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Updated: July 18, 2025
I pulled the valve-cord, and the barometer began to ascend. It was time. Some far-off rumblings were heard in the south. "Here is another engraving," resumed the unknown, not suspecting what I was doing. "It is an immense balloon carrying a ship, strong castles, houses, and so on. The caricaturists did not suspect that their follies would one day become truths. It is complete, this large vessel.
The three episodes are certainly funny enough. I find myself caring more for the first, called "June Day," since he reminds me so strongly in make-up of the French caricaturists in drawing, Rouveyre and Toulouse-Lautrec. Mr. Watts's feeling for satirical make-up is a fine shade of artistry in itself. He has excellent feeling for the broad contrast and for fierce insinuation at the same time.
The number of patients in this set who at the age of thirty are more worn out than septuagenarians increases so rapidly as to make one dread to think what will be the next race of Frenchmen. To the predilection for absinthe young Rameau and the writers of his set add the imitation of Heine, after, indeed, the manner of caricaturists, who effect a likeness striking in proportion as it is ugly.
Almost the first figure that these audacious caricaturists dared to depict was a political one: in Macaire's red breeches and tattered coat appeared no less a personage than the King himself the old Poire in a country of humbugs and swindlers the facile princeps; fit to govern, as he is deeper than all the rogues in his dominions.
He had changed very little in the interval; his hair was perhaps a trifle greyer, otherwise he looked just the same debonair picturesque figure that the Opposition caricaturists had loved to flesh their pencils on. He got up as we entered, regarding us both with a pleasant whimsical smile that put me entirely at my ease at once.
"Yes, but the annoyances, the children, the troubles " Ah, you must permit me to proffer the consolatory thought with which one of our wittiest caricaturists closes his satiric observations: "Man is not perfect!"
Hence the caricaturists of the day made sly sport of the love of Pericles and Aspasia. These two were intellectual equals, comrades; and that all of Pericles' public speeches were rehearsed to her, as his enemies averred, is probably true. "Aspasia has no time for society; she is busy writing a speech for her lord," said Aristophanes.
The contradictions, however sincere, were not believed by the persons most interested. Nearly all the nobles continued to regard the Cardinal with suspicion and aversion. Many of the ruder and more reckless class vied with the rhetoricians and popular caricaturists in the practical jests which they played off almost daily against the common foe.
Dare for once to do a strange thing, and let yourself be laughed at; go to a workman's meeting a Chartist meeting, if you will; and look honestly at the faces and brows of those so-called incendiaries, whom your venal caricaturists have taught you to believe a mixture of cur-dog and baboon we, for our part, shall not be ashamed to show foreheads against your laughing House of Commons and then say, what employment can those men find in the soulless routine of mechanical labour for the mass of brain which they almost universally possess?
Notwithstanding the care of our Government to conceal and bury this affair in oblivion, it furnished matter both for conversation in our fashionable circles, and subjects for our caricaturists. But these artists were soon seized by the police, who found it more easy to chastise genius than to silence tongues.
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