Grandville had offered that my portrait should be one of the first; he was one of the first to come and mount his platform, smoothing out his panel on a folding ladder and sketching the parts that reached above the height of the door. Two months afterwards, I went on a voyage. Did I see him again? I have my doubts. Only news of his tremendous works reached me. These were Chansons de Béranger, Gargantua au berceau, the Fables de la Fontaine, Les Animaux peinte par eux-mêmes, les Étoiles, les Fleurs animées. Then, in the midst of all these merry figures which fell from his pencil and pen came heartrending and bitter sorrows; his wife and three children died one after the other; when the last died, he himself fell ill. It was as though the voices of his four beloved ones were calling him to them. His conversation changed in character; it became more elevated; no more studio laughter or youthful joking was to be heard. He talked of that future life towards which he was going, of that immortality of the soul of which he was to know the secret; he soared into purest ether and floated on the most transparent clouds.
On 14 March 1847, he became insane; and he died three days later in the house of Dr. Voisin, at Vauvres. He is buried at Saint-Mandé, near his wife and three children, and if the dead are still endowed with sympathy, he has but to stretch out his arm to touch the hand of Carrel!
[CHAPTER V]
Tony Johannot
Grandville disappeared. Did he mount up to heaven on the rays of one of those stars with the faces of women, to whom he made love? Did he lie down to sleep in the tomb, to listen, during the sleep of death, to the growing of those women to whom he had given the stems of flowers? Oh! that is the great secret which the grave guards mysteriously, which death cannot tell life, which Hamlet asked fruitlessly of Yorick, of his father's ghost, of the interrupted song of Ophelia!
This secret my two dear and excellent friends who died on the same day—4 August 1852—Tony Johannot and Alfred d'Orsay, would assuredly have told me if it had been permitted to them. What poetry of sorrow could, then, be adequate to express the feelings of my heart the morning I woke to receive two such letters as these?
"MY DEAR FATHER,—Did you ever hear anything equal to this? I went to Tony Johannot's house yesterday with your letter, to ask him if he could undertake the vignettes for Isaac Laquedem, and they said to me: 'Sir, he has just died!'
"Tony Johannot dead! I met him the day before yesterday and we made an appointment for to-day. Dead! This single syllable felt like the tolling of a bell. It awoke the same kind of vibration in my heart. Dead! Tony Johannot is dead! If people die like this, one ought never to leave those one loves. Come back at once to Paris or I shall start for Brussels.—Yours, "ALEX. DUMAS, fils"