
Nanteuil or of Callot. Men like these make us doubt
and reconsider our stock distinctions of "romantic"
and "classic." The work of Meryon and of Baude
laire answers equally to both descriptions, and as
sures them a place apart in their generation. Thus,
while their paths crossed but for a moment, and while
they never shared with each other their secret thoughts
and aspirations, there is, nevertheless, no small in
terest for the student in these slight and fragmentary
records of what, had it not been for a cruel freak
of fate, might have proved an enduring and fruitful
friendship.

II
CHARLES MERYON, POET
f HE reader will recall a project for collabora
tion between Meryon and Baudelaire, pro
posed by the publisher, Delatre. This came
to naught, as plans for the album containing
the Eaux-Fortes sur Paris, for which Baudelaire was
to write a prose accompaniment, fell through. But the
suggestion at least serves to remind us that, when he
originally published his etchings at his own expense,
Meryon himself provided a partial accompaniment
for the work in the form of little poems which he
etched on separate copper plates and in his own
handwriting. A few of the shorter poems were even
placed directly upon the etchings themselves, where
they appear in one or more states. Would Meryon have
discarded these verses from the new album, and were
Baudelaire's remarks intended entirely to supersede
them as more formal and edifying? In certain cases
they had already been rendered obsolete by changes
in the plates which destroyed the point of the verses;
or, as in the case of Le Pont-Neuf and Le Stryge, they
had been effaced from the copper in later reworkings.
And yet we know from Meryon's manuscript notes
entitled Mes Observations, on the article by his friend
Philippe Burty in the Gazette des Beaux Arts, as well
as from numerous variants in existing proofs, that he

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Portrait of Charles Meryon
From the etching by Felix Bracquemond
This is the portrait which Meryon himself preferred
Size of the original etching, 4% X 3M> inches

devoted no little time and attention to these verses
in the attempt to perfect their form and diction. It
would thus seem as if Meryon, at one period of his
career at least, took his role of poet with some serious
ness. It may strike one as remarkable that an artist
who had expressed himself so completely in his chosen
medium should have sought another outlet. But
Meryon's mind was wholly absorbed by his subject-
matter. His selection of Paris with its monuments was
by no means a casual one, dictated merely by a sense
of the picturesque and by the promise of profit from
such an undertaking. For him, perhaps more than for
any other artist who has ever lived, save perhaps the
Russian novelist Dostoieffsky, cities had an inward
significance, a soul. It was this that attracted him and
that he strove to interpret beneath the material con
structions of bricks and stone; and as his imagination
was of the intellectual, brooding order, his work has,
in the words of Burty, a portee philosophique which
renders any successful imitation of it impossible.
This philosophical intention of the artist Meryon's
poems tend to prolong and, in some instances, to render
more explicit. Often mere jeux d' esprit, their very play
fulness touches the chords of life and death with a kind
of macabre and ironic humor, stirring an uneasy sense
of the mystery of good and evil. In the longer and more
serious poems, the lines throb with a passion of pity
and tenderness for suffering mankind. This is height
ened and intensified by the poet's wistful contemplation
of his own destiny when, like a child, he dreams of the
future, gazing on the stars and seeking, in his own artless
way, to solve the enigma of life after his first experience
of pain and sorrow. A distinct autobiographic interest

attaches to these poems which not only mirror his emo
tional moods, but reflect some of the outward vicissi
tudes of his adventurous and unhappy life.
Of particular interest from every point of view
is the dedication of Eaux-Fortes sur Paris to the
seventeenth-century Dutch etcher, Reynier Nooms,
better known as Zeeman, who was one of Meryon's
most important masters in the art of the needle, and
several of whose plates he carefully copied before
attempting any original work. But to seize the full
significance of this dedicatory poem and its peculiar
appropriateness in the present instance, one must also
bear in mind Meryon's own maritime experience as
an officer in the French navy, as well as the fact that
Zeeman himself had etched some views of Paris archi
tecture. The reference in the last stanza but one
seems to indicate how direct was the influence of these
upon Meryon in his style of treatment. Indeed, it
may very well be that Meryon received from them
not only the elements of his somewhat severe and
graver-like technique, but the original suggestion, even,
for his great undertaking. You who sailors grave!
Whose callous hand could capture
In a kind of rapture,
And so simply tell
All that weaves the spell
Of the sea and wave.
Let me tell thee, sire,
How I do admire
What subtly shows to me
The sailor soul in thee.
In all your work, no less,
How each trait doth aver
The skilful mariner
So simple in address.
20

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Meryon. Verses to Zeeman (1854)
Size of the original etching, 6% X 2% inches

If Reason did not check
My fancy, wont to roam,
I half the time should find
Your paper wet with foam,
And then along the wind
Should scent the tarry deck.
In some new age may I,
As through thy waters slipping,
Once more thy shores descry,
Thy ocean and thy shipping;
That on the plate well laid,
With keen point I may trace,
By acid's mordant aid,
All, in my thought's vast space,
I see that 's good and great
In the salt brine of the sea;
And thou, dear captain and mate
Wilt offer thy hand to me !
Of this first work and new,
Where I have Paris shown,
— A ship adorns her banner —
And tried to make my own
My master's simple manner,
Accept the homage due!
My master and man of the sea,
Reynier, thou whom I love
Like another part of me,
May I see thee soon above!
As a frontispiece for the Eaux-Fortes sur Paris,
Meryon presented a picture, fantastically surmounted
by the figure of a devil, of the old entrance to the
Palais de Justice. To face this, he wrote a short poem
in the second etched state of which occurs a variant
through the substitution of the word "gemisse" for
"rougisse," in the first line. I have incorporated both
readings in my translation : —
21

Though pure souls blush and groan,
For frontispiece I 've shown
This sooty devilkin,
Malicious, full of sin,
Who shadows with his wings
The old twin towers of kings,
Of Paris, pleasant town,
Paris, of fair renown,
Which love and laughter crown —
Where science, mighty rede
Of diabolic breed,
Full many a cub doth hatch
That Demons claw and scratch!
The wicked animal
Who brought about our fall,
Has chosen, far from well,
In our good town to dwell.
The case is truly grave,
And sadly I engrave,
Because, to rid the town,
We needs must — tear it down. . . .
For the Stryge, the first capital plate in the portfolio,
Meryon supplied but the two following lines, which
might, however, serve as a motto for the work as a
whole : — Lust, a foul vampire, insatiable and lewd,
Fore'er o'er the great city, covets its obscene food.
Even this brief inscription, which was traced di
rectly beneath the etching, appears in only one state.
Yet nothing could better sum up the saturnine philos
ophy of this mystic medieval dreamer, for whom the
monster thus described stood as the symbol of that
spirit of sin and suffering which corrupted the soul of
the town he loved and hated with a singular intensity
of evil fascination.
The same sentiment is more concretely and hu-
22

Meryon. Old Gate of the Palais de Justice
The frontispiece for "Eaux-Fortes sur Paris"
Size of the original etching, 3Mj X 3^0 inches

Meryon. Le Stryge
Size of the original etching, 6%. X 5% inches

manly expressed in the verses at the top of the third
state of La Rue des Mauvais Gargons: —
What mortal once did dwell
In such a dark abode?
Who there did hide him well
Where the sun's rays never showed?
Was it Virtue here did stay,
Virtue, silent and poor?
Or Crime, perchance you'll say,
Some vicious evil-doer ?
Ah, faith, I do not know;
And if you curious be,
Go there yourself and see,
There still is time to go . . .
The last line, of course, contains a reference to the
demolitions then in progress throughout the old quar
ters of Paris. Among the many monuments doomed
to disappear was the old Pompe Notre-Dame on
which Meryon composed the following verse, entitled
La Petite Pompe. Set in a very clever and amusingly
Bacchic border which seems to exude drunkenness in
every line, this little conceit has been well characterized
by one writer as an "elegant and witty fantasy": — •
You've served your day,
Lackaday !
Poor old pump,
Shorn of your pomp,
You now must die!
But to mollify
This iniquitous decree,
By a Bacchic pleasantry,
Why, pump, do not you,
Quite impromptu,
Instead of water pure,
No folks can endure,
Pump wine,
Very fine?
23

Not the destruction, but the restoration, of the
Pont-Neuf produced the following two stanzas, the
second with its whimsical, yet wistful, reference, per
haps to his own infirmities : —
Of old Pont-Neuf the view
Exactly shown you see,
All furbished up anew
By recent town decree.
Doctors, who know each ill,
And surgeons full of skill,
Why not with flesh and bone,
Deal as with bridge of stone?
According to Delteil, these verses occur only in the
sixth state of Le Pont-Neuf; but the text, as he gives
it, does not coincide in the last two lines with that of
a proof in the New York Public Library from which
I have made the above translation, nor does it make
good sense.
Of all Meryon's important plates, the one which he
worked over and altered most in successive states —
these number eleven — is Le Pont-au-Change. In the
second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth, there appears
in the upper left-hand corner a balloon on which is
inscribed the word "Speranza." This balloon gives
way in the seventh to a flock of birds which, in turn,
disappear in the tenth in favor of a flight of small
balloons; while in the eleventh and last still other bal
loons are added, including a larger one which bears,
this time, the name of "(Vas)co da Gama." It is not
difficult to see how, to his imaginative mind with its
mystical turn for symbols and correspondences, man's
soaring invention could become identified with his in
domitable readiness to rise, even from the depths of

Meryon. La Rue des Mauvais Garcons
Size of the original etching, 4% X 3"8 inches

Meryon. La Petite Fompe
Size of the original etching, 4*4 X 3y$ inches

\AZ7i77j:<'~33r

Meryon. Le Pont-Neuf
Size of the original etching, 7*4 inches square

despair. To develop the spiritual significance of this
analogy, and to explain the inscription of the word
"Speranza" on his first balloon, he wrote the follow
ing poem which enables us to penetrate the very mood
of the brain-sick: —
O power of Hope divine, Balloon, with upward urge,
Like the pale skiff that rocks upon the swelling surge,
Stirred by the careless breath of Autumns full of peace,
You float, and in the mists, set swirling by the breeze,
Reveal yourself sometimes unto our eager eyes,
In the calm tracts of space, on the blue ground of the skies,
Where the life-giving rays of a bright sun that gleams,
A line of gold do trace below the brilliant dreams
Of doubtful days to come; descend and build anew
The courage, sorely tried, of the rude and storm-tossed crew;
Of warriors stern and bold, who for a better fate,
Before the press of foes, still bear themselves elate,
Of wounded, broken hearts, who seek o'er earth in vain
The unknown joy they scent, and hunger to attain!
But, moody dreamer, why, when pictures are thy trade,
Wilt thou among the clouds forever promenade?
Descend, descend to earth, and do no longer try
To climb the paths too steep, that lead up through the sky.
Fear thou of Fate to tempt the wayward fantasy,
For never unto men is she with favors free.
And since you hold the point, through fortune's latest freak,
That makes a needy etcher of the sailor far too weak,
So work that on the copper, black-glazed, that you must hollow,
Your hand will leave behind the ripple that should follow
Each feeble skiff that passes upon the stormy sea
That men call life, whose waters both harsh and bitter be,
Where oft, too oft, alas, the lying hope that bore
Us on with siren lure deserts us at the shore!
If the foregoing, with its note of pensive self-con-
munion, is the most personal and poignant of all
the poems, L'Hotellerie de la Mort is the most pow
erful and passionate. Written to accompany La
Morgue, it completes the purpose of that etching by
carrying the eye beyond the grim walls of the "inn of

death" to the soul of the sinister tragedy within. In
it a sense of profoundest pity struggles with the never-
failing ironic perception of the artist, in a strange
atmosphere of imaginative fantasy, to produce an
agonized and heart-rending cry of revolt against the
mysterious principle of suffering that pervades the
universe. Peace and a promise of felicity are found
at last in an influx of that peculiar mystical sentiment
and insight which would seem to have its source in
German romanticism: —
Come, view, ye passersby,
Where her poor children lie;
A mother charitable,
This Paris that you see.
To them, at all times free,
Gives both a bed and table. .
See, without turning pale,
These faces that show naught,
Some smiling, some distraught,
The future's mystic tale. . . .
Here Death herds all the drove
Of those whom Fate waylays
Upon the stony ways,
Through Envy, Want, and Love. .
When upon Paris breaks
The pitiless hue and cry,
Satan himself then quakes,
So full the tables lie. . . .
Ah, may thou ne'er be shown
On this black bier of stone,
Of some one dear to thee,
The awful effigy! . . .
Oh, passers, passers, pray
For all who pass this way,
26

Meryon. La Morgue
Size of the original etching, Qy$ X 8% inches

And down to death are hurled
Forever, without measure,
By this great haunt of pleasure,
Here in this famous world!
And yet, Death, may it not,
'Neath the stern mask we see,
Hide, of man's final lot,
Some smiling mystery?
Who knows if, Grief and Pain
Drawing aside their screen,
At the end of toil and strain,
The star may not be seen?
Then on, poor human bands,
Dig and delve in the earth,
With your feet and with your hands.
For there is due to dearth
Some black bread every day!
If under famine's flail,
With night still on the way,
Your forces growing frail,
And stricken with dismay,
Upon the road are spent;
If you envisage Death,
Whom God perchance doth send,
Then, with your latest breath,
Wiping away your tears,
Glance at the vaulted skies,
Where cease for aye men's fears.
Lift up again your eyes!
There you perchance will read
That for you now draws nigh
The sweet days of no need.
When, never more to die,
The flower shall unfold,
The flower with fresh corol,
With the holy aureole,
Of blessings manifold,
Whose germ all hearts do hold!
Equally characteristic, in a certain note of sardonic
humor, is the little piece of six lines which Meryon
affixed to L'Abside de Notre-Dame: —
27

O you who subtly relish each bit of Gothic style,
Then view you here, of Paris, the noble churchly pile :
High they have wished to build it, our great and saintly kings,
To give, unto their master, their deep repentance wings.
Although it is so large, alas, they call it now too small,
Of those who fashionably sin, for it to hold them all!
This completes the first Paris series on the literary
side, nor are there any poems for the later Paris pic
tures, except one of little interest for Le Bain-Froid
Chewier, which appears in the proofs with letters.
Unlike the others, this is engraved on the plate in Ro
man characters instead of being etched in the artist's
own handwriting, which is, perhaps, one reason why
it seems less personal and more perfunctory. Worthier
of translation is the little set of verses which Meryon
inscribed in a portfolio of the Eaux-Fortes sur Paris
sent, in 1854, to his friend, Eugene Blery, who taught
him how to etch : —
B16ry, to you, my guide,
Who first for me untied
Of art, your secret way;
Who did, without delay,
Of your high-burning soul,
The mirror bright unveil;
My Muse, fresh for the goal,
Of what it hath, though frail,
Would make an offering,
In graving here your name
Within the frontis frame
Of this small gift of hers —
Though what stirs in her heart
But feebly it avers —
The first fruits of her art.
Had Meryon ever carried out his scheme for a port
folio of prints illustrative of his travels in the South
Seas, he might have written a number of poems to ac-

Meryon. L'Abside de Notre-Dame de Paris
From a proof in the collection of Harris B. Dick, Esq.
Size of the original etching, 6X HV2 inches

Meryon. Le Pilote de Tonga (1861)
This song, composed in prose, after the manner of the inhabitants of New
Zealand, was intended as a preface to a series of souvenirs of the voyage of
the corvet Rhin, which Meryon intended to illustrate.
Size of the original etching, 8 X 5% inches

company them. As it is, we have only one inspired by
this subject and by this episode in his life. It is un-
rhymed and is, in fact, a sort of prose poem. "I did
not make this little piece as a song," wrote Meryon
in Mes Observations, "though it doubtless contains
the material for one, according to the custom of the
Islanders." It reminds one of similar little pictures,
simple and rhythmic in line and glowing with light
and color, presented by that other great artist who
visited the South Seas and who has left a literary as
well as an artistic record of his impressions — the late
John La Farge. The text of Meryon's graceful and
spirited composition is printed in red, and is sur
rounded with a frame of Polynesian ornament. It is
entitled LE PILOTE DE TONGA
We sailed from Tonga on a ship of war;
now comes the Pilot in his frail pirogue.
He is nearly nude. Agile and strong, with
one leap he is on board; he goes straight to
the commander and greets him with a cour
teous salute.
The ship spreads her sails to the winds;
swiftly sped by the breeze that swells them,
she enters the narrow and dangerous strait.
Standing on the quarter-deck, his head held
high and his eye alert, the skilful pilot shows
with a gesture the course of the ship which
runs gaily among the reefs! His is the noble
attitude of the Sylvan. Everything about him
denotes assurance. His broad bosom, of tawny
hue, gleams in the sunlight like a bronze
buckler. His long locks float in the wind.

