[Illustration: Housekeeping. "Gracious, Dorothy, I have forgotten the meat for your cat!" "Have you, indeed? But you didn't forget the biscuit for your bird, egotist! No matter! No matter! If there is nothing in the house for my cat, I shall give her your bird, I shall!"--From _Impressions de Ménage_, by Gavarni.] Many caricaturists who afterward attained celebrity were early contributors to M. Philipon's much-prosecuted periodical. Among them was "the elegant Gavarni," who for thirty years was the favorite comic artist of Paris _roués_ and dandies--himself a _roué_ and dandy. At this period, according to his friend, Théophile Gautier, he was a very handsome young man, with luxuriant blonde curls, always fashionably attired, somewhat in the English taste, neat, quiet, and precise, and "possessing in a high degree the feeling for modern elegances." He was of a slender form, which seemed laced in, and he had the air of being carefully dressed and thoroughly appointed, his feet being effeminately small and daintily clad. In short, he was a dandy of the D'Orsay and N. P. Willis period. For many years he expended the chief force of his truly exquisite talent in investing vice with a charm which in real life it never possesses. Loose women, who are, as a class, very stupid, very vulgar, most greedy of gain and pleasure, and totally devoid of every kind of interesting quality, he endowed with a grace and wit, a fertility of resource, an airy elegance of demeanor, never found except in honorable women reared in honorable homes. He was the great master of that deadly school of French satiric art which finds all virtuous life clumsy or ridiculous, and all abominable life graceful and pleasing. Albums of this kind are extant in which married men are _invariably_ represented as objects of contemptuous pity, and no man is graceful or interesting except the sneaking scoundrel who has designs upon the integrity of a household. Open the "Musée pour Rire," for example. Here is a little family of husband, wife, and year-old child in bed, just awake in the morning, the wife caressing the child, and the husband looking on with admiring fondness. This scene is rendered ridiculous by the simple expedient of making the wife and child hideously ugly, and the fond father half an idiot. Another picture shows the same child, with a head consisting chiefly of mouth, yelling in the middle of the night, while the parents look on, imbecile and helpless. Turn to the sketches of the masked ball or the midnight carouse, and all is elegant, becoming, and delightful. If the French caricatures of the last thirty years do really represent French social life and French moral feeling, we may safely predict that in another generation France will be a German province; for men capable of maintaining the independence of a nation can not be produced on the Gavarnian principles.