“Venez, garçon, venez fillette, Voir Momus à la silhouette. Qui, chez Seraphin, venez voir La belle humeur en habit noir. Tandis que ma salle est bien sombre Et que mon acteur n’est que l’ombre Puisse, Messieurs, votre gaîté Devenir la réalité.” Long after the death of Seraphin, until 1870 in fact, the show continued in the hands of his descendants, presenting pieces especially written for it, with music composed to accompany the shadows. It was the art critic, Paul Eudel, who first published an illustrated volume of such fairy pieces and melodramas composed by his grandfather in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Half a century later Lemercier de Neuville, who was interested in _pupazzi noir_ as well as in other puppets, published another collection of little plays with fifty illustrations and with explanations of designs and methods of producing the shadows. De Neuville had enlarged the scope but had not changed the principles of the art. He presented animals who opened their jaws, processions and caricatures of celebrities such as Sarah Bernhardt, Zola, and others. [Illustration: TABLEAU From a shadow play of _The Prodigal Son_ at the Chat Noir [Designed by Henri Rivière]] Then a little later came the wonderful shadows, now designated as _Ombres Françaises_, and shown at the Chat Noir, famous cabaret of Montmartre where gathered literary and artistic Bohemia. “The Chat Noir has an art of its own,” writes Anatole France, “that is at once mystic and impious, ironical, sad, simple and profound, but never reverential. It is epic and mocking in the hands of the precise Caran d’Ache. It has a bland and melancholy viciousness in Willette, who is, as it were, the Fra Angelico of the cabarets. It is symbolic and naturalistic with the very capable Henri Rivière. The forty scenes of the ”Tentation“ of St. Anthony amaze me. They exhibit lovely coloring, daring fancy; impressive beauty and forcible meaning. I put them far above the imps depicted by the austere Callot.” These comedies, spectacles, military epics, oratorios, mysteries, Greek scenes, burlesques and pantomimes, were indeed conceived with a certain large poetic glamour. It was Caran d’Ache who made the great artistic contribution of giving up articulation of individual figures, for the most part, to move great numbers of them along. He invented perspective in shadows, using masses of figures in different planes and producing a sense of solidarity and immensity. His masterpiece, _Epopée_, the evocation of the Grand Army of Napoleon, presented with epic grandeur company after company of cuirassiers in long lines, the profiles diminishing in height as the figures receded from the eyes. It conveyed, as one critic avers, the idea of great space and of a vast army of men marching in serried ranks “to victory or to death.” A few single figures were allowed to stand out distinctly like the Little Corporal on horseback, there was