On board all is still. Officers and sailors
admire him in silence,
And the ship sails on, and on, and on.
But the channel broadens. At length the
surge of the open sea sounds beneath the
prow. Hurrah! valiant pilot! hurrah!
The strait is passed!
Pursue thy course, O noble ship; before us opens now
The Ocean!
And to thee, Pilot of Tonga, thanks!
Very different from this purely descriptive and
decorative composition is the last of Meryon's met
rical compositions, L'Attelage, with its dramatic
form and its profound sense of the misery of life for
the humble. Like the other poems, it is in his own
handwriting, and it has a decorative initial in the
shape of a summary but suggestive sketch of a bit of
dreary landscape that accentuates the moral atmos
phere of the poem itself: — ¦
A horse crawled on his way, sad, and with hanging head,
For he was old and thin, and powdered o'er with dust.
Behind him, as he went, a pensive yokel led
An ancient plow that creaked, unoiled, and worn with rust.
The man was spare and bent, by age, so it did seem,
And I felt deepest pity for this unhappy team.
And that I might console them, when as I came in reach,
'O weary slaves,' to both I thus began my speech,
'You will have rest at evening, when you are growing old.' . . .
— I had not finished speaking, when both at once, decisive:
'We hope for nothing ever: for us, no mirth will hold
'The future years derisive.
' For we are of the race foredoomed from birth to toil.
'Poor man, poor animal,
' Both with our burdens shall
' Go turning up the soil, 30

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Size of the original etchiDg, 5%X 3^4 inches

'With sweat, in summer's heat.
' For what our lord inherits, 't is ours to cause to swell
' And make the oats grow well
'That other mouths shall eat.'
— 'T is true, I mused, for them their weariness is vain;
Their labor and their sweat, their long hours and their pain,
Do bring them no return; ah! it is truly taught,
That certain men, too many, more than in justice ought,
In this life suffer all, and what the generous fee
For all their thankless toil? — Death — so it seems to me
Other pieces written by Meryon, and either etched
or engraved on copper, have a curious rather than a
literary interest. Thus Petit Prince Ditto is a polit
ical pasquinade on the Prince Imperial and con
tains a scurrilous reference to his reputed origin. The
two plates entitled respectively La Loi Lunaire and La
Loi Solaire are, as Burty calls them, philosophical
fantasies based upon a system of absolute morality.
The first, in particular, both in the order of its ideas
and in the symbolic style of its decoration, reminds
one somewhat of Blake, between whom and Meryon
there are certain points of resemblance both in tem
perament and in intellectual organization. Through
the latter, with his powerful objective vision, there runs
a vein of unmistakable mystic sentiment and percep
tion. True mystics have always been thus endowed,
and it may even be said that the primary basis of
mysticism is a firm grasp upon the ordinary realities
of life. It is from this ground, and not from any vague
indistinctness, or any absolute denial of the senses,
that the mystic worthy of the name soars to his trans
cendent interpretation of life as a whole.
Seen aright, each of Meryon's plates is such an
interpretation, and his poems aid us to understand

them in such a sense. But their function is not merely
interpretative. They have, in addition, an intrinsic
literary value of their own. They possess sincerity
and depth of feeling, and, in the matter of expression,
a certain blunt and homely directness that I have en
deavored to preserve in my renderings, even at the
expense of smoothness. They are, moreover, entirely
original, — so much so, indeed, that Meryon has all
the air of having actually invented poetry for his own
peculiar purposes, as he invented his simple yet strik
ingly decorative way of presenting it.
And yet these original and naive verses, so evi
dently the work of a hand quite unpracticed in the
art of poetry, of a mind of no particular literary cul
ture — of a medieval ballad-mind, if I may be allowed
the expression — have their affinities with other poetry.
As I have faithfully turned his French alexandrines
into their precise equivalent, his quaint homeliness re
minds me of more than one elder English poet — Sir
Thomas Wyatt, Nicholas Grimald, Michael Drayton — ¦
who tried to give Renaissance form to this, our tradi
tional ballad measure. But in mood and intellectual
content, it is to the great poets of the nineteenth cen
tury that he is most akin. Thus, in the pensive pes
simism of the wistful searcher of the skies, we seem
to listen to a less convinced and more mystical Leo-
pardi; in V Hotelier ie de la Mort there is a hint of
Hood's humanitarian sentiment and social invective;
in L'Attelage sounds the same outraged sense of the
dignity of human labor, and even of the moral claims
of animal life, that penetrates modern poetical expres
sion from Burns to Baudelaire;1 while, in Meryon's
1 This poem, however, presents an even more remarkable parallel
32

frequent bizarrerie of diction, his imaginative fantasy,
and his fondness for the occult and the abstract —
his metaphysical note, in short — we recognize that
he is brother to Poe and a forerunner of the Symbolistes.
Thus, also, they have their value as a gloss on the
moral and spiritual evolution of the age, these little
poems which, finally, thrill us as the product of the
same mind which imagined the austere, grandiose, and
mystical visions of the Eaux-Fortes sur Paris, and of
the hand which graved these on the copper with such
restrained ardor of execution.
with that famous production of fourteenth-century, or Middle-
English, literature, " The Vision of Piers the Ploughman." Not only
the spirit, but the very language, of Meryon's piece is found in such a
passage as the following from Miss Jessie L. Weston's admirable ren
dering into modern English in "Romance, Vision, and Satire": —
" Some set them to the plough-share, and seldom thought of play.
In harrowing and sowing they gain, laboriously,
What many of their masters destroy in gluttony."

Ill
MAXIME LALANNE
INTRODUCED into Prance by the "Men of
1830" as a phase of the revival of land
scape art and as an intimate instrument of
self-expression, modern painter-etching
dates its decline in that country from about 1860,
when it began to become popular. It is not without
significance that Lalanne 's first plate, the Rue des
Marmousets, should have been published the same year
— 1862 — as a little article with the suggestive title,
"L'Eau-forte est a la mode," which Baudelaire con
tributed anonymously to the Revue anecdotique. For,
if Jacque was, as he is commonly regarded, the pioneer
of the movement, the distinguished Bordelais, who was
decorated for his work by the King of Portugal—
critics and biographers have seemed to attach an ironic
importance to this unique recognition— may be said
to have brought it to a close. Bracquemond and
Jacque continued productive long after 1860, but La
lanne was the last considerable new talent to appear.
After him comes Buhot. This clever artist, however,
stands alone, remote from any tradition, and his dis
dain for all restraints arising from the nature of his
medium, marks in him the decadence of etching as a
distinct style.

w 5

J ^ate^.

Lalanne. Plage des Vaches Noires, Villers
"Who has rendered the long, dazzling reaches of seashore with so few lines and with so much magic of
atmosphere and perspective, as Lalanne in his etchings of the Norman coast — Villers, Dives, Beuzeval,
Calvados ? " Size of the original etching, 594 X 9^s inches

This is by no means the case with Lalanne. Pos
sessed of scarcely less skill than Buhot, he canalized his
cleverness, and confined his virtuosity to overcoming
the difficulties involved in a strict adherence to certain
fixed rules of procedure. That his work gained by
this rigid discipline of taste is unquestionable. To it
must be attributed the combined strength and delicacy
of a style which, more than that of any other French
etcher, keeps the freedom, vigor, and directness of the
Dutch masters, and unites with these qualities the
elegance and lucidity of the Gallic temperament. Al
though trained in the use of the fusain, Lalanne never
was seduced by love of depth and richness of tone into
abandoning, or even modifying, the pure linear tech
nique which is the basic principle of the art of the
needle. In this he may be contrasted with another
advocate of pure line— Haden— who, however, in his
frequent use of dry-point, not less than in his experi
ments late in life with mezzotint, betrays a distinctly
national bias toward what is, perhaps, the most char
acteristic mode of English black-and-white art. In
two plates, Les Borcls de la Tamise and Richmond,
which, perversely enough, although by no means in his
most interesting manner, are given by many critics
almost the highest rank among his works, Lalanne
emulated Haden in a certain tenderness of sentimen
tal and atmospheric suggestion. But he never sought
to secure his rich effects of light and shade, or his bril
liant tonal contrasts.
There was nothing sensuous in the temperament of
Lalanne, which may rather be described as spirituel.
"Amusant et piquant," is the way Beraldi describes
his method, and these two words accurately indicate
35

a mental attitude on the part of the artist toward his
material. At the root of his inspiration lay a habit of
analysis which made him see line where another would
see mass, and seek to reduce expression to the simplest
and most logical terms in that medium. Even his sen
timent partakes of this abstract intellectual character,
and is stirred in him by the grace of a curve, the caress
of a contour, rather than by any deeper appeal to the
emotions. Sensibility of this sort occasionally weakens
his work, as in the two popular plates, Aux Environs
de Paris and Le Canal a Pont-Sainte-Maxence, through
the excessive attenuation of natural forms to which it
leads. But it never produces vagueness or obscurity.
On the contrary, clarity is a distinguishing trait of
Lalanne 's style. No one has ever been able to express
himself more clearly, fluently, or concisely in the
medium of etching. He apparently never experienced
the slightest difficulty in saying precisely what he
wished and in selecting the precise way in which to
say it. Seldom, in his best plates, is there a stroke that
is not essential ; and in many of his sketches, where he
employs a free line remarkable alike for the brevity
of its indications, the clearness of its evocative power,
and the negligent nonchaloir of its flowing loops and
lacets, he reveals a faculty for generalization that is
amazing. There is no better example of this witty laconism of
style than the Rue des Marmousets. Although it is his
first plate, it exhibits a maturity of method that would
never lead one to suspect that it was the work of a be
ginner. There is original creative power in the simple
solidity of his architectural constructions, in the effec
tive distribution and biting of his relatively few lines,
36

Lalanne. Les Bords de la Tamise
"Jolie petite piece dans Ie gout de Seymour Haden.'
Size of the original etching, 3% X 5% inches

Henri Beraldi.

Lalanne. Rtje des Marmousets
"C'est de terns immemorial, que Ie bruit a couru qu'il y avoit en la Cite" de
Paris, rue des Marmousets, un patissier meurtrier, lequel ayant occis en sa
maison un homme, ayde" a ce par un sien voisin barbier, faignant raser la
barbe: de la chair d'icelui faisit des pastez qui se trouvoient meilleurs que les
aultres, d'autant que la chair de I'homme est plus delicate, k cause de la
nourriture, que celle des aultres animaux."
P. Jacques du Breul, Le Thedtre des Antiquites de Paris (1612).
Size of the original etching, 9V2 X 6% inches

and in his ability to evoke the genius loci of the grisly
pastrycook's sinister shop. Meryon may have sug
gested the subject, but his influence did not extend to
the style of treatment. The technique is Lalanne 's
own. It is more modern than Meryon's, and it is
akin to Whistler's, rather than to that of the classic
school whence Meryon derived his initial inspiration.
The latter, though romantic in spirit, was classic in
form. Lalanne, on the contrary, was a true impres
sionist ; and as etching is essentially an impressionistic
art, Lalanne may even be said, in this sense, to be the
superior of Meryon, whose art tended to merge in that
of line-engraving.
The differences between the two men are well exem
plified in their ways of working. Meryon made tiny
pencil sketches of the parts of his composition which
he afterward assembled on the plate. Lalanne,
sketching for the most part directly on the copper,
made each successive plate a leaf in a vast note-book.
What he thus lost through the absence of reflection and
deliberate design, he gained in spontaneity and in live
liness of execution. Still, charming as it is, much of
his work seems somehow trivial and deficient. One
cannot look through the eight fat portfolios that con
tain the complete collection of it in the New York
Public Library, without receiving an impression of
monotony, and even, it must be said, mediocrity. La
lanne traveled much, and thus shows no lack of va
riety in his subject-matter ; but his motives are few,
casual, and constantly repeated. Nor does this repeti
tion lead in the end to any greater depth of penetra
tion—to the consecutive "conquest" of nature. His
prolific output is not due to any deep passion, as in the

case of Claude Lorrain, to wrest from Nature her in
most secrets, but rather, one feels, to a simple taste for
the picturesque, and also to a love of etching for its
own sake— a sheer physical delight in the manipula
tion of the needle.
Lalanne was neither a thinker nor a poet, he had
neither deep personal emotion, exalted imaginative
vision, nor consuming scientific curiosity. His voca
tion as an artist was a vocation of hand and eye rather
than of heart and brain. ' ' Hugo, if you do not see his
rock of Guernsey, loses something of his elevation,"
writes Maurice Barres in an attempt to prove that the
personality of the lyric poet is the necessary comple
ment of his expression. Yet it is possible to view the
pedestal, and even then to miss the greatness of the
statue. This is undeniably the case with Lalanne, who
visited Hugo in his exile, and made a series of fifteen
plates portraying the poet and his domain. The
Hugo of these pictures scarcely forecasts in prestige
and grandeur the old man, the first sight of whom,
talking with Leconte de Lisle in the library of the
Senate, so filled the young Barres with emotion. He
is merely a middle-aged Frenchman of some political
importance, en villegiature, where he has been visited
by an inquisitive artist of the Paris press.
Instances could be multiplied indefinitely to illus
trate this moral and imaginative deficiency in La
lanne, which has been by no means overlooked by
critics. And yet, in spite of it, Lalanne holds a dis
tinct place of his own among French painter-etchers
of the nineteenth century. Others employed the point
more penetratingly in their search for the truth of
nature and of their own souls. Still others reared

wmm IIP. *«

Lalanne. Bordeaux, Vue de Cenon
B^ordmux F* fijf% Jfeause most deeply felt of the pure landscapes is the plate entitled
"of skyMInd%?e%Ted plain."haS ' n°te °£ n°blhty » "S comP°^°° «* - it- wide
Size of the original etching, 6% X 9% inches

Lalanne. Nogent
•¦More intimate and familiar, with a^of rustic graced idyllic freshness, are the views in the
Size of the original etching, 4y8X 6% inches

with it edifices more massive and moods more imagina
tive, but no one else has used it so cursively, with such
literary grace and facility, or developed a style so
accomplished and idiomatic. Nor is this all. If Me
ryon had more of the classic severity of form, Lalanne
had more of the classic serenity of spirit. In many
of his landscapes there is a tranquil charm, a gentle
pensiveness of mood, which humanizes, as it were, the
aspects of nature. Perhaps the finest, because most
deeply felt, of the pure landscapes is the plate entitled
Bordeaux, Vue de Cenon, which has a note of nobility
in its composition and in its wide sweep of sky and
steepled plain. More intimate and familiar, with a
touch of rustic grace and idyllic freshness, are the
views in the neighborhood of Nogent — the home of
Flaubert's Frederic Moreau. Doubtless it was as La
lanne pictured them, that Barres felt his desire drawn
by the canals and meadows of this Seine country on
his "Voyage de Sparte"; and these little etchings, so
filled with a sense of tender playfulness in their exe
cution, may well help us to understand something of
the Frenchman's nostalgia for his native soil.
Even more than to nature, Lalanne was attracted to
cities, and in his views of Paris and Bordeaux there is
a simple, intuitive apprehension of the scene as a
whole— the way a child sees things— which lifts
familiar sights, and constructions of brick and stone,
as completely out of the commonplace of every-day, as
does Meryon's somber vision. Thus, in his temper no
less than in certain incompletely realized pictorial
intentions, and in that preference for humanized
aspects of landscape which sets him apart from the
Barbizon artists, he has affinities with the school of

Claude, to whom his friends rather indiscreetly com
pared him in his lifetime. "I shall not speak of you
. . . nor of your etchings, in which the style of
Claude is so well united to the grace of Karel Dujar-
din, " wrote Charles Blanc in a letter to Lalanne
which is printed in the English translation of the lat
ter 's treatise on etching, the standard text-book on this
subject. He lacks the sustained seriousness and ele
vation of the master, but he has something of the
charm of the disciple. He has also certain definite
artistic achievements to his credit. Who, for ex
ample, has ever condensed a greater sense of space
into small compass, or introduced such multiplic
ity of detail without confusion or dispersal of in
terest, as Lalanne, in his Quai des Chartrons a Bor
deaux f Who has rendered the long, dazzling reaches
of seashore with so few lines, and with so much magic
of atmosphere and perspective, as Lalanne in his etch
ings of the Norman coast — Villers, Dives, Beuzeval,
Calvados f His masterpieces are not many, but few
etchers have produced so many plates on a sustained
level of excellence; and if from these there could be
eliminated the inferior work which for one reason or
another he also produced, the etchings which remain
would surprise more than one critic and collector who
now is disposed to dismiss Lalanne as a facile manu
facturer of pretty plates "easily comprehended of
the people."

