Alfred three times only just escaped death: by a bullet, by starvation and by typhus fever! One day, when he was on the ramparts, a bullet flew by two yards from him, a little nearer and it would have been the end of him; but he was spared. It was a different matter with starvation and, above all, in the matter of typhus! Hunger weakened his digestion, typhus burned up his blood: hence, the paleness of his cheeks and the fever in his eyes: he died in 1837 from the effects of the famine and fever of 1813.
The whole family, as we have said, returned to Paris in 1818 and settled near Charles, who then did one of his wonderful engravings, Le Trompette blessé, by Horace Vernet. The poor people were totally ruined. It was essential that the children they had nourished should, in their turn, look after those who had nourished them.
Alfred set to work at first to make engravings for confectioners and to illuminate images of the saints. This lasted for seven years. It was Charles who brought in the larger contribution to the common purse. He died in 1825, just the same age as was Alfred when he died, thirty-seven. God permitted that, from henceforth, Alfred's powers should increase, on account of the burden which this misfortune laid upon him. A young brother and aged parents—these were the responsibilities which the death of his brother left him!
The world does not sufficiently recognise the story of those saintly struggles of filial love against poverty, but I shall tell the story again and again!
Alfred's life was a strange one! He had no youth and was not to have an old age. The furrows of mature age, which line the careworn brow of the thinker, were engraved upon him by starvation when he was thirteen, by exile and by fatigue they were continued when he was eighteen, and poverty took up the task when he was twenty-five.
"Did you, who knew him, ever see him smile?"
"No." And yet this gravity had nothing in it of the melancholy of disgust or of despair; it was the calm of resignation.
The first plate which he published—for he began by devoting himself to engraving: feeling himself to be feeble he sought some support on which to lean—was that of Scheffer's Orphelins. This publication brought him the patronage of Gérard. In the first instance, this master entrusted him with a scene from Ourika, then the reproduction of his great picture of Louis XIV. présentant Philippe V. aux ambassadeurs d'Espagne. From that moment Alfred Johannot became known. It was the period when English publications introduced the taste for illustrations into France. Since Moreau, junior, who had admirably reproduced the pictures of the age of Louis XIV., and particularly those of the time of Louis XV., there was not a more distinguished engraver in France than Alexandre Desenne. Alfred went to him and asked to be allowed to study under his direction. Genius is simple, kind and friendly: Desenne gave him excellent advice. Then Desenne died, and the only well-known engraver who was left was Achille Devéria—You knew that fine intellect? that fecund producer, who, having to choose between genius, which leaves people to die of hunger, and talent, which can support a family, tore himself weeping from the disconsolate embraces of genius, flinging in its arms as a substitute his brother Eugène. Some day I will tell his story as I am telling Alfred's, and I will compel the jeering and ungrateful world to bow its head before the pious son, the industrious father, who, by working sixteen hours a day, kept a whole family in comfort.
O Devéria, how noble wert thou in God's sight when thou didst deny thyself the chance of becoming as great in the eyes of men as thou couldst have been!
But, soon, Devéria left painting and engraving for lithography. Then, Alfred assumed the first position in book illustration, which his brother was soon to share and to whom he abandoned it altogether when he was dying.