Two admiring friends have written the life of Gavarni, the incomparable caricaturist of la femme; and they tell us just how and where and when the artist acquired his "subtle and profound knowledge" of the sex. It is but too plain that he knew but one class of women, the class that lives by deluding fools. "During all one year, 1835," say these admiring biographers, "it seems that in the life, the days, the thoughts of Gavarni, there was nothing but la femme. According to his own expression, woman was his 'grand affair.'" He was in love, then? By no means. Our admiring authors proceed to describe this year of devotion to la femme as a period when "intrigues were mingled together, crossed and entangled with one another; when passing inclinations, the fancies of an evening, started into being together with new passions; when rendezvous pressed upon rendezvous; when there fell upon Gavarni a rain of perfumed notes from the loves of yesterday, from the forgotten loves of last month, which he inclosed in one envelope, as he said, 'like dead friends in the same coffin.'"[24]
The authors enlarge upon this congenial theme, describing their hero as going forth upon le pavé de Paris in quest of la femme as a keen hunter takes to the forest for the plump partridge or the bounding deer. Some he brought down with the resistless magnetism of his eye. "It was for him a veritable rapture, as well as the exertion of a power which he loved to try, to magnetize with his eye and make his own the first woman whom he chanced to meet in the throng." The substance of the chapter is that Gavarni, casting aside all the restraints of civilization and decency, lived in Paris the life of a low and dirty animal; and when, in consequence of so living, he found himself in Clichy for debt, he replenished his purse by delineating, as the fourberies de femmes, the tricks of the dissolute women who had got his money. That, at least, is the blunt American of our authors' dainty and elegant French.
Matrimony—A Man loaded with Mischief.[25]
"A monkey, a magpie, and wife
Is the true emblem of strife."
Old English Tavern Sign.
In the records of the past, we find men speaking lightly of women whose laws and usages concede least to women.