Lalanne. Bordeaux, Quai des Chartrons
"Who, for example, has ever condensed a greater sense of space into small compass, or introduced such
multiplicity, as Lalanne, in his Quai des Char irons a Bordeaux"?
Size of the original etching, 4X 5% inches

w

-_ ,A-I I9.

"7 I

Lalanne, Beuzeval
'Point de depart de Guillaume de Normandie allant a la conquete de 1' Angleterre. 1066."— Maxime Lalanne.
Size of the original etching, 5Vi> X 9 inches

Lalanne. A Cusset
'C'est ici dans la maison Belot, qu'en 1440, lors de la paix de Cusset qui mit fin a la revolte de la Praguerie, Louis XI,
alors Dauphin, recut le pardon de son pere, Charles VII." — Maxime Lalanne.
Size of the original etching, 4% X 7% inches

IV
SOME FRENCH ETCHERS AND
SONNETEERS
j, KITING in 1862 of that revival of etching
which his own appreciation of Meryon and
other contemporary etchers did so much to
promote, Charles Baudelaire expressed his
belief that this art would never become really popular,
although he admitted that he might be a bad prophet
and hoped that he would prove so. Time, however, has
fully justified his vaticination, and to-day it is more
clearly understood than ever before, that the personal,
and therefore aristocratic, element, which the French
poet and connoisseur correctly felt to be of the very
essence of etching, must of necessity limit its appeal
and forever keep it the favored medium of the few
rather than of the many. Yet, at the precise moment,
any one less perspicacious than he might well have been
pardoned for a far more optimistic outlook. Never, in all
its history had etching appeared more likely to achieve
popularity than when Baudelaire was writing his little
articles, Peintres et Aqua-fortistes, and L'Eau-forte est a
la mode. As the latter title indicates, the art of the
needle had already become the vogue among the more
cultured classes of Parisian society, and this tended to

increase rather than to diminish during the remaining
years of the decade. The ranks of the etchers were
rapidly swelled with new recruits as eminent painters
and humble illustrators alike experimented with the
needle, while teachers like Lalanne and Gaucherel
turned out clever students from their well-attended
classes. But the public demand for prints kept pace with the
supply, and in order to meet it more directly, Cadart,
who had founded the French Etching Club on the model
of the Society of English Etchers, started a periodical of
his own, to which the majority of the leading etchers
of the time contributed. Even his catalogues were care
fully arranged little works of art, embellished with
miniature masterpieces by Veyrassat and other popular
favorites. Nor was this all. Etching very largely took
the place of lithography for the production of views of
contemporary historical events. So that, just as Kaffet
drew upon the stone the incidents of his martial epic,
of which the glory of the French arms was the theme,
Lalanne bit upon the copperplate scenes connected with
their tragic humiliation and defeat in the Siege of Paris.
It even competed with wood-engraving as an illustra
tive medium for books and magazines; and for many
years — or until the photogravure process came to take
its place for intaglio impressions — no pretentious de
luxe volume was complete without a series of eaux-
fortes by some eminent etcher or group of etchers.
Of such works the most interesting to students of the
modern revival of etching, especially if they are also
somewhat familiar with the literary history of the period
in France, is perhaps Sonnets et Eaux-fortes.1 Baudelaire
1 Sonnets et Eaux-fortes, mdccclxix. Alphonse Lemerre, Editeur.
42

had already pointed out the special appeal of the
medium to the man of letters; and doubtless this sump
tuous volume, which was published in Paris in 1869,
and which aimed to bring together as author and illus
trator all the principal poets and etchers of the period
— including a few foreign artists of distinction — was
more or less directly inspired by his dictum. Forty-
two poets and etchers cooperated in this joint enterprise
which, it is significant to note, was engineered, not by
Cadart or any other publisher identified with the his
tory of etching under the Second Empire, but with one
who hitherto had limited himself exclusively to literary
enterprises, and was intimately associated with the rise
of the "Parnassian" school of French poetry. The
house of Lemerre is to-day one of the most important in
Paris. But its beginnings, which reach back only four or
five years before the publication oi Sonnets et Eaux-fortes,
were modest — even humble — enough. M. Edmond
Lepelletier has given an interesting account of these in
his Paul Verlaine, Sa Vie, Son CEuvre,1 as well as of the
group of poets of whom, as M. Remy de Gourmont
points out in a recent appreciation of their belated
survivor, Leon Dierx, it is difficult to say whether they
most owe their success to Lemerre, or he owes his to
them. The leaders of the Parnassian movement had at first
assumed the style of Les Impassibles; and, as this name
indicates, they cultivated an attitude of stoic self-
restraint with which was blended an element of dandyism
Paris. 350 copies, and plates destroyed. Dedicated " Aux poetes et aux
artistes qui ont collabores a cette oeuvre, a M . Philippe Burty qui en
a dirige l'illustration, l'editeur reconnaissant, A. Lemerre."
' Paul Verlaine, His Life — His Work. Translated into English by
E. M. Lang. New York: DuiSeld & Co.
43

and of disdainful indifference towards the common con
cerns of mankind. They repudiated the lachrymose sen
timentality of Lamartine, the "unlyrical brilliance" of
Alfred de Musset, and — although they continued to
admire the poet himself — the political preoccupations
and humanitarian enthusiasms of Victor Hugo. Their
new note which, in brief, represented simply a reaction
against the excesses of romanticism, was — in theory,
at least — compounded of a frigid impersonality, an
ideal adoration of beauty as it appealed primarily to the
painter and to the sculptor, and an entire devotion to
the practice of an impeccable, painstaking, and rather
inhuman, art. Thus they found their naturally ap
pointed masters in Theophile Gautier, with his doctrine
of "l'art pour l'art," Alfred de Vigny, with the lordly
isolation of his "ivory tower"; Theodore de Banville,
with his virtuosity and scrupulous exactitude in the
use of the metrical instrument he did so much to develop
and refine; and Charles Baudelaire, with his strange
intensity, and yet almost reticent sobriety and restraint
of expression, making him one of the most enigmatic of
poets and artists. Closest to them all, however, on the
personal, as on the artistic, side — their real elder
brother in the spirit — stood the creole poet, Leconte
de Lisle, who seemed to soar above the world on the
wings of the eagle which he himself has described, and
to embrace the entire vision of earth and sky in his epic
gaze. Like all Parisian movements, this one was organized
in a cafe, but it soon found a salon in the home of one of
its leaders, Louis-Xavier Ricard, at No. 10, Boulevard
des Batignolles, where Madame Ricard, mother of the
poet and journalist, entertained her son's associates,

and let them talk as long and as loudly as they
liked. "This improvised salon," writes M. Lepelletier, "was
a simple and suburban affair," but "it exercised a deci
sive influence upon the movement of ideas, and more
especially upon the formation of a new school of poetry
among the literary youth of 1866-70. It was here that
Parnassianism had its cradle," and it was here that
many poets, destined to become famous, made their
debut. For example, it "witnessed the first introduction
of a rough-headed poet, whose appearance had the effect
of a dawn, viz., the brilliant and sparkling Catulle
Mendes: refinement in ringlets. He was credited in
those days with the vices of which he was probably
ignorant, and the talent of which he already showed
signs was not properly appreciated. Mendes, in his
turn, introduced a young man, pale and thin, with
brilliant, deep-set eyes, and inscrutable expression,
whom he presented to us as a clerk in the War Office,
desirous of reciting some verses . . . His name was
Francois Coppee."
"At his side might be seen a youth of serene aspect
and tranquil mien, with a small nose, somewhat senten
tious speech, of circumspect regard, and prudent hand
shake, who delivered himself of a sonnet, which had
something to do with a turbot, placed by a decree of the
senate before Caesar with sauce piquante.'' This was
Anatole France, whose mind seems to have been
obsessed by the thought of Caesar at this time, since,
as we shall see, the sonnet which he contributed to
Sonnets et Eaux-fortes dealt with another phase of the
same subject. " Sully-Prudhomme, the oldest of us all,
graceful and gentle, . . . also recited, in a slow, monoto-
45

nous sing-song, the admirable philosophical sonnets
which later on were collected and published under the
title, Les Epreuves. One by one they leant against the
mantelpiece to enunciate their verses, retiring after
wards to a corner in silence."
There were others as well, among them the mad
genius, Auguste Villiers de l'lsle-Adam, and the West
Indian, Jose-Maria de Heredia, "sonorous, exuberant,
amiable, well-dressed, displaying a gold chain on his
evening waistcoat, with his handsome brown beard," —
in short, a typical creole gentleman of the planter class
— who "would declaim sounding verses and reproduce
the cries with which Artemis filled Ortygia as she chased
the wild leopards. Les Trophies, with its note of triumph,
published twenty-five years later, dates from this
period." But although these young poets enjoyed their private
recitals before a sympathetic audience, they were ambi
tious to reach a larger public, and what they wanted
more than anything else was, accordingly, a publisher.
"Our comrade, Ernest Boutier (a violinist), knew a
bookseller in the Passage Choiseul, whose customers
mostly purchased books of prayer and first communion,
which he displayed at No. 45, the corner shop, where the
Passage opened out into the Place Ventadour, in which
the Italian theatre then stood. This bookseller was
young, intelligent, enterprising, ambitious, and dreamed
of something better than being the mere successor of a
certain Percepied. He therefore lent an ear to the ten
tative suggestions of Ernest Boutier, backed up by
Verlaine, Ricard, and myself; and finally consented to
publish certain volumes of poetry, which it was under
stood were to be printed at the expense of the authors,
46

and to act as agent for a literary journal we were con
templating." The first volume issued was del, Rue, et Foyer, by
Ricard, and this was followed by two volumes, Le
Reliquaire and Poemes Saturniens by Francois Coppee
and Paul Verlaine respectively — "a triple commence
ment, and also the first essay of the excellent Alphonse
Lemerre, who was before long to conquer fame and for
tune by publishing poetry, an undertaking at all times
hazardous, and in those days regarded as absolutely
mad." Then in the same year was launched the now cele
brated collection of contemporary verse, Parnasse
Contemporain — so called at the suggestion of a scholar
who was engaged in editing Ronsard and the other
poets of La Pleiade for Lemerre — which gave its name
to an entire period of French poetry. Edited by Ricard,
it appeared monthly in parts of sixteen pages each, from
March 3 to July 14, 1866. The first part contained
poems by Gautier, Banville, and Heredia. The second
was entirely devoted to Leconte de Lisle. The third
brought together Louis Menard, Francois Coppee, and
Auguste Vacquerie. Part V presented some new Fleurs
du Mai by Baudelaire, and so on through a long list
which includes Leon Dierx, Sully-Prudhomme, Paul
Verlaine, Stephane Mallarme, and others too numerous
to mention.
Poets old and young, and of all shades of poetic tem
perament, were assembled in this eclectic publication
which attracted such general attention that, three years
later, Lemerre, who by that time had achieved important
success, issued a second series with the editorial assist
ance of Leconte de Lisle. "Some of the poets who, for

various reasons, and notably Sainte-Beuve and Auguste
Barbier . . . were not included among the authors in
the first volume, were invited to take part in the sec
ond," and the gates of Parnassus swung wide to include
a host of newcomers.
This second volume appeared in 1869, and the same
year Lemerre issued Sonnets et Eaux-fortes. It might
well have been entitled Parnasse Contemporain Illustre;
for nearly all the poets represented in it had already
appeared in one or the other, or both, of the preceding
volumes, and it was no less representative of the new
movement. The Parnassian poets, having proclaimed
an impersonal and objective attitude, and adopted a
descriptive method based mainly on visual impressions,
recognized a special affinity between their art and that
of design. What, therefore, could be more appropriate
and suggestive from an aesthetic standpoint, than an ac
tive alliance between the two, in which each should sup
plement the other, the sharpness of the etched line deep
ening the impressions of form and color conveyed more
faintly by the words, and these, in turn, amplifying the
ideas and sentiments that the artists were able to indi
cate only indirectly and symbolically in the pictures?
We have already mentioned Baudelaire's approxima
tion of etching to the art of literary expression. There
was also another way in which his influence was felt.
A collector himself, this friend of Meryon set the fashion
for the man of letters to be an amateur des estampes, and
the patron of etchers, and there was more than one
example of friendly relations between the practitioners
in the two arts, as in the case of Bracquemond and
the Goncourts. Several poets had even experimented
with the needle themselves. Chief among these was
48

S> .«,\\.v. '"V-') . W V« .

Daubigny. Le Verger
Size of the original etching, 7% X 4% inches

Victor Hugo, who had been instructed by Maxime La
lanne on the island of Guernsey; while, among the
minor poets, Claudius Popelin was both a painter and
an etcher, as well as a designer in enamel.
Popelin enjoys the unique distinction of appearing in
his dual capacity in Sonnets et Eaux-fortes. It is, how
ever, a distinction to which he is scarcely entitled by
any skill on his part. A competent, but not in any
way remarkable, poet, he shows himself a very feeble
draughtsman in the inferior figure study for Heredia's
fine sonnet, Les Conquerants, while he, in turn, is illus
trated, in his Dernier Amour de Charlemagne, with equal
mediocrity, by an obscure painter and etcher named
Ehrmann. Victor Hugo, on the other hand, appears
only as an artist. He had previously pleaded an arrange
ment with his publisher as an excuse for not contribut
ing to either of the volumes of the Parnasse, and no
doubt the same plea explains his non-appearance here
as a poet. But no such obstacle existed to his sending in
a dessin for the sonnet, L' Eclair, of his young friend and
admirer, Paul Meurice, who later became his literary
executor, and it must unquestionably have flattered the
colossal vanity of the poet to be thus publicly accorded
a place among the recognized masters of designing.
The plate which bears his name, however, was etched,
not by Hugo himself, but by Charles Courtry, also
represented by original work elsewhere in the volume.
The names one misses most in looking down the list
of poets and artists represented in Sonnets et Eaux-
fortes, are those of Charles Meryon and Charles Baude
laire. Both had died, insane, before the book was even
projected, so that they missed this opportunity for a
collaboration which, it will be recalled, was at one time
49

seriously contemplated in connection with the proposed
publication of Meryon's Eaux-fortes sur Paris. Meryon's
place is scarcely filled by his imitator, Louis Armand
Queyroy, who published views of Vendome and of the
streets and houses of old Blois in a physical dress that at
once suggests Meryon, and to whom Victor Hugo had
written (as he had previously written to Meryon and as
he habitually wrote to all artists who sent him their
work, with the same facile flattery that deprived his
recognition of all critical value): "C'est lafidelite photo-
graphique avec la liberte du grand art." There is more of
photography than of great art in Queyroy's work, but
it is not without a merit, little trace of which, however,
appears in his illustration for Le Sphinx, by Henri
Cazalis. Meryon and Baudelaire are absent, but there is
plentiful, if not always adequate, representation of
other major poets and etchers of the period, though,
unfortunately, their names rarely occur in conjunction.
Thus, among the poets of the first romantic generation,
there is Theophile Gautier, whose Promenade hors des
murs, showing Dr. Faustus and his famulus Wagner
sitting moodily apart from their fellow-citizens on a
festal occasion, is illustrated by the Belgian, Baron
Leys, Leys produced many similar scenes of Flemish
mediaeval life, which were popular in Paris for a time,
probably for the same reason that Victor Hugo's Notre
Dame de Paris was hailed as a masterpiece of fiction.
But Beraldi's judgment that, aside from his selection of
subjects, where the French artist is admitted to have
the advantage (though on precisely what grounds, other
than sentimental, is not clearly stated), Leys is the equal
of Millet, is one of the curiosities of criticism. On the
50

