As a youth, he was taciturn but observant, watching everything with those large melancholy eyes of his, which seemed as though they were looking for and finding in everything some side unknown and invisible to other eyes. It is this side which he has shown in all beings and created things, from the giant to the ant, from man to mollusc, from the star down to the flower. Others find fault with the world as the good God has made it, but, powerless to refashion it, they rest satisfied with railing at it; Grandville not only did not scoff at it, but even re-created one of his own.
At twelve he entered the school at Nancy, and he left at fourteen. What did Latin, Greek or even French matter to him? He had a language of his own, which he talked in low tones to that invisible master whom we call genius, a language which, later, he was to speak aloud to the whole of creation. When I went to see Grandville and found him holding a lizard in his hand, whistling to a canary in its cage or crumbling bread in a bowl of red fishes, I was always tempted to ask him: "Come, what does the fish, canary or lizard say to you?"
Grandville began to draw at fourteen; I am mistaken, he had always drawn. Exercises and translations were scanty in his college exercise-books, but illustrations—as they have since been termed—to the subject of la rose, rosa and to the translation of Deus creavit cælum et terrant were marvellous! So, one day, the masters showed these exercise-books to his father. They meant them to be the means of getting the child a scolding; but the father saw more than the masters did: they only saw an indifferent Latin scholar; the father saw a great artist. All saw correctly, but each turned his back and looked in an opposite direction from that of the others. Grandville was from that day introduced into his father's studio, and had the right to make sketches without being obliged to do exercises and translations. When a sitter came to sit for a miniature in M. Grandville's studio, he sat both to father and son. The sitter, however, only saw the work of the father because that was a finished, varnished and touched-up portrait, whilst the son's was a beautiful and excellent caricature, at which the father would laugh heartily when the sitter was gone, but which he advised his son to hide deep among his drawings, wondering each time how it was that the man's face had some likeness to the head of an animal. Meantime, an artist called Mansion passed through Nancy, and went to call on his confrère Grandville, who showed him his miniatures; the artist visitor looked at them rather contemptuously, but, when he came to the youth's drawings, he fastened on them eagerly and looked at them as though he would never stop looking, repeating: "More!" as long as there were any more left.
"Let me have this lad," he said to the father, "and I will take him to Paris."
It was hard to give up his boy, even to a brother artist; and yet Grandville's father knew very well that one cannot become a great artist unless one goes out into the great centres of civilisation. He adopted a middle course, which appeased his conscience and comforted his heart. He promised to send the boy to Paris. Six months went by before this promise was put into execution; at last, recognising that the lad was wasting time in the provinces, the father made up his mind. A hundred crowns were put into one of the young artist's pockets, a letter to a cousin in the other, and he was commended to the care of the conductor of a diligence; thus the great man of the coming future started for Paris. The cousin's name was Lemétayer; he was manager of the Opéra-Comique. He was a clever man, whom we all knew, very popular in the artist world, and intimate with Picot, Horace Vernet, Léon Cogniet, Hippolyte Lecomte and Féréol.
I shall be asked why I put Féréol, a singer, with Picot, Horace Vernet, Léon Cogniet and Hippolyte Lecomte, four painters? Well, just as M. Ingres, who is a great painter, lays claim to be a virtuoso, so it was with Féréol, who, though an excellent opera-singer, laid claim to be a painter.
