Paris under the Commune: The Seventy-Three Days of the Second Siege; with Numerous Illustrations, Sketches Taken on the Spot, and Portraits (from the Original Photographs)Leighton, John
History
Paris under the Commune: The Seventy-Three Days of the Second Siege; with Numerous Illustrations, Sketches Taken on the Spot, and Portraits (from the Original Photographs)
Leighton, John
Paris (France) -- History -- Commune, 1871
The next one is signed Pilotel. Pilotel, the savage commissioner! He
who arrested Monsieur Chaudey, and who pocketed eight hundred and
fifteen francs found in Monsieur Chaudey’s drawers. Ah! Pilotel, if by
some unlucky adventure you were to succumb behind a barricade, you
would cry like Nero: “Qualis artifex pereo!” But let us leave the
author to criticise the work. A Gavroche, not the Gavroche of the
_Misérables_, but the boy of Belleville, chewing tobacco like a
Jack-tar, drunk as a Federal, in a purple blouse, green trousers, his
hands in his pockets, his cap on the nape of his neck; squat, violent,
and brutish. With an impudent jerk of the head he grumbles out: “I
don’t want any of your kings!” This coarse sketch is graphic and not
without merit.
Horror of horrors! “Council of Revision of the Amazons of Paris,” this
next is called. Oh! if the brave Amazons are like these formidable
monstrosities, it would be quite sufficient to place them in the first
rank, and I am sure that not a soldier of the line, not a guardian of
the peace, not a _gendarme_ would hesitate a moment at the sight, but
all would fly without exception, in hot haste and in agonised terror,
forgetting in their panic even to turn the butt ends of their muskets
in the air. One of these Amazons—but how has my sympathy for the
amateurs of collections led me into the description of these creatures
of ugliness and immodesty?—one of them.... but no, I prefer leaving to
your imagination those Himalayan masses of flesh, and pyramids of
bone—these Penthesileas of the Commune of Paris that are before me.
Ah! Here is choleric old “Father Duchesne” in a towering passion, with
short legs, bare arms, and rubicund face, topped with an immense red
cap. In one hand he holds a diminutive Monsieur Thiers and stifles him
as if he were a sparrow. Here, the drawing is not only vile, but stupid
too.
This time we have the nude, and it is not the Republic, but France that
is represented. If the Republic can afford to bare her shoulders,
France may dispense with drapery entirely. She has a dove which she
presses to her bosom. On one side is a portrait of Monsieur Rochefort.
Again! Why this unlovely-looking journalist is a regular Lovelace.
Finally, two cats (M. Jules Favre and M. Thiers) are to be seen outside
the garret window with their claws ready for pouncing. “Poor dove!” is
the tame inscription below the sketch.[56]
Next we find a Holy Family, by Murillo. Jules Favre, as Joseph, leads
the ass by the reins, and a wet-nurse, who holds the Comte de Paris in
her arms instead of the infant Jesus, is seated between the two
panniers, trying to look at once like Monsieur Thiers and the Holy
Virgin. The sketch is called “The Flight.... to Versailles.” Oh! fie!
fie! Messieurs the Caricaturists, can you not be funny without
trenching on sacred ground?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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