Coubtby (After Victob Hugo). L'Eclaib
Size of the original etching, 8% X t>Va inches

V_i

Leys. Promenade hors des Murs
Size of the original etching, 7%X 5% inches

other hand, Sainte-Beuve's sonnet on Le Pont des Arts,
was assigned to Maxime Lalanne, a not unworthy allot
ment, although that excellent etcher's work in this
instance is rather hard and mechanical. The third of
these older poets, Auguste Barbier, famous for his
political invectives, had the misfortune to fall to the lot
of un nomme Giacomotti, who contributed a caricature
of Botticelli's Nascita di Venere to accompany a sonnet
celebrating To K.a\6v.
Prominent among the poets of the second romantic
generation is Leconte de Lisle who drew one of the most
workmanlike of the younger etchers, Leopold Flameng,
but his subject, Combat Homirique, presented an almost
impossible problem for an etcher, and the result is a
weak and empty outline drawing somewhat in the man
ner of Flaxman. Theodore de Banville's Promenade
Galante, is depicted by Edmond Morin, who has a place
in the history of French illustration in the 19th century
as heritor of the ideals of elegance and refinement from
Eisen, Cochin, and Marillier, though more languid and
sentimental, but who is hardly of importance as an
etcher. The same is true of Celestin Nanteuil, who inter
prets Louis Bouilhet's Le Sang des Giants, in a hard,
dry, and matter-of-fact manner, and gives little evidence
of that stormy fugue with which he was popularly sup
posed to produce his famous eaux-fortes noires, when he
was the romantic illustrator and engraver par excellence,
and used, so the legend ran, to shout to his assistants, as
his fury was excited by the fumes of the acid, to bite his
plates till they "cracked" (crevaient).
Nanteuil was a youth of only seventeen when he
escaped from his art school in 1830 to join the band
of Les Jeunes, who accompanied their demigod Victor

Hugo to and from the theatre, and formed a faithful
phalanx to applaud the first production of Hernani.
"Jeune homme moyen-dge," he was called playfully by
Gautier in those days, and it was from a mixture of the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance that, as Beraldi says,
he invented that illustrative formula which he applied
with such contemporary success to works by Victor
Hugo, Dumas, Petrus Borel, and Paul de Kock. But
his was a shallow though showy talent, and the passing
of romanticism left him stranded. He lived to regret
the wasted time and facile triumphs of his youth, which
apparently he felt had frustrated the more serious artistic
triumphs fate once held in store for him — though
doubtless this was no less an illusion than that which
led him after the romantic will-o'-the-wisp. At all events,
Beraldi tells us that when, about this time, Philippe
Burty, friend and interpreter of Meryon, visited Nanteuil
in his studio, " he found him little disposed to anecdote
and of a haughty and reserved air" — the air of a man
who has failed, and attributes his failure to the fault
of others and an adverse fate.
A pupil of Nanteuil's was Edmond Hedouin who, like
Morin, was noted for his fashionable elegance and
grace, and who illustrated Sully-Prudhomme' s sonnet,
Silence et Nuit des Bois; while among the other illustra
tors may be mentioned Emile Boilvin, also a painter,
who has little opportunity to display his affected pretti-
ness in Jean Vireton's Rabelaisian episode, Apres la
Harangue: FeTix Regamey, a caricaturist, who visited
and worked in both England and America, and who
made, as far as Beraldi's records show, only the one
etching which here accompanies the unfortunate Albert
Glatigny's Le Roman Comique; Gustave Jundt, who

illustrated many children's books, and who contributes
a rather clever costume and character drawing for
Emmanuel des Essarts' Les Incroyables — dandies of
the Directoire period — and, of course, Gustave Dore",
whose study of a lion for Leon Cladel's sonnet on that
beast, reminds us of van Muyden, though it is not so
well drawn, being quite flat and without bones or bulk
in the body.
It was apparently Dore's first experiment with the
needle, for Beraldi dates the real awakening of his
interest in etching from a period three years later, or
1872. He then became very enthusiastic and produced
some fifty-four plates dealing with a variety of subjects,
and including several life-sized heads of Christ, one of
which he is said to have executed in less than an hour;
for he worked as rapidly with the needle on copper as he
did with the pencil on the woodblock. According to
Beraldi, Dore rarely bit his own plates; but sometimes
he did so, and the printer Salmon has told how the art
ist's valet, who took a personal interest in his master's
pursuits, used to rush into the printing office exclaim
ing: "Here is another plate that Monsieur and I have
just finished!"
Dore's productivity in what, after all, remained for
him an alien medium, contrasts with Genome's total
output of four etchings, one of which is the very slight
and tentative sketch for Anatole France's Un Sinateur
Romain. Other painters who produced a few plates
only, were Jules Hereau, paired with Laurent-Pichart
(Reverie); Auguste Feyen-Perrin, with Armande Sil-
vestre (Nenuphars); Emile Levy, with Autran (Le
Masque) ; Victor Ranvier, with Emile Deschamps
(Dernier Mirage) . 53

The poets mentioned in the preceding paragraphs
were all, or nearly all, pf the youngest, neo-romantic, or
Parnassian, generation. To them should be added cer
tain others. For example, there is Jean Aicard, to-day a
member of the French Academy, and better known as
a writer of humorous picaresque novels dealing with the
adventures of one Maurin, than as a poet. His sonnet,
La Mer, on the other hand, was illustrated by one of the
older etchers, Leon Gaucherel, who instructed so many
pupils in the art — Flameng was one of them — that
he was called by some admirers the "father of etching"
— "let us say uncle, rather," remarked one dissenter.
As a matter of fact, Gaucherel was an excellent crafts
man rather than an artist in the strict sense, and did his
best work on plates that exhibit his skill as an architec
tural draughtsman and decorative designer. The speci
men of his original work shown here is weak and ama
teurish. Nor is that sound reproductive etcher, Charles
Courtry, seen to the best advantage in his plate for
Francois Coppee's Fils de Louis XI. Coppee was the
first of the new poets to win fame and to attract attention
to the little group of which he was one of the original
or "charter" members. To this, as we have seen, also
belonged Catulle Mendes and Louis-Xavier Ricard.
Both chose feminine subjects — Thiodora and Theroigne
de Miricourt — which were illustrated by Ingomar
Frankel and Victor Giraud, respectively; while the Eng
lish artist, Edward Edwards, who was so highly praised
by his contemporaries, including Haden and Whistler,
was associated with the poet Edouard Grenier in a
maritime subject, the wreck of La Sulina; L.-M. Solon,
an industrial artist attached to the French governmental
works at Sevres, with Leon Valade (La Chute) ; Tancrede
54

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Size of the original etching, 7% X 4% inches
Abraham, with Arsene Houssaye (Le Pays Inconnu);
and Frangois-Louis Frangais, with Victor de la Prade
(Au Bord du Puits).
Not Gaucherel, but Jacque, is the real "father of
French etching." He perhaps it is, who, for this reason,
is most missed in the present collection among the
artist contributors. Whistler, Legros, and Appian are,
however, also important absentees. But, on the other
hand, here are Corot and Millet, Haden and Daubigny,
Manet and Jongkind, Bracquemond and Jacquemart,
Rajon and Veyrassat, and several other excellent artists
or skillful craftsman, though they are by no means all
represented by their best work. Thus Corot's Paysage
N armand (for a poem by Andre Lemoyne), afterwards
published under the title of Dans les Dunes; Souvenir des
Bois da la Haye is thoroughly charming and characteris
tic, as are also Millet's study of a peasant girl with a
spindle tending goats, for a poem by Albert Merat, and
Jongkind's winter scene, with skaters, on a Dutch canal,
Batavia — the more interesting of two studies which he
made of this subject — for one by Robert Luzarche.
Bracquemond's L'Eclipse, to the words of the elder
romantic poet, Auguste Vacquerie is a rather piquant
conception realized with considerable feeling for design,
while Beraldi calls Ribot's Une Grande Douleur, which
shows Josephin Soulary's ouvrier mourning over a
broken pipe, that artist's best work on copper.
But Haden' s treatment of trees and of light and
shade on the forest floor in La Rookery x (Ernest d'Her-
villy) , is in that extravagantly blurred and blotted style
that stirred Ruskin's wrath, and suggests Chinese
1 In both Drake's and Harrington's catalogues of Seymour Ha-
den's work this plate is called " The Herd "

"bunginja," or mandarin, art. Manet's Fleur Exotique
(Armand Renaud) is too obviously an imitation — and
a superficial imitation — of Goya. Daubigny's Le
Verger, while entirely expressive of the sentimental
spirit of Gabriel Marc's text, is hardly on a level with
his highest achievements in painter-etching. Jacque-
mart's La Pivoine, for a sonnet by Judith Gautier,
daughter of Th^ophile, and the only woman represented
in the collection — is an insipid japonaiserie without
such delicacy in the drawing as we would have expected
from this master of still life. Rajon's Le Pitre (Paul
Verlaine), in spite of its technical competence, is a
triviality of the illustrated papers; and Veyrassat's
Supplice de Judas dans I'Enfer (Antoni Deschamps), is a
crude attempt to treat an imaginative subject somewhat
outside the proper domain of etching.
From such failures, or comparative failures, of recog
nized masters, it is pleasant to pass to the successes, or
at least the intelligent attempts, of lesser-known men.
G. Howard, for example, in his study of windswept trees
on a hillside, for Revolte, by Leon Dierx — latest and
almost the last of the prominent Parnassians to pass
away — shows a perception of the painter-etcher's true
linear method superior to that of some of his better-
known contemporaries; Jules Michelin, in Souvenir du
Bas-Breau (Andre Theuriet), if less poetical and imagi
native, brings to the realization of his intentions a more
complete mastery of medium and method (his treatment
of trees reminds us at times of Storm van's Gravesande
in certain of the latter's woodland studies) ; and Lansyer,
in La Fontaine (George Lafenestre), seems to have
come under the classical influence of Nicholas Berchem
and Claude Lorrain. 56

H rQ
H "qj

fc .9

Altogether it will be seen that Sonnets et Eaux-fortes
has historical interest rather than artistic value of a
high order. The opportunity offered, it might seem, by
the ingenious plan of the publication, was by no means
improved to the fullest extent. Not that the artists them
selves were entirely responsible for the failure of so inter
esting an experiment. Some were, indeed, poor etchers,
without sufficient practice in the art or knowledge of
its principles, while others were not so much artists as
skillful craftsmen, incapable of important creative effort.
But several were set tasks which, if not impossible,
were, at any rate, difficult and ill-adapted to the display
of the best possibilities of the medium. But the ultimate
reason for the slight and disappointing results is doubt
less to be sought in the obligation imposed upon the
artist to realize the idea of another rather than his own
— to become an illustrator — and this in the most
intensely personal and spontaneous of mediums. It is
therefore not remarkable that, after all, those who suc
ceeded best in the present undertaking were not always
the most accomplished etchers, or even the finest artists,
but often merely those who had a special talent for illus
tration, and were men of clever attainments rather than
of genius.
But if the artistic level of Sonnets et Eaux-fortes is not
high, its contents are at least varied and interesting, and
represent a wide range of tastes and talents. On the
whole, moreover, the prints are quite worthy of the
poems which they accompany, and the majority of which
are anecdotal or descriptive trifles. There are few really
fine sonnets among them, and there is no particular
reason why the greater number should have been cast
in sonnet, rather than in any other, form. Some of the

younger authors were, in after years, to achieve a fame
as conspicuous as that then enjoyed by their elders —
but not, as in the case of Verlaine, for example, through
the sort of work by which they are represented in Sonnets
et Eaux-fortes. This, as we have said, was a virtual
continuation of Parnasse Contemporain, the publication
primarily, of a school. But, writes M. Remy de Gour-
mont, in the study of Dierx alluded to above, "of all
these poets of Parnassus, none was popular or even
known to the public in so far as he was Parnassian, that
is to say, impassible and impeccable. The reason is,
that they all had, in these years — this is true even of
Coppee and Verlaine — an attitude of painter-decora
tors. They described life, above all in its brilliant and
picturesque parts, and disdained to participate in it
otherwise than by very lofty illusions."
It is this sort of painter decorating — if not painter-
etching! — that dominates Sonnets et Eaux-fortes.

Manet. Fleor Exotique
Size of the original etching, 6% X^Ys inches

V
THE GONCOURTS AND THEIR CIRCLE
[0 WHERE is the teeming intellectual and
artistic life of the second half of the XlXth
Century in France found so completely
focussed and concentrated as it is in the
famous Journal des Goncourts. The brothers began it
in 1851, the year of the Coup d'itat, — the year also
when they published their first novel, whose failure
they were always inclined to attribute, half seriously,
to the fatal effects of that political event in diverting
public attention from their maiden effort, — and
Edmond, who outlived Jules by a quarter of a cen
tury, continued it down to 1895, the year of his
literary "Jubilee."
In this half-century they witnessed the decline of
Romanticism both in art and in literature, and helped
to shape the new movement of Naturalism which sup
planted it; while Edmond, in the early eighties, was one
of the first to recognize at once the aims and the methods
of Impressionism in painting. These, indeed, he himself
had already practiced in his later prose fiction — partly,
at least, as the result of his study of Japanese art,
which he was among the first to initiate in Europe, just
as he and his brother had already led in a revival of
interest in the art of the XVIIIth Century.
59

Champions of light and color in painting, they were
also ardent amateurs of black and white in the arts
of design. No one appreciated more thoroughly the
artistic value of etching and lithography, or better un
derstood their limitations and possibilities. Nearly all
the principal etchers, lithographers, and even book-
illustrators, — who at that period still continued to
draw their designs upon the wood block, — were their
friends and acquaintances — members of that great
and ever-extending circle which, in the course of time,
came almost to coincide with the upper art-world of
Paris. It is on this personal side that the Journal with its
day-to-day record of encounters, conversations, criti
cism, and illuminating anecdote, is above all inter
esting. The Goncourts were distinguished artists and
competent critics of art. But, through their intense self-
conscious absorption in all that immediately pertained
to themselves and to their contemporaries, they be
came, in their loose, scattered, and often trivial-seeming
chronicle, more than all else, the spiritual historians of
their epoch.

Both Edmond and Jules de Goncourt had studied art
before they turned their talents to literature, and they
never entirely lost touch with the Bohemian artistic fife
of Paris as described by the Romantic writer, Henri
Murger, in his Scenes de la vie de Boheme.
Having in mind, perhaps, Murger's own grim and
grewsome end, than which the rigid moralist could de
mand no better commentary on the dangers of the Bo-
60

Gavarni. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
From Messieurs du FeuiUeton

hemian ideal, the Goncourts themselves gave in Ma-
nette Salomon, an account of conditions in the Quartier
that, while scarcely less fascinating, is considerably less
couleur de rose. It is, moreover, a bitter statement of the
terms on which success is achieved by the artist in our
own time, since the only character who is thoroughly
successful is a painter who deliberately sacrifices every
thing to obtain official recognition; while both the
heroes — the one with too much talent as well as the
other without any — end in common failure.
The model for the latter, the whimsical Anatole, was
found by the brothers in an artist named Pouthier, who
had been Edmond's companion at college, and who actu
ally prolonged for many a year in Paris the miserable ex
istence attributed to his fictional counterpart. As for
Naz de Coriolis, the attempt was apparently to create
in him the ideal type of the great artists of the Roman
tic period.1
Like Decamps, Delacroix, and so many others, Cori
olis was an Orientalist. But his talent had also another,
prophetic, side. He looked to the future as well as to the
past. And in his attempt to represent the scenes of
contemporary life, he was as modern as any of the great
painters of the latter part of the century. Such clair
voyance naturally does credit to the judgment and
perspicacity of a writer, and it is with pardonable pride
that Edmond de Goncourt, writing in 1874 of Degas'
then newly established preference for laundresses and
ballet dancers, says: —
"I cannot find his choice bad, since I myself, in
1 In the sixth volume of the Journal, Edmond de Goncourt speaks of
Beaulieu, "le peintre des feux de Bengale," whose studio he had given
in Manette Salomon. Coriolis was also a "peintre des feux de Bengale "
at one period.

