Gavarni was the first who seized the worldly side of modern life; he portrayed elegant figures full of _chic_, and gave them a garb which fitted them exactly. In his own dress he had a taste for what was dandified, and he plunged gaily into the enjoyment of the Parisian life which eddied around in a whirl of pleasure. The present generation feels that the air in such old journals of fashion is heavy. In every work of art there is, in addition to what endures, a fine perfume that evaporates after a certain number of years, and is no longer perceptible to those who come afterwards. What is fresh and modern to-day looks to-morrow like the dried flowers which the botanist keeps in a herbarium. And those who draw the fashions of their age are specially liable to this swift decay. Thus many of Gavarni's lithographs have the effect of pallid pictures of a vanished world. But the generation of 1830 honoured in him the same _charmeur_, the same master of enamoured grace, which that of 1730 had done in Watteau. He was sought after as an inventor of fashions, whom the tailor Humann, the Worth of the "July Monarchy," regarded as his rival. He was the discoverer of all the fairy costumes which formed the chief attraction at masquerades and theatres, the delicate _gourmet_ of the eternal feminine; and having dangled much after women, he knew how to render the wave of a petticoat, the seductive charm of a well-proportioned leg, and the coquettishness of a new _coiffure_ with the most familiar connoisseurship. He has been called the Balzac of draughtsmen. And the sentences at the bottom of his sketches, for which he is also responsible, are as audacious as the pictures themselves. Thus, when the young exquisite in the series "La Vie des Jeunes Hommes" stands with his companion before a skeleton in the anthropological museum, the little woman opines with a shudder, "When one thinks that this is a man, and that women love _that_"! [Illustration: _Quantin, Paris._ DAUMIER. MENELAUS THE VICTOR.] But that is only one side of the sphinx. He is only half known when one thinks only of the draughtsman of ladies' fashions who celebrated the free and easy graces of the _demi-monde_ and the wild licence of the carnival. At bottom Gavarni was not a frivolous butterfly, but an artist of a strangely sombre imagination, a profound and melancholy philosopher who had a prescience of all the mysteries of life. All the mighty problems which the century produced danced before his spirit like spectral notes of interrogation.