Assembly of the Notables at Paris, February 22d, 1787.[22]
"Dear objects of my care, I have assembled you to ascertain with what sauce you want to be eaten."
"But we don't want to be eaten at all."
"You are departing from the question."
Mirabeau.[23] (Paris, 1789.)
The world is familiar with the tragic incidents of the sudden collapse of the monarchy. Except during the Reign of Terror, which was short, the caricaturists, whether with the pen or the pencil, played their usual part. It was almost impossible to caricature the abuses of the times, so monstrous was the reality. The "local hits" in Beaumarchais' "Marriage of Figaro," played with rapturous applause a hundred nights in 1784, were little more than the truth given with epigrammatic brevity. When the saucy page, Cherubin, confessed that he had behaved very badly, but rested his defense upon the fact that he had never been guilty of the slightest indiscretion in words, and so obtained both pardon and promotion, the audience must have felt the perfect congruity of the incident with the moral code of the period. In Figaro's famous discourse on the English God-dam there is, indeed, a touch of caricature: "A fine language the English; a little of it goes a great way. The English people, it is true, throw in some other words in the course of conversation, but it is very easy to see that God-dam is the basis of their language." When he descants upon politics, he rarely goes beyond the truth: "Ability advance a man in the Government bureaus! My lord is laughing at me. Be commonplace and obsequious, and you get every thing." Figaro gives the whole art of French politics in a few words: "To pretend you don't know what you do know, and to know what you don't; to hear what you understand, and not to hear what you don't understand; and especially to pretend you can do a great deal more than you can; often to have for a very great secret that there is no secret; to shut yourself up to mend pens and seem profound, when you are only empty and hollow; to play well or ill the part of a personage; to spread abroad spies and pensioned traitors; to melt seals, intercept letters, and try to ennoble the poverty of the means by the importance of the ends—may I die if that isn't all there is of politics." It is a good hit of Susan's when she says that vapors are "a disease of quality," only to be taken in boudoirs. A poor woman whose cause is coming on at court remarks that selling judgeships is a great abuse. "You are right," says the dolt of a magistrate; "we ought to get them for nothing." And how a Paris audience, in the temper of 1789, must have relished the hits at the hereditary principle: "It is no matter whence you came; the important question is, whither are you bound?" "What have you done, my lord, to merit so many advantages—rank, fortune, place? You took the trouble to be born, nothing more." We can fancy, too, how such touches as this might bring down the house: "I was thought of for an office, but unfortunately I was fit for it. An arithmetician was wanted; a dancer got it."
All men, as Mr. Carlyle observes, laughed at these jests, and none louder than the persons satirized—"a gay horse-racing Anglo-maniac noblesse loudest of all."
The first picture given in these pages relating to the French Revolution, "The Assembly of the Notables," is one of the most celebrated caricatures ever produced, and one of the best. Setting aside one or two of Thackeray's, two or three of Gillray's, and half a dozen of Mr. Nast's, it would be difficult to find its equal. It may be said, however, that the force of the satire is wholly in the words, which, indeed, have since become one of the stock jokes of French Joe Millers. The picture appeared in 1787, when the deficit in the revenue, after having widened for many years, had become most alarming, and it was at length proposed to tax the nobility, clergy, and magistrates, hitherto exempt from vulgar taxation. But the Assembly of the Notables, which was chiefly composed of the exempt, preferred to prolong inquiry into the causes of the deficit, and showed an unconquerable reluctance to impose a tax upon themselves. It was during this delay, so fatal to the monarchy, that the caricature appeared. There must have been more than one version of the work, for the one described by Mr. Carlyle in his "History of the French Revolution" differs in several particulars from that which we take from M. Champfleury. Mr. Carlyle says: "A rustic is represented convoking the poultry of his barn-yard with this opening address, 'Dear animals, I have assembled you to advise me what sauce I shall dress you with,' to which a cock responding, 'We don't want to be eaten,' is checked by, 'You wander from the point!'"