Manette Salomon, have sung the praises of these two
professions, as furnishing the best models of modern
women for a contemporary artist. In fact," he goes on
to give a characteristic color note of his own, " there is
in the rose of the flesh, in the white of the linen, in the
milky mist of the gauzes, the most charming pretext
for blond and tender colorations."
Those who have read Manette Salomon will recall how
Coriolis, balked in his ambition to achieve a great career,
turned to etching, and found in that art a sort of ano
dyne for his mood of disillusionment and despair. The
Goncourts followed the artistic currents and tenden
cies of their own time too closely not to note, in the
preoccupation of painters in the minor art of etching, a
characteristic trait of the period. But the passage has
a personal, autobiographical, as well as a general, in
terest. "All these last days," writes Jules under date of
March, 1859, "we see no one, our thought and attention
deeply plunged in the eau-forte. Nothing so completely
occupies one, takes him out of himself, as these me
chanical distractions."
Both Edmond and Jules practiced etching to a cer
tain extent. They saw in it, primarily, as they said,
an outil d' immortalisation, for the graphic side of those
eighteenth-century subjects on which they were then
engaged. But they also maintained an independent
artistic interest in the medium for its own sake, and
after Jules' death, in 1870, Edmond arranged for the
publication of a portfolio containing twenty of his
brother's plates, for which Burty wrote a preface and
prepared a catalogue.
Philippe Burty, critic and historian of the graphic

arts, and fine connoisseur of prints, early met the Gon
courts and became a member of their circle.
"We have passed the day at Burty 's," wrote the
latter some time in 1865. "An interior of art," is the
way they characterized the quarters of this ardent col
lector, crowded "with books, hthographs, painted
sketches, drawings, faiences; a small garden; women;
a little girl; a little dog, and long hours spent turning
over the prints in card-board boxes lightly brushed by
by the dress of a stout, lively, young singer. . . . An
atmosphere of cordiality, of good fellowship, of happy
family, which makes one think of those artistic bour
geois households of the eighteenth century. It is a little
such a laughing and luminous house as one imagines
to have been the abode of Fragonard."
So far as I know, the Goncourts never met Meryon, of
whom their friend Burty was, with Baudelaire, the co-
discoverer, though they knew and admired his work,
writing concerning it a page of appreciation that no
one — not even Hugo or Baudelaire — has surpassed: —
"Studied," they write one day, "at Niel's the work of
Meryon in all its states, its trials, and even a number of
his designs. It seems as if a hand of the past had held the
point of the graver, and that something better than the stones
of old Paris had descended upon these leaves of paper. Yes,
in these images, one would say that there had been resusci
tated a little of the soul of the old city; it is, as it were, a
magic reminiscence of old quarters foundering sometimes
in the troubled dream of the brain of the visionary poet-
artist who had seated at his sides Madness and Misery.
"Poor, miserable madman," they add some lines
further along, after giving details of his sufferings and
hallucinations, often erotic or obscene, "poor, miserable

madman, who, in the lucid intervals of his mania, takes,
at night, interminable walks in order to surprise the
picturesque strangeness of the shadows in great cities."
II
If Meryon represented the culmination of the Ro
mantic tradition in French etching, Celestin Nanteuil,
fed on Piranesi, may be called one of its originators.
Nanteuil was one of the "Men of 1830," though be
longing rather to the literary, rather than to the artistic,
group thus commonly designated, and was closely allied
with Hugo and Gautier in all the public manifestations
of the first Romantic period. He was, above all, a book
illustrator, and it was from such work that he long made
his livelihood. But by 1860 the illustrated book had
largely gone out of fashion in France, and when the
Goncourts met him, he was already fearful of the future.
Indeed, there is little doubt that he would have faced the
prospect of a destitute old age, if official employment
had not providentially been found for him in a provincial
museum. The Goncourts apparently never knew any of the
Barbizon group of painters who were the real "Men of
1830," in the artistic acceptation of the term. At least,
if they did, there is no record of it in the Journal, al
though their friend Leroy, the engraver, was a perfect
mine of anecdotes concerning them. But once, when
they had accompanied Leroy to the seashore, at Veules,
they met Jacque, who came to spend a day in their
company. "He was dressed," they recorded, "in black, and
wore a stove-pipe hat that he never took off even

when he painted and ate. He drew from his pocket a
little album, the size of a visiting card, on which he
showed us twenty geometrical lines representing the
horizons he had noted during the last ten days. He,
the skillful and witty sketcher, the brilliant and
learned aquafortist, the master of the pig, affects doc-
torally to repudiate all tricks, all formulas, all manual
dexterities — all the things of which his own little,
but very real, talent is composed — going so far as
to esteem only the primitive masters, the spiritual
masters, and to recognize in the modern school but one
man: M. Ingres."
If it is thought that the Goncourts did, on the whole,
rather less than justice to the man who brought the in
fluence of Rembrandt back into modern etching, they
certainly cannot be accused of slighting the English
etcher who continued his work in England and America.
This was Seymour Haden, whose art won the highest
admiration of the brothers. Indeed, Edmond de Gon
court once wrote of Haden's plate, Sunset in Ireland,
that he regarded it as one of the most remarkable mod
ern etchings — one in which the artist, "who recov
ered the velvety black of Rembrandt, has, as it were,
imprinted on a sheet of paper, the melancholy senti
ment of the twilight hour."
But the main admiration of the brothers for an art
ist of their own time, was reserved for one of whom it
is difficult to say whether they valued most highly the
man himself or his work. This was Gavarni.
The great designer, who was a still greater satirist,
and whose lithographs, as they appeared week after
week in Le Charivari, had been studied, and even copied,
by the Goncourts while they were still, as it were, in
65

the nursery, had had no small share in shaping their
own artistic and spiritual development. Seduced by
what they themselves describe as "that habitual figura
tion of pleasure, of love, of Parisian life, that depiction
of manners caught in their vain or cynical verity, that
mordant exposition of Parisian vice," which they found
in Gavarni, they were tortured to achieve an equal
truth of observation, combined with an equal concise
ness and elegance of expression, in the treatment of sim
ilar subjects drawn from the as yet scarcely suspected
treasures of modern life.
As for the man himself, he attracted them by a per
sonal distinction which was, in the main, that of the es
sential "Dandy" as defined by Barbey d'Aurevilly and
realized by Merimee. But with this there was mixed
something darkly mysterious, almost Machiavellian,
which suggested the malignant Marquis of Les liai
sons dangereuses.
Gavarni was about fifty years old when the brothers
made his acquaintance under circumstances which
they describe both in their book, Gavarni: I'homme et
son ozuvre, and in the opening pages of the Journal.
But tall, slender, supple, athletic, with upturned mous
taches and a military overcoat buttoned to the chin, he
had much more the appearance of a man of thirty, es
pecially as the red color of his hair tended to conceal
the gray beginning to be scattered through it.
He had been married, but his wife was dead, and he
now lived a solitary life in a quaint little old house, with
a garden, at Point-du-Jour, on the road to Versailles.
He was an indefatigable worker. Indeed, he himself
said that his life consisted of work and of women. But
he had another passion nearly, if not quite, as strong as
66

'%? ._~.:.:77::-~+

" Gavarni"
(Guillaume Sulpice Chevalier)

either of the others. This was abstract mathematical
science, which he claimed was the most immaterial of
all the arts.
"Even in music," he said, "there is the beating of the
sonorous waves against the tympanum. Mathematics
is the mute music of numbers ! ' '
In 1851, the Goncourts' cousin, the Comte de Ville-
deuil, a young man just out of college, came to Paris,
where he started a paper called L'Eclair, with the
collaboration of Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, then
twenty-nine and twenty-two years old respectively.
Meeting with little success — finding, indeed, the great
est difficulty in keeping afloat — they decided, if possi
ble, to interest Gavarni in their undertaking.
It seemed an audacious idea. The artist was then at
the very zenith of his great reputation. The three kins
men were, on the contrary, just beginning to make their
modest debut in the world of letters, the Goncourts hav
ing published, at this time, but one, unsuccessful, novel.
But perhaps it was their very audacity that pleased the
older man. At any rate, when they met at dinner, for
the first time, at the Maison d'Or, he proposed for their
publication the series of the Manteau d'Arlequin.
Furthermore, he signified a desire to extend the ac
quaintance thus begun, by inviting them to call. This
they did a few days later, and Gavarni showed them
through the old house, with its grim wall and rusty
grills on the street, which had been a counterfeiters' den
under the Directoire. Later it had been acquired by
Josephine's modiste, Leroy, who used the iron chamber,
where the false coin had been manufactured, to press
Napoleon's mantles, embroidered with golden bees.
To this house they returned many times. There, in
67

his cheerful garden atelier, they watched the master at
work and listened while he told stories of Balzac, Dau-
mier, and others with whom he had been associated in
his earlier years or while, in pungent aphorisms that had
the epigrammatic concision and grace of the legends
which he traced beneath his pictures, he expressed his
philosophy of art and of life.
Once he dwelt upon his indifference towards the fait
accompli in art.
"I do a thing," he said, "only because of its difficul
ties, and because it is not easy to do. Take my garden
for example. When it is done, I shall gladly make a gift
of it to some one. There are those who paint landscapes.
I amuse myself by making landscapes in relief. Well,
what is it you want me to do with a design once it
is finished? There is nothing left to do but to give it
away." Again, speaking of the theatre, he asked : —
"Have you ever watched, not the stage, but the
theatre itself, during a performance? I do not know how,
after having seen that spectacle, one has the courage
to go on addressing the public. . . . Man at least makes
the acquaintance of a book in solitude. But a play is ap
preciated by a raw mass of humanity, an agglomerated
stupidity." Then, leaving this subject, after a silence in which
he remained for a moment lost in his reflections, he
cried: —
"Ah! scientific research — that is a fine monomania
for you. Now, whether I make one lithograph more or
less does not count greatly for my renown. But, instead,
if there were a theorem which bore my name — hein,
that would be something like, would it not?"
63

Ill
At Gavarni's occasionally they found other artists.
Once it was Bracquemond, with whom the master of the
house was engaged in tripotant "some eaux-fortes . . .
in sketching with the point on the copper a series of
celebrities, among which he shows us a Balzac of ad
mirable workmanship." Then all four, the day's work
done, went off to dine at a little restaurant.
Another time it was Constantin Guys, the staff artist
of the Illustrated London News, who had reported the
Crimean War so brilliantly for that paper.
"A little man with a face expressing energy, with
gray moustaches, with the aspect of a grognard; limping
a trifle as he walked, and continually drawing up his
sleeves with the flat of his hand on his bony arms; dif
fuse in his talk, trailing off into parentheses, zigzagging
from one idea to another, getting off the track, lost, but
finding himself again and regaining your attention with
a metaphorical bit of gutter-slang, a word borrowed
from the terminology of German thinkers, a technical
term from some art or industry, and always holding you
under the impact of his highly colored speech which
made everything, as it were, visible to the eyes. And
there were a thousand souvenirs that he evoked during
this walk, casting among them, from time to time, hand-
fuls of ironies, of sketches, of landscapes, of bloody,
disemboweled cities perforated with bullets, of hospi
tals where the rats gnawed the wounded.
"Then, on the reverse of this, as in an album, or as, on
the back of a drawing by Decamps, you find a thought
by Balzac, there issue from the mouth of this devil of a
69

man, social silhouettes, apergus on the French species,
or on the English species, all quite new, which have not
grown stale in a book — two-minute satires, pamphlets
in a single word, a comparative, philosophy of the na
tional genius of peoples."
Both Bracquemond and Guys henceforth became
members of the Goncourts' circle, the former making the
well-known head of Edmond, which is one of the greatest
of modern portrait etchings.
Meanwhile this circle was becoming extended on the
literary side. The stream of novels and eighteenth-cen
tury studies that flowed from the pens of these inde
fatigable brothers, began to attract attention. They had
already met and joined forces with Gautier, Banville,
and Flaubert, when one day, in 1861, Sainte-Beuve, the
Grand Sultan of Criticism, came to call on them.
Through the Goncourts, Sainte-Beuve and Gavarni
soon entered into closer relations, with important re
sults for the history of French literature in the latter
half of the XlXth Century. For the following year,
these two men, who conceived a relish for each other's
conversation , despite a constant malentendu on the sub
ject of art, organized at Magny's a fortnightly dinner
destined to become the last great cenacle of the century.
It began modestly enough, with only six members:
Gavarni, Sainte-Beuve, Veyne, de Chennevierres, and
the two Goncourts. But it grew rapidly, and its mem
bership soon came to include such representative think
ers and men of letters as Taine, Renan, Gautier, Flau
bert, Saint-Victor, Turgenieff, Sherer, and the great
synthetic chemist, Berthelot.
Here, at one table, surrounded by men of two genera
tions, the great tradition of French letters may be said
70

Bracquemond. Edmond de Goncourt
In the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

to have been directly continued. For here, from the dy
ing embers of Romanticism, emerged the new spirit of
Naturalism, of which Flaubert was the Paraclete, Taine
the prophet, and the Goncourts themselves were the
apostles and pioneers — also, as they liked to think, the
"martyrs." This celebrated and epoch-making cinacle, continued
until 1870, when, of the six original members, three —
Gavarni, Sainte-Beuve, and Jules de Goncourt — died.
It was revived after the war, in 1872, on the occasion of
the hundredth performance of Hugo's Ruy Bias, but
with only indifferent success. And, for the reader of the
Journal, interest, after 1870, rather tends to center in
the younger group which gradually grew up around
Edmond de Goncourt.
In this the leaders were Daudet and Zola.1 The latter
brought with him his co-disciples of Les soirees de
Midan — Maupassant, Huysmans, Ceard, Hennique,
Alexis — and the gatherings in Goncourt 's Grinier
were augmented from time to time, by a number of
other writers — Octave Mirbeau, Abel Hermant, Jean
Lorrain, the Belgian poet-novelist Georges Rodenbach,
Lucien Descaves, Margueritte, Rosny, Charpentier, and
many others, of all literary generations right down to
the very latest represented by Leon Daudet, son of the
author of Sapho and Tartarin. IV
From about 1870, new names of artists begin to ap
pear in the Journal, also. There is Ziem, for example,
1 Goncourt, Flaubert, Turgenieff, Daudet and Zola soon formed the
monthly "Diner des cinq." 71

the painter of Venice, who first captures Goncourt's at
tention because he has studied on the spot the perspec
tives of Giotto, and can compare the procedis of the
primitifs with those of the Japanese artists.
Then, of special interest to the future author of mono
graphs on Hokusai and Utamaro, there is a real Japan
ese painter, Watanobe-Sei, who gives a demonstration
of the traditional methods of his race, by executing a
great kakemono at Burty's before a select assistance.
Burty also takes him to see the young sculptor, Cros,
who is making a wax figure of his daughter. Felicien
Rops (an old acquaintance, this one) comes to lunch
with him. He calls on Marcellin (a former classmate),
caricaturist and director of La Vie Parisienne, who
has asked him to write an article on Gavarni. He spends
pleasant evenings with young Pierre Gavarni and his
wife. He meets the two illustrators, of such unequal
value as artists, Vierge and Dore, and he talks at Bra
bant's with that pauvre Fromentin, so soon to die, his
work unfinished, who confides to him that, if he had no
one dependent upon him, he would "chuck" painting
altogether, and turn his attention entirely to literature.
A frequent companion is Claudius Popelin, a skilled
art-worker, also a poet, who executed a portrait of Jules
de Goncourt in enamel. Edmond himself goes one day
to the studio of an unknown artist whose dry-points he
has admired at Burty's and who has offered to make his
portrait in the same medium. Shortly after, Bracque
mond makes his great etching of the writer. And a
third portrait of the period is the one, life-size, made by
the Neapolitan De Nittis, whom Goncourt loved, and
whom he called "the true landscapist of the Parisian
street." 72