Alas! We know others, too, besides M. Ingres and Féréol, who are ambitious in the same way! Now, it happened one day that Féréol, having carried one of his compositions to Lemétayer, it was seen by Grandville, and Grandville, in his disrespect for Féréol's painting, began to draw it over again, as Féréol might have begun singing over again one of the airs of M. Ingres. Meanwhile, Hippolyte Lecomte came in. We do not know whether Hippolyte Lecomte has, like M. Ingres and Féréol, some hobby besides his art; but we know he was a man possessed of good common sense and of good judgment. It was exactly what the young man wanted, and he passed from M. Mansion's studio to that of Lecomte. And, M. Mansion's pupil kept an old grudge against his master. This was what occasioned it—
With his delightful imagination, which was as picturesque when he was a child as when a man, Grandville had invented a game with fifty-two cards. Mansion thought this game so remarkable that he fathered it under his own name with the title of La Sibylle des salons. I once saw the game at Grandville's, when he was in a good humour and turning over all his drawings; there was something very fantastic about it. When with Hippolyte Lecomte, there was no longer any question of drawing—he had to paint. But painting was not Grandville's strong point—pencil or pen were his to any extent! He painted, like Callot, with a steel pen. Pencil, pen and style spoke admirably the language of the artist and adequately expressed what he wanted to say!
Then, suddenly, lithography comes on the scenes. Grandville is attracted to, looks at and examines the process, utters a cry of delight, and feels that this is what he must do. Grandville, like Clément Boulanger, was a seeker, never satisfied with what others found for him to do, at times discontented with what he had found for himself. Callot had substituted in his engravings the spirit varnish of musical instrument-makers for soft varnishes. Grandville executes his lithographs after the manner of engravings: he cuts into the stone with a hard pencil, shades with cut lines, specifies his outlines and draws no more, but engraves; it was at this time that the series of drawings representing the Tribulations de la petite propriété appear and that of the Dimanches d'un bon bourgeois. Grandville then lived at the hôtel Saint-Phar in the boulevard Poissonnière, the room since occupied by Alphonse Karr, an artist who also used his pen as an engraving tool instead of writing with it.
About 1826 Grandville left the hôtel Saint-Phar and went to live in a sort of garret situated opposite the Palais des Beaux-Arts, where I made his acquaintance. Alas! I also lived in another sort of garret; the twenty-five francs which, upon Oudard's entreaty, M. de Broval had just added to my salary, did not allow me to live in a first floor of the rue de Rivoli; my garret, however, was envious of Grandville's: an artist's studio, no matter how poor he is, always contains more things than the room of an ordinary workman; a sketch, a statuette, a plaster-cast, an old vizorless helmet, some odd bits of armour with traces of the gold damascening, a stuffed squirrel playing the flute, a gull hanging from the ceiling with wings spread, looking as though it still skimmed the waves, and a strip of Chinese material, draped before a door, give to the walls a coquettish air which rejoices the eye and tickles the fancy. And the painter's studio was a gathering-place for talks. There, and in the adjacent studios, were to be found Philippon, who was to found La Caricature and, later, his brother, who founded Le Journal pour rire; Ricourt, the persistent maker of improbable stories; Horeau, the architect; Huet, Forest, Renou. When they were flush of money they drank beer; on other days they were content to smoke, shout, declaim and laugh. Grandville laughed, declaimed, shouted, smoked, and drank but little. He remained seated at a table, a sheet of paper before him, pen or pencil in hand, smiling betimes, but everlastingly drawing. What did he draw? He himself never knew. A fancy bordering on the nonsensical guided his pencil. Birds with monkeys' heads, monkeys with fishes' heads, the faces of bipeds on the bodies of quadrupeds: a more grotesque world than Callot's temptations or Breughel's sportive demons, When two hours had gone by, full of laughter, noise and smoke for the others, Grandville had drawn from his brain, as from some fanciful circle, a whole new creation, which certainly belonged as much to him as that which was destroyed by the Flood belonged to God. It was all very exquisite, very clever, very enchanting; and expressed very clearly what it wished to interpret; the eyes and gestures speaking such a droll language that, by the time one had to leave them, one had always spent upwards of half an hour or an hour looking at them, trying to discover the meaning of them—improvised illustrations of stories unknown by Hoffmann. It was in this way he prepared, composed and published Les Quatre saisons de la vie, Le Voyage pour l'éternité, Les Metamorphoses du jour, and, finally, La Caricature, in which all the political celebrities of the day sat for him or before him. Then came 1832.