A Poultice for Two—Sympathy and Economy.—From Impressions de Ménage, by Gavarni.
Among the heaps of albums to be found in a French collection we turn with particular curiosity to those which satirize the child life of France. Gavarni's celebrated series of "Enfants Terribles" has gone round the world, and called forth child satire in many lands. The presence of children in his pictures does not long divert this artist from his ruling theme. One of his terrible children, a boy of four, prattles innocently to his mother in this strain: "Nurse is going to get up very early, now that you have come home, mamma. Goodness! while you were in the country she always had her breakfast in bed, and it was papa who took in the milk and lighted the fire. But wasn't the coffee jolly sweet, though!" Another alarming boy of the same age, who is climbing up his father's chair and wearing his father's hat, all so merry and innocent, discourses thus to the petrified author of his being: "Who is Mr. Albert? Oh, he is a gentleman belonging to the Jardin des Plantes, who comes every day to explain the animals to mamma; a large man with mustaches, whom you don't know. He didn't come to-day until after they had shut up the monkeys. You ought to have seen how nicely mamma entertained him. Oh dear!" (discovering a bald place on papa's pate) "you have hardly any hair upon the top of your head, papa!" In a third picture both parents are exhibited seated side by side upon a sofa, and the terrible boy addresses his mother thus: "Mamma, isn't that little mustache comb which Cornelia found in your bedroom this morning for me?" Another sketch shows us father, mother, and terrible boy taking a walk in the streets of Paris. A dandy, in the likeness of Gavarni himself, goes by, with his cane in his mouth, and his face fixed so as to seem not to see them. But the boy sees him, and bawls to his mother: "Mamma! mamma! that Monsieur du Luxembourg!—you know him—the one you said was such a great friend to papa—he has gone by without saluting! I suppose the reason is, he don't know how to behave." Another picture presents to view a little girl seated on a garden bench eating nuts, and talking to a young man: "The rose which you gave to mamma?" "Yes, yes." "The one you nearly broke your neck in getting? Let me see. Oh, my cousin Nat stuck it in the tail of Matthew's donkey. How mamma did laugh! Got any more nuts?" The same appalling girl imparts a family secret to her tutor: "Mamma wrote to M. Prosper, and papa read the letter. Oh, wasn't papa angry, though! And all because she had spelled a word wrong." A mother hearing a little girl say the catechism is a subject which one would suppose was not available for the purposes of a Gavarni, but he finds even that suggestive. "Come, now, pay attention. What must we do when we have sinned [péché]?" To which the terrible child replies, playing unconsciously upon the word péché (sinned), which does not differ in sound from pêché (fished), "When we have pêché? Wait a moment. Oh! we go back to the White House with all the fish in the basket, which my nurse eats with Landerneau. He is a big soldier who has white marks upon his sleeve. And I eat my share, let me tell you!"
It is thus that the first caricaturist of France "utilized" the innocence of childhood when Louis Philippe was King of the French.
Parisian "Shoo, Fly!"
"Captain, I am here to ask your permission to fight a duel."
"What for, and with whom?"
"With Saladin, the trumpeter, who has so far forgotten himself as to call me a moucheron" (little fly).—From Messieurs nos Fils et Mesdemoiselles nos Filles, by Randon, Paris.