By 1880 Paris was in the full flood of Impressionism,
and Goncourt, quick to discern the new character of
the period, as he was to sympathize with every new
manifestation of the human spirit, exclaims: —
"Ah! if I were younger, the fine novel there would be
to write again on the world of art, making it altogether
different from Manette Salmon, with a painter of the
Avenue de Villiers, a Bohemian painter, living in the
great world and in high life, like Forain, a reasoner on
art, in the fashion of Degas and all the varieties of the
Impressionist artist."
We have seen how the latter's modernist programme
appealed to him. But while he admires the former, he is
far from seeing Forain a real successor to Gavarni. He
had none of that artist's amenity of spirit mingled with
the sharpness and acerbity of his satire, which spares no
shame or suffering in its cruel disdain: —
" Ah ! the ferocious legend of Forain ! " he cries. " No,
Gavarni in his legends has not this implacability, and
the sayings of Vireloque are tempered by a philosophy
at once elevated and kind-hearted."
For the rest Goncourt, who visits Forain in his studio
and notes a resemblance to Daumier in his method of
attack, seems somewhat undecided as to whether this
painter of Parisian life is at his best when expressing
his ideas on the lithographic stone, or when he is pro
jecting them through the sublimated delicacies of his
subtly ironic speech.
It is not until 1886 that Goncourt meets Rodin. It is
then Bracquemond who takes the writer to call on the
great sculptor : —
" He is a man with coarse plebeian features, clear eyes
blinking beneath sickly red lids, a long yellowish beard,
73

hair cropped close, a round head expressing a gentle
and obstinate stubbornness — a man such as I imagine
were the disciples of Jesus Christ."
The year following, Geffroy brings Raffaelli to call on
Goncourt (ostensibly to see the latter's drawings), and
henceforth these two artists, Rodin and Raffaelli, be
come inmost members of the latter's circle. Others are
Carriere, whom Goncourt calls "a crepuscular Velas
quez," Alfred Stevens, the Belgian feminist painter, and
James Tissot, after his return from Jerusalem where he
had gone to make the celebrated series of paintings rep
resenting Bible scenes in the Holy Land.
Tissot had already, some years before, illustrated
Goncourt's novel La Fille Elisa. He, too, had origin
ally aspired to interpret the chic graces of the Parisian
woman. But in 1893 he brought to see Goncourt one
who far surpassed anything he himself had achieved in
that feminine field. This was Paul Helleu, a young man
"with feverish eyes, a tormented physiognomy, to
gether with the skin and the black locks of a crow."
"He has just made a dry-point of me," writes Gon
court, adding that Helleu was very much frightened,
having dreamed all night that he had made a failure
of the portrait, and that to get his hand in, — since he
drew only women, — he had tried to sketch himself.
"He works on uncovered copper with a diamond
point which has a sharper turn on the metal than the
steel, and boasts that he can make a figure 8. This
diamond point, which comes from England, is, he says,
the object of envy of all contemporary etchers, who
turn diplomats to borrow it in order to get one like it
made for themselves by a Parisian jeweller."
Goncourt was now more than seventy years old, and

Helleu. Edmond de Goncourt

it was becoming the fashion to solicit the privilege of
making his portrait. Raffaelli had already made a great
full-length for the Exposition, and now foreign artists
actually visited Paris for the express purpose of fixing
on paper, or on the copper-plate, their impression of his
aristocratic features and rather melancholy expression.
Thus Will Rothenstein crossed over from London in
connection with a projected work entitled, Edmond and
Jules de Goncourt (With Letters and Leaves from their
Journal), and Zilcken came down from Holland to make
a characteristic dry-point; while at home, the French
illustrator, Frederic Regamey included Goncourt in a
series of portraits appearing in Le Matin, and the cari
caturist, Willette, made a sketch of him for the menu
of his " Jubilee " banquet. This was held on February
22, 1895. A year and a half later (July 16, 1896) he
died.

VI
SOME FRENCH ARTISTS DURING THE
SIEGE AND COMMUNE
I
jDMOND DE GONCOURT was in the print-
room of the Bibliotheque Nationale when the
war broke out in August, 1870. Through the
window, he tells us in the lively, impression
istic pages of his Journal du Siege, he saw people running
in the Rue Vivienne. Instinctively he pushed from him
the illustrated work he was examining and, reaching
the street, ran with the crowd.
Whether he returned later and finished his perusal,
he does not say. Profoundly impressionable, almost
neurasthenic, this literary maniac, as he has been called,
seems, on the whole, to have lived in a state of sur-
excitation that must have rendered anything like con
secutive work on indifferent subjects difficult, if not
impossible. But while he himself apparently spent most of his
time wandering about the streets, meeting people, and
making observations, there were, no doubt, those cap
able, like Goethe at Weimar and Kant at Konigsberg,
in similar circumstances, of preserving their personal
detachment in the midst of public misfortune.
76

Indeed, one is struck, in the Journal, by the account
of Zola's call on Goncourt towards the end of August,
when the tide of French fortunes on the frontier was at
its lowest ebb. The future author of Le Debacle talked
exclusively of himself, sketching "a series of novels he
wished to write, an epic in ten volumes involving the
natural and social history of a family . . . with the ex
position of temperaments, characters, vices, and vir
tues, as developed by diverse environments and differ
entiated like the parts of a garden, 'with sun here,
shade there.'"
Already, it is seen, the fortunes of the Rougon-Mac-
quart family were of far more acute personal concern to
Zola than the fate of the French armies under Mac-
Mahon and Bazaine.
Other writers appear in Goncourt's gossiping pages, to
create a semblance of literary life in a city which starva
tion was already beginning to stare in the face. There
were, for example, those who, like Renan, Saint- Victor,
Neffter, and the great chemist, Berthelot, met every
week with Goncourt at Brebant's on the Boulevard for
dinner and discussion. There was also the old, or elderly,
Theophile Gautier, returning "broke" from beyond the
Swiss frontier, and bemoaning his fate, which was al
ways to be the victim of revolutions. And there was
Victor Hugo, whom the fall of the Empire had at last
allowed to return from his long exile on the island of
Guernsey. Of the younger Parisian artists and men of letters,
those fit for military service were for the most part
already with the colors or, like the debonnair Catulle
Mendes — who came dressed in the uniform of a volun
teer to bid Goncourt good-bye on his way to the front —
77

were rapidly going there. Of these death took heavy
toll; and among others, it cut off in his earliest prime one
in whom Gautier declared French art had lost its unique
hope of renewal.
"I go this morning to the funeral of Regnault," writes
Goncourt under date of Friday, January 27, 1871, in the
Journal. "There is an enormous crowd. We lament
above the body of this talented youth, the burial of
France. It is horrible, this equality before the brutal
death dealt by rifle or cannon, which strikes genius or
imbecility, the precious life like that which is without
worth." Gautier, who', like Goncourt, has also given us his
Tableaux de Siege, describes in a croquis his meeting
with Regnault for the first time only a few days before
the fatal event. It was in the former's poor lodgings in
Paris, to which the artist, with all his military accoutre
ments, was brought by a common friend acquainted
with the long-standing wish of the two men to meet each
other. Not noticing the lack of chairs, the painter, just
back from North Africa, sat on the bed as on a divan,
talking of Tangier and turning the pages of a complete
copy of Goya's Los Desastres de la Guerra, which
Gautier had recently borrowed from Philippe Burty.
There are those who think that, in times of great
national stress or crisis, and specifically in wartime, a
way should be found to relieve the creative artist, the
leader of the intellectual elite, from his share of the
common responsibility. The man of genius himself,
however, has rarely taken this narrow view of his human
obligations. Regnault held the Prix de Rome, and was thus exempt
from military service. But, unwilling to profit by such a

Regnault. Automedon with the Horses of Achilles
Size of the original painting, 10 feet 6 inches X 10 feet IIY2 inches
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

privilege — feeling, as all high-minded men must at
such a time, that genius, like nobility, imposes superior
obligations — he abandoned the big studio he had just
built at Tangier, and returned to Paris. Enlisting as a
private, he was offered the rank of sous-lieutenant, which
he refused characteristically on the ground that "his
example would be more useful than his command."
"Having decided to stand the fatigues and troubles of
the soldier's trade, without flinching or seeking to avoid
a single one," he wrote his captain, — " having de
cided to be the first at every task and the first under
fire, I hope to encourage by my example those of my
comrades who might be tempted to complain or to
hesitate." There was the usual protracted period of inaction
atid suspense, hardest of all to bear. At length came
the order to advance to the outposts. Two days later
the battle began in the suburbs of Paris.
"The day wore on," writes M. Roger Marx, who bet
ter than any one else has told the story, "and the strug
gle was still desperate before the wall of the Pare de
Burzenval, where Regnault had fought since dawn. The
ground was strewn with corpses, and still the wall was
not won. The bugle sounds. It is the signal for retreat,
the heartrending order to descend once more the slopes
up which they had swept that morning with such enthu
siasm. The troops obey, but slowly, with sudden returns
of rage. Regnault cannot decide to leave. It galls him
to abandon the fight before firing his last cartridge."
Suddenly his friend, Georges Clairin, who had scarcely
been separated from his side all day, missed him from
the ranks. Anxious, he made inquiries. But it was not
until they had returned to the shelter of the bastions

that he found a soldier who had heard Regnault say:
''Le temps de lacher mon dernier coup de fusil, et je vous
rejoins," and had seen him fall behind.
As soon as possible a search was instituted, and the
body of the artist was found where he had fallen on his
face, a bullet through the temple. II
"Art has paid its debt to the fatherland without
stint in this fatal war," wrote Gautier. "Its dearest
children have fallen in the flower of their age, full of
daring, of genius, of iron resolution, and the future of
painting is perhaps for a long time compromised by their
death." Another of these plus chers enfants was Victor Giraud,
who came of a family of painters. Dying of fever con
tracted in camp, he expressed a noble envy of Regnault,
who gained his glorious death on the field of honor.
Past active military age, Puvis de Chavannes took no
part in the actual fighting about Paris, but he did guard
duty with the others on the ramparts, where he received
his inspiration for two very remarkable compositions.
"Monsieur Puvis de Chavannes," writes Gautier,
"has brought back from the ramparts a superb design
which he has had lithographed, one that recalls the grand
but simple manner of the artist to whom we owe the
magnificent frescoes . . . la Guerre, la Paix, le Travail,
and le Repos.
"A slender, graceful woman, in a long mourning gown,
her hair arranged like a widow's, her right hand resting
on a rifle with fixed bayonet, her left uplifted, her face
less than profile, stands on the platform of a bastion.
80

Puvis de Chavannes. " La ville de Paris investie confie a
l'air son appel a. la France"
Reproduced from the painting by permission of Mrs. James R. Jesup
and Mrs. Harry Harkness Flagler

Puvia de Chavannes. "Echappe a la serre ennemie le message
ATTENDU EXALTE LE CCEUR DE LA PTERE CITE "
Reproduced from the painting by permission of Mrs. James R. Jesup
and Mrs. Harry Harkness Flagler

The folds of her black dress, breaking at her feet like
the sharp folds of Gothic drapery, make her a pedestal
which elevates her and adds to her elegance.
"A little below her are seen cannon, tents, gabion-
nades, pyramids of cannon-balls. From a fort whose
silhouette shows it to be Mont-Valerien, smoke drifts in
horizontal streaks, and in a corner of the sky, already
blurred by the distance, fades the spherical bulk of a
balloon, sole means of communication now left us with
the outside world.
"The symbolic figure, which might be real and repre
sent a portrait as well as a generalization, follows the
balloon with a look of love and anxiety. This frail bark
bears the burden of a great hope.
"A legend is written at the bottom of the picture: —
" La ville de Paris investie confie a Vair son appel d la France.
"This touching figure," adds Gautier, "demands as
its pendant: 'Paris serrant contre son coeur la colombe
messagere qui apporte la bonne nouvelle! ' For the correct
expression, M. Puvis de Chavannes has but to recall
Mademoiselle Favart reciting 'Les Pigeons de la Ripub-
lique' in her gown lustred like the plumage of a turtle
dove. It [this second design] will be his distraction when,
next on guard, he sees, speeding across the sky, our
feathered postmen pursued, but not caught, by the post
men of Monsieur de Bismarck."
From the designs thus described, Puvis de Chavannes
executed two noble panel paintings in brown mono
chrome, which have had a singular history. In 1873 or
1874 they were sent to America as gifts to a lottery organ
ized to aid the sufferers from the Chicago fire, and were
lost sight of. They have, however, quite recently come
81

to light again, and are Jierewith reproduced for the first
time since their rediscovery. Ill
"One of my friends," writes Gautier in December,
"came to find me yesterday to take me to Bastion 85
where, he said, I should see something interesting; but
there was need of haste, for night comes quickly these
sad December days, and, besides, a change of tempera
ture might destroy the object of our pilgrimage. So we
started off in haste, cursing the slowness of our poor
steed which slipped on the glazed surface of the snow
... as we penetrated the deserted streets of the quarter
beyond the Luxembourg and the Observatoire. . . .
"We pursued our way past the great gray walls pla
carded with dingy posters, bizarre old abodes given over
to the industries the elegant city banishes to its extreme
outer limits, barracks built of pine boards, hospitals or
shelters for the troops, dismantled enclosures of a tone
which recalled that of drawings on tinted paper, rein
forced with China white, the clinging patches of snow
representing the touches of gouache. . . .
"Arriving at the road which runs round the ramparts,
we abandoned our fiacre, whose horse could go no fur
ther, and my friend led me to the spot where we were to
find the curiosity which he had promised me, and which,
in fact, was well worth the journey to the bastion.
"The 7th company of the 19th Battalion of the Na
tional Guard contains many painters and sculptors who,
soon bored by the life, are eager to find some better
occupation for their leisure, from one turn of sentry
duty to another, than the eternal drawing of corks.

r^

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NViii#ii

Falguiere. La Resistance
Etched by Bracquemond from the statue in snow
Size of the original etching, 8y$ X 6Vi inches
The New York Public Library

Pipe, cigar, cigarette help them to burn time; discus
sions on art and politics occasionally kill more of it, but
one cannot be forever smoking, talking, or sleeping.
"Now the last three or four days a considerable quan
tity of snow has fallen. This is already half melted in the
heart of Paris, but it still lies intact on the ramparts
where it is more exposed to the cold wind which comes
from the open country. And as there is always in the
artist, whatever his age, an element of childishness and
gaminerie, the sight of this lovely white covering at
once suggested a snow-fight as a welcome distraction.
Two sides were formed, and active hands had soon con
verted into projectiles the frozen, glittering flakes from
the slopes of the talus.
"The battle was about to begin when a voice cried:
'Would n't it be better to make a statue with all these
snowballs?' The idea made an immediate appeal, for
MM. Falguiere, Moulin, and Chope happened to be on
guard that day. They erected a sort of framework of
cobblestones, and the artists — whom M. Chope gladly
served as assistant — set to work, receiving from every
side the hard-packed masses of snow passed up to them
by their comrades."
M. Falguiere made a statue of Risistance, and M.
Moulin a colossal bust of la Ripublique. The former was
"placed below a parapet, not far from the guard house,
on the edge of the chemin deronde, and facing the coun
try. The delicate artist to whom we owe the Vainqueur
en combat de coqs, le Petit Martyre, and Ophelia, has not
given his Resistance those robust, almost virile forms,
those great muscles, a la Michelange, that, at first, the
subject seems to demand. He has understood that it
is here a question of a moral, rather than a physical

resistance, and instead of personifying it under the traits
of a sort of female Hercules ready for the fray, he has
given her the frail grace of a Parisienne of our own day.
"La Resistance, seated or, rather, leaning against a
rock, crosses her arms on her nude breast with an air of
indomitable resolution. Her slender feet, the toes con
tracted, seem determined to take root in the very soil.
With a haughty movement of her head, she has tossed
back her hair, as if to exhibit to the foe her charming
face, more terrible than that of the Medusa. On her lips
plays the light smile of a heroic disdain, and, in the slight
frown upon her brow, is concentrated the obstinacy of
an eternal interdict.
"At the base of this improvised statue, M. Falguiere
has had the modesty to write in black letters on a bit of
board : La Resistance. The inscription was not necessary.
Anyone would interpret a figure expressing so stubborn
an energy, even if unaccompanied by its snow cannon.
"It is sad to think that the first warm breath will
melt this masterpiece and make it disappear, but the
artist has promised, as soon as he is off duty, to execute
a sketch of wax or clay in order to conserve its ex
pression and movement."
Moulin's statue was a colossal bust of La Ripublique.
Placed on the highest part of the parapet, Gautier
writes, its "gaze, beyond the bastion, seems to pene
trate the very depths of the country. But it is not from
that side that it should be seen: the right place for a
view is the chemin de ronde, at the foot of the talus.
While the artist was working at the head of his Ripub
lique ... his friends called to him from below: 'Rajoute
le front, soutiens la joue, avance le menton, remets de la
neige au bonnet !' And the artist, perched on his parapet
84

