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Delepierre, "we find that M. Henri Berthoud, a literary man of some repute, and a constant contributor to the Musee des Familles, confesses that the letter attributed to Marion was in fact written by himself. The editor of this journal had requested Gavarni to furnish him with a drawing for a tale in which a madman was introduced looking through the bars of his cell.
He had a quick eye, no training, and a certain extravagant imagination, and caricature was his inevitable field. He was, however, as Mr. Jerrold himself remarks, "a caricaturist who seldom raises a laugh." Not hearty fun, still less delicate humor, was his. In the higher qualities of caricature his contemporaries, Daumier and Gavarni, were vastly his superiors.
As a specimen of the most perfect, in its truth and union of harmony and contrast, the view of the Circus of Gavarni, with the female figure on horseback in the front ground, is not surpassed by any we remember to have seen. What is to come of the stereoscope and the photograph we are almost afraid to guess, lest we should seem extravagant.
This drawing had appeared in the Caricature, an organ of pictorial satire founded in those days by one Philipon, with the aid of a band of young mockers to whom he gave ideas and a direction, and several others, of whom Gavarni, Henry Monnier, Decamps, Grandville, were destined to make themselves a place.
We've just time for one turn before the waiter comes with your order. Come along. The band was staggering into a fresh tune, a tune that Henry knew well. Many a time had Mme Gavarni hammered it out of an aged and unwilling piano in order that he might dance with her blue-eyed niece. He rose. 'No! he exclaimed grandly. 'I am going to dance with my wife!
To the writer of this imperfect sketch he remains considerably less interesting than Gavarni; and/or a particular reason, which it is difficult to express otherwise than by saying that he is too simple. Simplicity was not Gavarni's fault, and indeed to a large degree it was Daumier's merit.
This final and aggravational representative of the compromising sex looms to my mind's eye, I should add, but as the creature of an hour, in spite of her having been domiciled with us; whereas I think of Mademoiselle Delavigne as flitting in and out on quick, fine, more or less cloth-shod feet of exemplary neatness, the flat-soled feet of Louis Philippe and of the female figures in those volumes of Gavarni then actual, then contemporaneous, which were kept in a piece of furniture that stood between the front-parlour windows in Fourteenth Street, together with a set of Béranger enriched by steel engravings to the strange imagery of which I so wonderingly responded that all other art of illustration, ever since, has been for me comparatively weak and cold.
Among the flowers the lovely Hortense continued to live on, and Gavarni, the great poet of the floral realm, has reared to her, as Hortensia, the Flower Queen, an enchanting monument, in his "Fleurs Animées." Upon a mound of Hortensias rests the image of the Queen Hortense, and, in the far distance, like the limnings of a half-forgotten dream, are seen the towers and domes of Paris.
Besides, we are becoming too cosmopolitan, and wander too constantly over this little globe, not to have learned that the Bohemia of 1830 is as completely a thing of the past as a grisette or a glyphisodon. It disappeared with Gavarni and the authors who described it.
Petersburg: not even the best efforts of Gillray or ``H. B., or Gavarni or Daumier, or the brightest things in ``Punch'' or ``Kladderadatsch'' surpass it. Some other Russian efforts at keeping up public spirit were less legitimate.
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