This print was the first to indicate the enormous boom in war-drawings which has characterized Paris. Published at 5 francs, it was within a few months unobtainable under 500. Collectors took the hint, and the drawings of Forain, Steinlen, and other well-known artists were eagerly sought after, and rose to very high premiums. The character of the prints changed; with the exception of M. Véber's series, the greater part of the drawings published outside magazines and newspapers had been cheap, ranging from threepence to two francs each, and including some publications of deliberately naïve construction and crude colours, others which achieved without deliberation a startling likeness to the old broadsheets with their childlike simplicity. Postcards and prints fairly flooded Paris in the first few months of the war, but since the collector appeared on the scene in his dozens the cheaper publications have been displaced by more ambitious works that range up to a hundred francs each, and have crowded out the smaller artist, the smaller print-seller, and the smaller collector. This variety of output has been increased by the publication of many illustrated war-papers in Paris, such as _Le Mot_, _l'Europe Anti-Prussienne_, _l'Anti-Boche_, _A la Baïonnette_, war editions of already established papers, and a crop of crude halfpenny papers, printed after the Epinal manner, and greatly used by children and the very low classes. A coloured history of the war, of extraordinary naïveté, issued in penny sheets, was intended for use in schools, but achieved an additional success in hospitals, where the thin sheet was easily held and folded, and the incidents depicted roused the liveliest interest among the wounded. In the whole of this output it is difficult to find any sign of wavering in the national spirit of France. Once the civilians had decided to hold out, there could be no other stumbling-block. Naturally, in such a range of drawings, there are many that drop into brutality on the one hand, vulgarity on the other; but the overwhelming majority breathe a spirit of calm, determined endurance, with a ready laugh for hardships, a sly dig at politicians, and no little irony at the expense of their own weaknesses and foibles. Very often, so often as to set the key for the whole, the note is heroic, sometimes grimly so. There is none of the splenetic fury of the German drawings about the majority of the French ones; the Germans are ridiculed and hated, it is true, but the spirit is more steady and less spiteful—it rests on an emotion which for forty-five years has been a religion to the Frenchman.