Moulin. La Republique
Etched by Bracquemond from the bust in snow
Size of the original etching, 8y$ X 6*4 inches
The New York Public Library

like a Greek artisan on the summit of a pediment, lis
tened to the indications and criticisms till the bust,
little by little, took on a majestic and terrible beauty."
IV
Whether or not either Moulin or Falguiere actually
made sketches in more permanent material of their
grandiose conceptions I do not know; but an interesting
record of them has been preserved in two plates etched
by Bracquemond.
"I have a friend," writes Gautier in still another
tableau, "who also turns to account the leisure of the
rampart, and who etches with a strange originality the
barbarous side of war as it appears contrasted with the
refinements of our modern civilization."
Doubtless this was Bracquemond, whose own bat
talion was stationed at the very bastion, 85, which had
thus been turned into a veritable Musee de Neige, and
who was, therefore, presumably Gautier's guide on the
above occasion. At all events, Bracquemond published
three years after the war, in 1874, a series of five etch
ings dealing with the Siege, numbers four and five of
which preserve, respectively, the forms of Falguiere's
La Risistance, and Moulin's bust of La Ripublique.
Another, number two, gives a view of Bicetre et les
Hautes-Bruyeres, par un temps de neige, which we might
suppose to be the very snowstorm which supplied those
artists with their material, were it not for the date on the
plate itself, which places it a month earlier.
Another etcher, also serving with the National Guard,
who recorded his pictorial impressions on the copper
plate, was Maxime Lalanne. His series, which con-

tains twelve plates besides a supplementary plate, was
published under the title, Souvenirs artistiques du siege
de Paris.
"C'est egall" exclaims Beraldi cataloguing it. "Le
siege de Paris aboutissant a des souvenirs 'artistiques,'
quel titre, quand on y pense!"
One is, perhaps, inclined to agree with B6raldi at
first. But after all, why not? he concludes on reflection.
The Souvenirs, which give a very fair idea of the charac
ter of Lalanne's sometimes thin, but always distin
guished linear technique, are certainly none the worse
for being artistiques, and constitute a valuable record of
certain aspects of Paris during the siege.
They are particularly interesting if studied in conjunc
tion with Goncourt's record of impressions preserved in
the Journal du Siege, for which, it might almost seem
that they were made as illustrations, so close, very
often, is the correspondence in the choice of subject, if
not in the style of treatment.
This, always heightened and imaginative in Gon
court, tends to become literal and matter-of-fact in La
lanne. Take, for example, the plate entitled Avenue de
Boulogne which shows how the superb trees had been
ruthlessly felled and the stumps sharpened so that the
pointed stakes would serve as an obstacle to the enemy's
advance. The impression which Lalanne has given is
simply that of some ugly llano estacado. Goncourt, on
the other hand, has been impressed by the way in which
"these great trees fall under the axe, swaying to and fro
like men fatally wounded," and, as he views the stakes
which are like the upturned teeth of some "sinister har
row," hate rises in his heart "for these Prussians, who
bring about such assassinations of nature."
86

Maxime Lalanne. Avenue de Boulogne. From " Souvenirs artistiques du Siege de Paris '
Size of the original etching, 5 X 8% inches
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

¦.•¦¦".¦.:¦¦¦.¦

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Maxime Lalanne. La Mare d'Auteuil. From "Souvenirs artistiques du Siege de Paris"
Size of the original etching, 4% X 8^4 inches
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Both artists have noted the singular transformation
of the pretty little Mare d'Auteuil which, "half drained
by the cattle which kneel to drink among its reeds,"
its banks denuded of their trees and trampled by the
herds collected here by the commissariat, presents, in
Lalanne's plate, the appearance of a world returned
entirely to primal chaos, in whose marshy wastes, once
peopled plains, the last man sits on a stump fishing for
his obscene food.
A similar correspondence is to be noted in their
rendering of the view, from Point-du-Jour, of the Pont-
Viaduc, whose arches, "barricaded and closed with
great wooden cross-beams," as Goncourt describes them,
supply the classical and somewhat academic Lalanne
with a striking architectural motive which quite makes
him forget that his real subject is the siege!
V
The supplementary plate in Lalanne's series, Le
section bastion Jfi et parte Brieu, has an added per
sonal interest in that it is dedicated "A notre excellent
capitaine et ami Cadart, souvenir des gardes de la 8e cie,
du 8e Bon."
Cadart, of course, was Lalanne's publisher, as he was
of so many other French etchers in the second half of the
last century, when etching had become a popular art,
and there had grown up a commercial demand for prints.
Taking advantage of this and of the popularity of the
subject, Cadart issued a number of sets of etchings
illustrating the siege and Commune. Among the best
after Lalanne's — and very much more in the spirit
of true illustrations than his slight sketches aspired to

be — were those by Martial (Adolphe Martial Pote-
ment): Le Prussien chez nous, Paris en siege, Paris
sous le commune, Paris incendii, and several others.
In connection with these too (though Martial often
supplies a text of his own either in verse or in prose), as
well as with the series depicting types and costumes
etched by Bertall and published with English text in a
volume entitled The Communists of Paris, one should
read Goncourt's Journal, which records more than one
exciting adventure, often in the company of his friends,
Bracquemond and Burty. Bracquemond, still liable for
military duty, and afraid of being drafted into the
National Guard at the orders of the Commune, joined
the medical staff as a hospital helper, while Burty's
house, one of Goncourt's headquarters in Paris, was
directly in the line of march of the troops of the Re-
publique from Versailles and so an excellent, if some
what hazardous, vantage point for the observation of
1 For a new generation of print-lovers, it may be interesting to note
what the late Philip Gilbert Hamerton had to say of this etcher who
was once regarded as one of the masters of his art in Paris.
"The technical skill of Martial is extraordinary," writes Hamerton,
after praising his enormous industry, "and a few years ago, before
skill in etching became more general in France, he had scarcely an
equal in this kind of ability. For example, Martial would go to a gal
lery of pictures and make sketches there in his note-book, and after
wards go home and take several large plates of copper, and write on
the copper an account of the pictures, and illustrate it as he went on
by many sketches of them etched in the text, feeling quite sure that
every one of the sketches would be successful. . . . Many another feat
of cleverness has he accomplished. . . . His two best qualities are a
brilliantly clear conception of facts, and perfect manual skill. He has
no creative imagination, nor any tenderness; and therefore his work,
though always admirable, can never be charming; never have any
hold upon the heart. But notwithstanding this restriction, it is emi
nently valuable work in its own way, and future students of the his
tory of Paris will be, or ought to be, very grateful for it." Martial's
collection of etchings of old Paris contains no less than three hundred
plates, exclusive of those included in numerous series such as I have
mentioned, and his Salons. 88

Martial. Arms of the City of Paris
(Plate suppressed by the Government)
Size of the original etching, 16% X 15 inches
The New York Public Library

fierce street-fighting from behind barricades on the
Boulevard. Once Goncourt went with Burty to call on the great
Dutch artist, Jongkind, who had gone on quietly living
in one of the more remote quarters all through the insur
rection. "I was one of the first to appreciate the painter,"
writes Goncourt, "but I had not previously met the
man himself. Imagine a big blond devil of a fellow, with
eyes of Delft blue, and a mouth whose corners droop,
painting away in a knitted waistcoat, and with a Dutch
sailor's cap on his head.
"He has, on his easel, a picture of a Parisian banlieu,
with a loamy bank represented by a delicious scrawl.
He shows us sketches of the streets of Paris, of the Quar-
tier Mouffetard, of the approaches to Saint-M6dard,
where the enchantment of the gray and mottled colors
of the Paris plaster seems to have been surprised by a
magician, in a radiant aqueous atmosphere.
"Then there are, in the card-board boxes, scribbled
sketches on paper, phantasmagorias of sky and of
water, the fireworks-like colorations of the ether.
"He shows us all this bonifacement, talking a patois of
Dutch and French through which pierces at times the
bitterness of a great talent — of a very great talent —
which requires but 3,000 francs a year, and has not
always been able to earn even that small amount in
order to live. . . . But immediately, his manner soften
ing once more, he speaks, with sadness, of his art, of his
struggle, of his constant striving, which renders him,
he says, the unhappiest of men.
"In the meantime, there hovers about him, with the
caressing words mothers have for their children, a short
89

woman, with silver locks and with thick moustaches —
an angel of devotion who looks like a vivandiere of the
Imperial 'Old Guard.'
"The seance is long. The examination of the boxes
has lasted several hours. Jongkind talks much. He
grows animated on the subject of the politics of the
Commune. Suddenly his speech is confused, grows more
Dutch, his words become bizarre, incoherent. . . . He
begins to babble of the agents of Louis XVII, of horrible
things he claims to have seen. He jumps up, as if moved
by a spring. 'Look, an electric current has just passed
me!' and he whistles to imitate the sound of a rifle-
ball  " VI
The two friends also called, at the H6tel-de- Ville, on
Verlaine, who had become involved in the Commune
through weakness and, as it were, almost against his
own will. He told Goncourt and Burty that he had had to
combat a proposition on the part of the insurrectionists
for the destruction of Notre-Dame.
This was after the destruction of the Vendome column,
one of the most celebrated incidents of the Commune,
to which, however, and to the part played in it by the
painter, Gustave Courbet, Goncourt makes but a pass
ing reference. Others have told the singular story, the
latest being Mr. Ernest A. Vizetelly, an eyewitness, in
a recent volume of reminiscences.1
"Gustave Courbet," he writes, "peasant-like in ap
pearance, puffed out with beer, good-humored, simple-
minded, and yet very conceited, was one of the curiosi-
1 My Adventures in the Commune, by Ernest Vizetelly. New York:
Duffield & Co., 1915. 90

ties of the Commune. How a great artist, such as he
was, could have consented to join the band of the Hotel-
de- Ville, amazed many of his contemporaries. The
story that he positively hated the Vendome column and
became a member of the Commune for the one express
purpose of seeing it pulled down, is merely a foolish
legend, and one may assume that foolish vanity alone
led Courbet to accept the honor thrust upon him."
And yet, as Mr. Vizetelly himself proceeds to show, it
is undoubtedly true that the destruction of this monu
ment to Napoleon and "CEesarism" had long been a
mania with Courbet, who hated the Second Empire to
such an extent that he had even refused to accept the
decoration of the Legion of Honor at the hand of the
Emperor. "At the time of the German siege of Paris," writes
Vizetelly, "Courbet proposed that the column should be
pulled down and melted in conjunction with all the
French and German guns of the period, with the view of
erecting with the metal a new and gigantic monument
which should be dedicated to universal peace and repub
licanism. Naturally, that Utopian idea found few sup
porters even among the French, and certainly none on
the side of Bismarck's 'big battalions.' At the Com
mune's sitting on April 2, however, both Courbet and
J. B. Clement complained of the delay in pulling down
the column, whereupon they were assured by Paschal
Grousset and Andrieu that it was only a matter of a few
days, and that the work had been entrusted to two engin
eers of ability who had assumed all responsibility for
the undertaking. May 5 was the next date fixed for the
demolition, but it went by without anything being done,
and the Commune thereupon declared that there should
91

be a fine of 500 francs for each day's delay, the amount
to be deducted from the original contract price for the
demolition, which was no less than 36,000 francs."
Finally it was announced officially that the column
would fall at two o'clock in the afternoon of May 16.
"Long before the appointed hour, the Rue de la Paix
was a sea of heads. . . . We were all there — either in
the Rue de la Paix, or the Rue de Castiglione or in some
side street whence a glimpse of the column could be
obtained. I myself, my father and my brother Arthur
were in the Rue de la Paix. Every balcony there was
crowded, heads peeped out of every window, and no
little anxiety was blended with the general excitement,
for there might be some havoc should the column collide
in its fall with one or another building."
The long wait was beguiled by the music of bands and
the appearance of gaudily dressed and gold-braided of
ficials on the balcony of the Ministry of Justice. At length
the capstans began to work.
"But all at once there came a strange, strident sound.
Did it emanate from the column? Everybody became
nervous, anxious, excited. Was there going to be an
accident — perhaps a disaster? No ! only one of the
cables fixed to the summit of the column had snapped.
That, unfortunately, meant a further delay, and, in fact,
nearly two hours elapsed before everything was made
right again. Meantime we were regaled with more ' Mar
seillaise,' more 'Chant du Depart,' more 'Chant des
Girondins.' According to my watch (as noted in my
diary) operations only became effective at a quarter-
past five o'clock. Even then the capstans performed
their work very slowly, and the half-hour was reached
before the column really began to oscillate. Swiftly,

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Martial. La Colonne de la Place Vendome
From "Paris sous la Commune"
Size of the original etching, 9% X 6V4 inches
The New York Public Library

however, came the sequel. In another instant the great
pile was bending in our direction. Some of the lower
plates of bronze had been removed and some of the
masonry, just above the pedestal, cut to a certain depth.
... A great bed of fascines, sand, and manure had been
prepared for the reception of the lofty pile. It came
down in its entirety . . . until a certain angle was
reached. Then, all at once, it split into three sections,
and in that wise fell upon the bed prepared for it. There
was a loud thud. Particles of manure and sand arose,
cloud-like, and were carried hither and thither. The
ground trembled beneath one, houses shook, windows
rattled, but there was no damage.
"As the dust cleared away, I perceived Glais-Bizoin,
one of Gambetta's coadjutors during the war in the
provinces, standing on the column's pedestal, waving
his hat, with a queer smile upon his punchinello face.
Near him stood 'General' Bergeret and several guards,
waving large red flags. Loud were the shouts of ' Vive la
Commune ! ' Right quickly did one of the Guards' bands
strike up the 'Marseillaise,' but amidst and above it I
suddenly heard the strains of 'Hail, Columbia!' played
violently on a piano by some Yankee girl belonging to a
party of Americans who had installed themselves on the
first floor of the Hotel Mirabeau. They came out on to
the balcony and were loud in their plaudits. In those
days the cult of Napoleon had no disciples in the United
States. Both New Yorkists [sic] and Bostonians knew
but one hero — the George Washington, who, unlike
Napoleon, never lied."
Courbet was one of the committee appointed to super
intend the removal of valuable books and works of art
from the house of M. Thiers, which was likewise demol-
93

ished, and their distribution among the public museums
and libraries. These were all deposited in the Tuileries,
however, where they are said to have perished when
that palace was consumed by the flames.
About this same time there occurred a serious split in
the Communists' ranks, and Courbet was among those
who signed a protest complaining that the Commune
had abandoned all direct responsibility and thrown to
the winds its original policy of political and social re
form. The signatories threatened that they would no
longer attend the deliberations of the Commune, and
were accused of wishing to save their own skins in the
great crisis that was now felt to be at hand.
Courbet's attitude in these latter days, as well as his
great fame as an artist, may, indeed, have had some
effect in ameliorating the judgment passed upon him
by the courtmartial at the end of the Commune. Though
a number of his fellow-prisoners were condemned to
transportation, deportation, or hard labor for life,
Courbet was sentenced to only six months' imprison
ment and the payment of a fine of 1500 francs. His
last years were spent in Switzerland, where he died in
1877. The monument, in whose demolition he had been
the leading spirit, was afterwards restored.

VII
COROT AS A LITHOGRAPHER

JN the preceding chapter, I wrote of the
French artists who remained in Paris dur
ing the Siege, and who, in many instances,
as members of the National Guard or of
the Mobiles, bore an active part in the defence of the
capital. The list, though it included Puvis de Chavannes,
Courbet, Regnault, Bracquemond, Lalanne, and others,
was far from complete. For example, I made no men
tion of Corot. Yet, during the fateful winter of 1870-
71, there was in the beleaguered city no more helpful
or patriotic spirit than that of the great lyric landscape
artist who expressed his apocalyptic sense of events in
the strange, visionary painting, so unlike the rest of his
work, Paris Incendiie.
Though seventy-five years old, Corot not only re
fused to leave Paris while there was yet time, but even
bought a rifle in order to take his place on the ram
parts. When he saw that he was not strong enough for
this, he found other forms of useful activity. If he could
not give himself, he could at least give his art for the
Fatherland. So he worked away with redoubled energy,
selling his pictures, and employing the considerable

sums obtained in this way to relieve in some measure
the horrors of the Siege.
"He went among the ambulances and hospitals," we
are told by one writer, M. Geffroy, "emptying his hands
and his pockets," and at one time he sent a large sum
to the authorities with a note expressing the wish that
it might be employed for "the manufacture of the can
non required to drive the Prussians out of the woods
of Ville d'Avray. " Then, later, he sent ten thousand
francs for "the liberation of the country" and refused
to take it back when the war was over. Instead, with
characteristic compassion and generosity, he ordered
it turned over to the poor of the tenth arrondisse-
ment. Even when Paris had capitulated and the Siege was
raised, Corot was loth to leave the capital, and might
have remained to experience all the added horrors of
the Commune, had it not been for the entreaties of his
friend and future cataloguer, M. Alfred Robaut, who
came down from Douai and persuaded the old painter
to return with him to his home in the North.
Robaut was the son-in-law of that provincial painter
of Arras, Constant Dutilleux, who, in 1847, while yet
unknown to Corot, — and while Corot himself was yet
unknown to the world at large, — wrote the latter
expressing profound admiration for his art. Dutilleux
remained, to the day of his death, in 1867, the faithful
friend and humble disciple of the great artist, whom
he taught one thing at least — how to make clichis-
verres. He had, indeed, two major passions in his
obscure and laborious life — Corot and Delacroix —
and both of these were shared to the fullest extent by
Robaut.

Cobot. Le Clocher de St. Nicolas-Lkz-Arras
Size of the original lithograph, 11 X 8% inches
In the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The latter's father had been a skilful designer. He
himself grew up surrounded by lithographic presses,
and early served his apprenticeship in the art of draw
ing on the stone. What more natural, therefore, than
that he should place a lithographic crayon between the
fingers of his distinguished guest, and encourage him
to make a number of drawings on autographic paper?
Corot, it is said, liked the freedom of handling which
the medium permitted; and, evenings, when the day's
painting was done, the old artist gave rein to his ima
gination and fancy. He made altogether thirteen de
signs in this way in the spring of 1871, and they were
carefully transferred to the stone by Robaut himself,
who, in 1872, arranged for the publication of twelve,
the thirteenth, Sous Bois, being merely a preliminary
experiment in the handling of the medium. Fifty copies
only were issued of this set, which is to-day one of the
rarest treasures of French black-and-white art in the
nineteenth century.1
i Cover: DOUZE CROQUIS & DESSINS ORIGINATJX sur
papier Autographique par COROT — tires a Cinquante Bxemplaires.
— Numero . . . figne [sic] de VAuteur — Paris. Rue Lafayette No. 113,
Rue Bonaparte No. 18, a la Lihrairie artistique et chez les principaux
Marchands d'Estampes. — Imp. Lemercier & Cie, rue de Seine, 57,
Paris. Translation of the notice printed on an inside leaf: —
"We offer to admirers of M. Corot's art, so much appreciated to
day, a hitherto unpublished collection of twelve sketches and compo
sitions drawn by him on autographic paper, and transferred by us
directly to the stone.
"One thus has before him the work of the Master, just as it came
from his hand, and we beg to lay stress on this point; for, in the work
of an artist like M. Corot, there is always an elusive element of poetry
that no alien crayon can possibly render.
"After having remained in Paris throughout the Siege, M. Corot
came North in April, 1871, to rest. Both at Arras and at Douai he
made studies and even painted some important pictures, while from
time to time, for the sake of varying his work, he produced, with his
97

As a matter of fact, these autographs were by no
means Corot's first essays in the field of lithography.
While yet a young man, in the establishment of M.
Delalain, the cloth-merchant, and before he had re
ceived the slightest training as an artist, he made at
least three designs on the stone. Of them no trace re
mains, even in the Bibliotheque Nationale, although
the stationer, Collas, at whose shop in the Passage Fey-
deau the prints were shown, was supposed to have
deposited there the three copies required by law; but
Corot roughly sketched two from memory for Robaut,
who reproduced them in their proper sequence in his
monumental catalogue. With true Boswellian frugality
and prudent foresight, the latter also carefully pre
served the crumbs of comment with which they were
accompanied in the making.
"Oh, how ugly and awkward that must have been!"
Corot exclaimed, as he made the sketch of The Plague
at Barcelona, which shows a Spanish peasant, covered
with a great cape, seated in the foreground of a deso
late, fever-stricken landscape. "For, you know," he
usual imaginative fecundity, the compositions and sketches which we
have collected and published in an edition limited to fifty numbered
copies. "We are confident that these expressions, however hasty at times,
of the thought of the Master, will be appreciated by collectors and
artists. For this reason we have not wished to make any selection,
believing that admirers of the work of M. Corot will be grateful to us
for furnishing even the slightest sketches of such a painter, in their
frank and spontaneous execution. Those who have been privileged to
meet and know him, will recognize in them the echo, as it were, of his
always varied and delightful conversation.
"Some of these drawings are, moreover, very finely executed, the
great artist having lavished every care on them. They contain there
fore much of the charm of his incomparable paintings.
" Paris, September, 1872."
The set owned by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is No. 31.
98

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Corot. Le Dormoir des Vaches
Size of the original lithograph, 6% X 5% inches
In the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

continued, "I was absolutely ignorant of my trade,
and had no leisure to learn it. I was still living with M.
Delalain, and it was only at night I escaped to carry
my stones to Engelman" — one of the three great
lithographic printers and publishers in Paris at that
period, when the new art, invented or discovered by
the Bavarian Senefelder, was carried to its very zenith
by such artists as Isabey, Harding, and Bonington.
Another of these crude early compositions, inspired,
no doubt, by either Charlet or Raffet, was called The
Old Guard Dies but Never Surrenders.
"I recall," said Corot, as his pencil ran rapidly over
the paper, "that I had backed my grenadier up against
a tree ... in his arms he held his flag, resolved to aban
don it only with his death. ... I see him again with
his great coat and gaiters. . . . Before him, three to
one, the English threatened him with their bayonets."
The recollection of recent humiliations to the French
arms (this was in 1873) led him to add: "To-day it
would be possible to make a sad counterpart of this
drawing; but let us not dwell too much upon this fact,
and let us console ourselves with nature."
Of a third lithograph, Une Fete de Village, Corot him
self could recall nothing more, after an interval of half
a century, than the title and the fact that the composi
tion contained a large number of figures.
II
As an acolyte of business, Corot was hardly a success.
It is said that he was forced to leave the first establish
ment where his father placed him, because he soiled the
fabrics with his paint-stained fingers. Having shown

not the slightest aptitude for salesmanship in his second
place, he was finally set to work outside the establish
ment, carrying heavy packages through the streets.
But he was equally a failure in this department. More
than once his employer, M. Delalain, came across him
either loitering along and looking up at the clouds, or
else standing before the shops in whose windows prints
and other pictures were displayed, as one may see in
Carl Vernet's cover sketch for an album issued by
Delpech — another of the great lithographic publishers
of the period, like Engelman.
Every one knows how, finally, in 1822, Corot's father
consented to his son's abandoning the mercantile career
he had marked out for him, and becoming an artist.
The young man immediately entered the studio of
Michallon, and thereafter, wrapped up in his painting,
he apparently quite forgot the humbler medium in
which he had made his obscure debut as an original
artist. Only once before 1871 did he, so far as is known,
again touch a lithographic crayon, and that was merely
to make a cover for a little brochure, La Caisse
d'Epargne, a vaudeville, both words and music of which
were written by the sons of Corot's old patron, M.
Delalain. It represented Madame Rose in the r61e of
Mere Boisseau, at the Thedtre-Comte, in 1836, and of
this work Robaut possessed a unique example.
In 1845 Corot's interest in Charles Jacque's experi
ments with the needle led him to etch a plate, the
Souvenir de Toscane, and later, urged by his friends
Bracquemond, Michelin, and others, he made a dozen
or so delightful etchings which, in spite of many evi
dent shortcomings, succeed to an extraordinary degree
in expressing the most poetic aspects of Corot's genius.
100

Corot. Le Moulin de Cuincy
Size of the original lithograph, 8-ft„ X 10% inches
In the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

But though, of the two, lithography would, on the
whole, have seemed much the more sympathetic
medium, it remained neglected by him for nearly half
a century. According to Mr. Joseph Pennell, Corot's lithographs
or autographs, like those of so many other contempo
rary painters who made occasional use of transfer paper,
"reveal no appreciation of the lithographic quality,
and are precisely like his drawings in other mediums."
What he means, doubtless, is that neither Corot, Cour
bet, Jacque, nor Millet, ever availed himself of the
full resources of the lithographic art. They did not,
like its pioneer exploiters, seek to perform feats of
amazing virtuosity, to rival oil painting in its own field
with wonderful effects of tone and color. But it is diffi
cult to see how, as far as they went, they used it any
less idiomatically than their predecessors.
"The lithographs of Corot are particularly delightful,"
writes M. Loys Delteil, who has compiled a catalogue
of the artist's black-and-white work in Le Peintre
Graveur Illustre. "They express in the highest degree
the qualities of charm, style, and naive skill charac
teristic of Corot. On lithographic transfer paper (papier
caique autographique) , the master felt more at ease than
on copper or on glass; consequently he was able to give
free rein to his imagination, based as it was on pro
found knowledge, and put into practice the maxim in
scribed in one of his notebooks: " I am never in a hurry
about detail; the masses and the character of a pic
ture interest me before everything. When it is well
planned out, I seek the subtleties both of form and of
colour."

101

Ill
What, perhaps, first strikes one in examining these
lithographs, is their variety — even their marked diver
sity of manner. Some, like Le Clocher de St. Nicolas-
lez-Arras and Le Repos des Philosophes, are compara
tively finished drawings. Others, like La Tour Isolee,
executed with pen and ink instead of with lithographic
crayon, and Sous Bois, Corot's first attempt on auto
graphic paper, are little more than casual scrawls, though
they convey with sure science precisely what the artist
sought to express.
And the subject-matter is as diverse as the style of
handling. Glimpses of the level, clean-washed, wind
swept north country where Corot was almost as much
at home as in the woods of Ville d'Avray, alternate
with reminiscences of that Italian land which never
ceased to allure, linking him, the modern Frenchman,
subtle interpreter of the very soul of nature, so unmis
takably with the classic Claude Lorrain — himself
naturalist and romantic nature-lover in his own day.
Finally there are those pure and poetic evocations of
the remote pagan past, such as Sapho and Le Repos
des Philosophes, in which the imaginative side of his
curiously double and composite art fought free of fact
and found complete, untrammelled expression.
Whatever its theme or its treatment, there is not one
of these lithographs that has not its own peculiar beauty,
or at least suggestion of loveliness. This, naturally, is not
to say that some are not better than others, or that there
are not even comparative failures in the group. In the
Sapho, for example, the lines of the composition, as
102

38r

Corot. Le Repos des Philosophes
Size of the original lithograph, S'KoX 511Aa inches
In the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Corot. Le Coup de Vent
Size of the original lithograph, SliuX lO-is inches
In the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

well as the lack of detail and of contrast between the
dark tones of the foliage and foreground, produce a
heavy effect, and the drawing of the figure is unfortu
nate. Le Cavalier dans les Roseaux also seems a trifle
empty and awkward. But such exceptions serve merely
to bring into higher relief the charming qualities of the
series as a whole.
The most satisfactory drawings are not, necessarily,
in every instance the most completely finished. Le
Clocher de St. Nicolas-lez- Arras and Le Repos des Philo
sophes will doubtless please those for whom Corot's
etchings are too summary and abstract. Some, however,
will prefer certain others, such as Saules et Peupliers
Blancs, Le Moulin de Cuincy, and even Le Coup de
Vent (so suggestive of a picture with the same title
painted several years before) where the method is more
direct and evocative, as in the etchings themselves.
It is a commonplace to say that Corot is even
more a poet than a painter — that he is concerned far
more with the spirit than with the surface and texture
of things, with the interpretation of certain aspects of
nature which occur over and over again in all his work
till they combine to form, as it were, a sort of melodic
accompaniment to it, than with their sheer represen
tative power. Yet this does not indicate any lack of
a firm grip on the facts, or any uncertainty in their
rendering. He is at times a master of delicate and
expressive draughtsmanship. Take, for example, Saules
et Peupliers Blancs. Who else could so simply yet
subtly suggest the feathery lightness of pollard willows
whose tops, a glamour of misty gray-green in the
bright spring and summer breezes, Corot has rendered
with that soft yet free sweep of his crayon which is at
103

once an enchantment and a caress? And where could
one find fresher observation or firmer rendering of the
larger tree-forms than in Le Moulin de Cuincy f
This last print is particularly pleasing with its reflec
tions on the water, its filmy clouds, its white-walled
mill, and its suggestion of peasant figures in the fore
ground. Without being carried quite so far as some
of the others, even more is suggested, and the whole
scene seems bathed in the tender, limpid atmosphere
of early spring, when the skies grow dreamy and the bare
trees begin to show the first faint signs of sap stirring
in their branches.
Both Le Dormoir des Vaches and Souvenir d'ltalie
are also remarkably beautiful drawings, especially the
latter, which, in the way three trees of different shape
and size fill the space opened against the sky by a steeply
descending Italian hillside, offers one of the artist's
effective and characteristic compositions.
IV
Between 1871 and 1874 Corot executed three other
lithographs on autographic paper. Among these the
most attractive perhaps is Souvenir de Sologne. This
piece, which originally appeared in another, miscella
neous, publication,1 is not reproduced in Robaut's
catalogue, where it is indicated as a cliche-verre trans
ferred to the stone.
"Would it not be more accurate to call it a drawing
1 L' Album contemporain, collection des dessins et croquis des meil
leurs artistes de notre epoque — ouvrage public sous le patronage des
maitres contemporains — premiere serie de 25 planches. Prix 15 fr.,
en vente au siege de la Societe Ichnographique, boulevard St. Mi
chel, 35. 104

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Corot. Saules et Peupliers Blancs
Size of the original lithograph, lOVs X 15%c inches
In the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

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Corot. Souvenir d'Italie
Size of the original lithograph, 5%e X 7Vs inches
In the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

executed directly on prepared paper and then trans
ferred?" asks M. Delteil, who answers his own question
in the affirmative. However this may be, the execution
is quite different from that of any of the other auto
graphs, and its finer, lighter, and tighter linework is
certainly closer to that of the clichis-verres, and even
of the etchings, than of the consummate freedom and
ease of Corot's sweeping crayon stroke, in the drawings
I have already mentioned.
Instead of criticizing such drawings and finding them
deficient in "lithographic quality," one wishes that
Corot had made many more in the same medium, and
that all had been issued in much larger editions. For
now the few that he did make are almost hopelessly
out of the reach of the collector, while no photographic
reproduction can give any adequate idea of their charm.

THE END

CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
U . S . A